The Juice Cleanse Reset Diet

Our heartfelt gratitude to our dedicated team of wellness warriors at Ritual Wellness: Debbie, Donald, Emil, Jeff, Kaela, Lou, Luis, Markie, Sal, Tyler, and countless others. Without you all, we would not be able to deliver bottles of nutritious freshly pressed organic juice to our clients every day.

To our loyal customers and friends who believed in and supported our vision from the very first day.

To our husbands, Richard Farley and Tom St. Clair, for their patience while we created this book, for allowing themselves to be test cases for new recipes, and for their unyielding faith in our abilities.

To our parents and siblings for always encouraging us to follow our passion for wellness and teaching us that you can accomplish your biggest dreams if you are willing to work hard and you believe you will succeed.

To our agent, Steve Troha, for holding our hands and guiding us skillfully and enjoyably through the process, and to Lindi Stoler for having the vision to see this book even while it was only a tiny seed germinating in our imaginations.

To our brilliant and insightful editor, Julie Bennett, for believing in our project and, more importantly, for helping us organize our thoughts into something you would want to read and be inspired to follow.

To each person reading this book, for taking the first step toward prioritizing your health.

Who isn’t looking for quick and easy ways to lose weight, look
younger, have more energy, and get healthy? In our constant quest for improvement, we eat premade processed food, count points, and drink powdered shakes; we pay for facials, peels, laser treatments, and fillers; we shoot caffeinated energy drinks; and we get our fat sucked out, melted down, and sweated away. These quick-fix methods rarely have lasting results, but we try the latest fads again and again only to end up disappointed when the programs, products, diets, and treatments fail to deliver on their promises.

To see results on the outside, you have to focus on improving the inside. If you’re struggling to lose those last five pounds, can’t seem to shake that midafternoon slump, and have started noticing bags under your eyes, it’s time for a reset. By resetting your system, you create the right internal environment for what you want to accomplish, whether that’s increasing your energy level, dropping a few pounds, reducing your cravings for sugary food, creating glowing
skin, or just plain getting healthy. To get the results you want, you must first clear your body of the toxins and acidity that prevent it from absorbing nutrients.

People ask us all the time, is cleansing really necessary? Aren’t our bodies designed to clean themselves through the function of the liver, kidneys, and miles of digestive tract? The short answer is yes. And while it’s true that our bodies are able to fight off infections, remove waste from the digestive system, combat diseases, and clean out the toxins we ingest, these days we subject our bodies to a lot of unnatural ingredients, whether by choice or inadvertently, which makes it harder than ever for our bodies to keep up.

Thanks to science and advances in the food industry, there are now pesticides that can keep wildlife from eating our produce before we can pick it. Seeds are genetically engineered to produce fruit that is perfectly shaped, is resistant to diseases, and ripens just when the growers want it to ripen. Inventions like argon gas allow farmers to pick produce before it has ripened, ship it across the country, and spray it so that it reaches the perfect color to appear ripe once it hits the supermarket shelves. Thanks to these shipping practices, you’re not limited to the type of fruit grown in your part of the country or the world, but have access to nearly every variety all year long.

Similarly, cows, chickens, and pigs are raised from birth to slaughter in a much shorter time frame than they were fifty years ago. Livestock are fed engineered grain to mature them more quickly, and treated with antibiotics to protect against diseases prevalent in their poor living conditions and caused by the hormones they are injected with. Chickens and pigs are fed fatty diets and their movement is restricted to help them plump faster. Fish are farmed to increase the population of certain breeds, while exposing them to more antibiotics and pesticides than their wild kin.

In an effort to accommodate our quickening lifestyle, grains are processed to speed up preparation time. Rather than cooking steel-cut oatmeal for breakfast, we buy breakfast cereal made from refined white flour. These flours are generally derived from a whole grain. During the milling process, the kernel is put through a high-heat process that removes the germ and bran (which contain 90 percent of the nutritional content of the kernel), leaving only the endosperm (starch). To replace those nutrients lost in processing, artificial vitamins and minerals are sprayed onto the finished cereals or baked goods.

Here’s the issue. Real food and manufactured food are not the same things to your body, even if they look the same to a scientist. Nutrients and vitamins and minerals can be created in the lab and glued onto processed food, but our bodies can tell the difference. Even if you start with a nice ripe orange, full of antioxidants and vitamin C, once you juice, heat, and pasteurize it, the nutrients are dead, and the enzymes necessary to help your body absorb the vitamins have been killed off, too. But it’ll stay fresh on the grocery store shelves for months on end.

We eat processed, manufactured foods created in a lab or a factory rather than unprocessed foods grown in the ground. Add to that all of the environmental toxins we’re exposed to—airplanes crossing the skies emitting exhaust that contains a variety of air pollutants, farming methods that pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a faster rate than plants can produce oxygen, natural gas extraction methods that release methane into the atmosphere, and manufactured waste that fills our oceans with chemicals—and it’s easy to see how the overload is more than our bodies can keep up with!

All of these changes to our diets and the results of new food-production technology are catching up with our bodies. Today, obesity is officially an epidemic. Forty years ago, we fought to end world hunger, yet today we have a greater chance of dying from overnutrition (the health consequence of obesity) than malnutrition. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), worldwide obesity has nearly doubled since 1980, and 65 percent of the world’s population live in countries where being overweight or obese kills more people than being underweight does. Our parents wouldn’t let us leave the dinner table without cleaning our plates, citing all of the starving children around the world, but if you clean your plate today, you consume twice as much food as you would have because serving sizes have grown to such monstrous proportions.

A few decades ago, pregnant mothers worried mainly about the possibility of their babies being born with low birth weight or Down syndrome. Today, attention-deficit disorder, autism, and asthma are also prevalent. Allergies and sensitivities to gluten, nuts, eggs, dairy, pollen, and so on are all but commonplace. Children suffer in increasing numbers from adult diseases like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and depression. Medical researchers predict that today’s children will be the first generation to die at a younger age than their parents.

We spend more money in the United States on sickness than on wellness. We treat the symptoms and the effects rather than the cause. But by changing what you put into your body, you can take back control over your health. Yes, real food may be a bit pricier than its manufactured substitutes, but in the long run, your body will thank you. The increased energy, wellness, and quality of life you will experience, along with a decrease in doctor’s visits, prescription drugs, and days of feeling less than optimal, make the trade-off a relatively easy one.