The Juice Cleanse Reset Diet (4 page)
Read The Juice Cleanse Reset Diet Online
Authors: Lori Kenyon Farley
Meal-Planning Tips
• Plan your meals in advance. Select from the recipes in this book or subscribe to our blog at
www.ritualwellness.com
for more recipe ideas. If you don’t enjoy cooking, choose two recipes to make each week and make double so you have four meals ready to go.
• Make a few dishes that can be eaten several ways. For example, the roasted veggies you make for dinner on Sunday can be added to a lunch salad on Monday. And leftovers from the rotisserie chicken you bought for Tuesday night can be used in all sorts of dishes, including the Chicken Salad (
this page
), Butter Lettuce Tacos (
this page
), or Roasted Veggie and Chicken Salad (
this page
) recipes found in this book.
• If a recipe calls for you to prepare a sauce, make a big batch and freeze what you don’t use in ice cube trays. Next time you make the recipe, defrost enough for that meal. This is a big time-saver!
• Make a big batch of steel-cut oatmeal in the slow cooker on Sunday night and have it for the week.
• Stock up on organic frozen fruit and frozen spinach or kale for easy smoothies.
If you take the time to acknowledge the challenge this food causes for you, recognize your conscious choice to say no to this food, celebrate your decision, and reflect on how empowered you feel, you can release the control that this food has over you. The next time
this food is in your path (keeping it out of your home doesn’t mean you’ll never see it again), your odds of passing on it are much better. Perhaps more importantly, if you do choose to indulge in it, you’ll be making a conscious choice to do so rather than reverting back to an old habit.
How to Overcome Temptation
• Acknowledge the challenge this food causes for you.
• Recognize that you can make a conscious choice to say no to this food.
• Pause and celebrate your decision to prioritize your health.
• Reflect on how empowering the decision to say no to temptation is and sit with the feeling.
The greatest thing that you can do as you begin this cleanse is to dedicate yourself to the idea of eating real food. Yep, you read that correctly: “Eat. Real. Food.” Michael Pollan coined this phrase and it has been restated a hundred different ways, but the sentiment is the same.
Many modern-day health issues are caused or exacerbated by the shift in eating habits that has taken us further and further away from food as it is in its most natural state. Choosing to eat real food ensures that you take in the nutrients your body needs in order to operate properly. Chemicals and additives, which are foreign to your body and cannot be utilized, cause weight gain, health challenges, energy depletion, and allergy issues.
AMY J., WORKING MOTHER OF THREE •
I’m a fully recovered sugar addict! Thanks to the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet and following Lori and Marra’s guidance to say good-bye to my trigger foods, I finally feel back in charge of what I feed my body. For years, I struggled with massive sugar cravings, mood swings (my poor husband), and generally feeling out of control when it came to food. I committed to the reset program, and I can honestly say that it’s the best decision I ever made for my health. The sugar withdrawal was intense during the first few days, so intense that I am certain I would have caved in if I still had a stash of sweets in the cupboards. Thank goodness I didn’t because today, nine months post-reset, I still feel amazing and I am back to my prepregnancy weight. Best of all, if I choose to have a bite of dessert, I can stop there instead of slipping into the sugar-eating tailspin that used to happen after what started out as “just a bite.”
Today, nearly everything with a label screams something at you: “Low-carb!” “High-protein!” “Vitamin-fortified!” “All-natural!” “Trans fat free!” or “Fat-free!” There was a time when no one, other than food scientists, thought of food as the macronutrients that made it up. Before refined flour started to replace whole grains, bread was bread, period. Still, it wasn’t until the 1980s that we began thinking of bread as a carbohydrate instead of an essential part of a sandwich. This shift toward viewing food as the nutrients rather than food has greatly contributed to the huge mess currently lining supermarket shelves.
Over the years, bread has become even more complicated. (We’ll stick with our example of bread even though there are endless examples of pure and simple foods that now come filled with chemicals, preservatives, and additives.) Today you can buy bread that is
low carb, high protein, fortified with various vitamins, or even grain free! The result? Many people are overwhelmed by the decision to buy something as simple as bread.
Bread: Then and Now
Here’s the ingredient list of a basic loaf of bread when your great-grandparents ate it:
flour • yeast • water • salt
Here’s the ingredient list of one of today’s most popular store-bought breads:
flour • yeast • sugar • wheat gluten • wheat bran • soybean oil • honey • molasses • salt • vinegar • calcium carbonate • calcium propionate • sodium stearoyl lactylate • calcium sulfate • mono calcium phosphate • yeast extract • soy lecithin • azodicarbonamide • calcium dioxide • soy flour • whey
Store-bought bread is one of the many examples of a once-simple food that has been manipulated into something that barely resembles food any longer. Everywhere you look, processed, chemically altered, and engineered nutrition is trickily disguised as food.
The good news is that by following the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet, you will reset your palate and be better able to identify the difference between real food and artificially engineered products. During the days after your Reset Cleanse, a strawberry will taste sweet and delicious, as nature intended. A store-bought, prepackaged cookie filled with refined sweeteners and shelf life–extending additives will taste unnatural and processed—because it is!
During the cleanse, it’s imperative that you use as close to 100 percent organic ingredients as possible. Conventional foods come with a heavy burden of pesticides, or hormones and antibiotics in the case of animal products, none of which is conducive to cleansing. While our dream scenario is for you to consume organic foods all of the time, we’re more flexible on this after your cleanse phase is complete. It’s nearly impossible to dine out or engage in social situations and stick to a fully organic diet. Eating 100 percent organic is a greater challenge than eating 100 percent vegan! With this in mind, the time to make organic food a priority is when you’re eating at home.
There are certain fruits and vegetables that you should always consume in their organic form. The Environmental Working Group (EWR) puts together a list every year called the “Dirty Dozen.” The Dirty Dozen is your guide to the most toxic conventional fruits and vegetables. The potential toxic load, as reported by the EWR, is huge, with residues from up to sixty-four different pesticides containing carcinogens, neurotoxins, hormone disruptors, developmental or reproductive toxins, and toxins that are killing honey bees. The EWR added two more items to the 2012 list but didn’t want to abandon the catchy phrase of “dirty dozen.” Instead, they created an addendum: “plus green beans and leafy greens” (think kale and collard greens). EWR warns that these new additions “contain pesticide residue of special concern” because they are commonly contaminated with insecticides that “are toxic to the nervous system.”
The Dirty Dozen (plus green beans and leafy greens)
• Apples
• Celery
• Bell peppers
• Peaches
• Nectarines
• Strawberries
• Lettuce
• Grapes
• Blueberries
• Potatoes
• Spinach
• Cucumbers
• Green Beans
• Leafy greens
EWR also warns against eating conventional corn in the United States because corn is one of the most genetically engineered crops and is not required to be labeled as such. Long story short—in addition to the famous Dirty Dozen, stay away from toxic greens and genetically engineered corn by choosing organic!
Why Washing Is Not Enough
Many people have been falsely led to believe that washing produce well brings conventionally grown produce up to par with organically grown produce. We have even heard juice bars claim that their products are pesticide free because they are washed thoroughly, despite using conventional produce. Unfortunately, this is not the case! Since fruits and vegetables have pores, pesticides can infiltrate produce on a cellular level and cannot be fully removed through washing. According to the National Pesticide Information Center, “no washing method is 100 percent effective for removing all pesticide residues.”
To spot organic food, look for:
• USDA Organic: Trust it. Buy it. Ninety-five percent or more of the ingredients must have been grown or processed without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides (among other standards). In the case of meat and dairy, this seal also indicates the products are growth-hormone and antibiotic free!
• Made with Organic Ingredients: This statement in conjunction with the USDA seal means the product must contain a minimum of 70 percent organic ingredients. The label will indicate which ingredients are organic and tell you the percentage of organic ingredients used.
Be cautious of:
• Organic (without certification): Some organic companies choose not to get certified due to a lack of resources. If it’s labeled organic but not certified, you must decide whether or not you trust the source. In instances when a product claims to be organic with no seal, base your purchasing decision on your own research.
• Conventional: If a product says nothing one way or the other on the subject of organic, it is conventional, meaning it is
not
organic in any way.
• All Natural: The FDA has not developed a definition for the term
natural
. Unless otherwise stated, consider something that claims to be “natural” to be in the same arena as conventional. Even items with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as the first ingredient can claim “all natural” on the label because the HFCS is a derivative of corn.
• Organic When Possible: You may see this in a retail establishment/restaurant. Organic is nearly always possible, but it’s almost always more expensive. Ask the shop or
restaurant owner what their standards are for determining “when possible” because the truth is that it’s nearly always possible, at a price.
• Local: Local has no relevance to the term
organic
. A pesticide is a pesticide, even if it comes from your own backyard.
• Wild-crafted: This is a new buzzword in the food and supplement arena. Wild-crafted is the practice of harvesting plants from their natural or “wild” habitat, for food or medicinal purposes. However, the term
wild-crafted
has no real significance as to whether it is organic or not. Food suppliers are stretching the term to mean picked from the plant while leaving the plant intact, even if the “habitat” is a pesticide-ridden farm.
And when it comes to produce:
• Fruits and vegetables: Fruits and vegetables are naked—the best way to eat your food. This means no packaging. It also means no place for that beautiful USDA organic seal. For your fruits and veggies, learn the following number codes, which usually appear on a sticker.
Five-digit PLU (price look-up) starting with 9: Organic. Yes, buy it.
Five-digit PLU starting with 8: Genetically modified (see
this page
). Do not buy it.
Four-digit PLU: Conventionally grown with the use of pesticides. If there is not a frozen, organic variety available, conventional produce is still better than processed foods.
Vote with Your Dollars
Remember that you truly do vote with your dollars. Every time you choose organic over the conventional alternative, your voice is heard loud and clear by the supermarkets, food distributors, and farmers. You hold the power to make a difference in our food system.
If you’re committed to doing your reset, it’s important for you to use organic produce. You’re putting forth a huge effort to do something good for your health and if you choose conventional, you may be unleashing a toxic burden on your cells through the form of concentrated pesticides in the fruits and veggies.
While calorie for calorie conventional and organic may be the same, in addition to the benefit of avoiding toxic pesticides, organic produce has been reported to deliver more antioxidants than its conventional counterparts. A 2011 article by Gene E. Lester and Robert A. Saftner, published in the
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
, references two separate studies that demonstrated organic vegetables to have between 15 to 25 percent higher levels of some antioxidants than their conventional counterparts.
Think of antioxidants as nature’s equivalent to the human immune system. You probably know that taking antibiotics repeatedly weakens your own defenses in the form of antioxidants. Rather than increasing your immune system by building antibodies, your body gets used to relying on external antibiotics. In a similar way, when crops are continuously flooded with pesticides to keep bugs away, the plants have no reason to build up their own defenses. These defenses are beneficial to humans, and when the plants lack defense-related compounds, the produce is less nutritious. Choosing organic helps you limit your toxic load and increases your nutrient consumption.
If organic produce is unavailable or is outside of your budget, we highly recommend buying frozen organic produce. This is a great option and is definitely our recommendation over conventional produce.