Juicing: An Objective Analysis

One of the hottest fitness trends is juicing. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. I would wager 12.50 right now that your friend, aunt, or god parent is currently juicing to cleanse their body of harmful toxins.

And that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to lose a few pounds, make sure you’re getting enough fruits and vegetables, and add a bunch of nutrients where before there was only KFC leftovers and crippling depression.

But before you start stocking up on organic ginger root and beet greens, there’s a few things you should take into account:

1) Make sure you’re not a giant f*cking idiot.

This is where most people go wrong in their juice cleanse.  Here’s a test: Have you ever bought raspberry ketones for weight loss? If you answered yes, you should check out other weight loss protocols like “The Corn Only Diet” and “Kegal Your Way Thin!”

Honestly, do your homework. If you’re looking for a quick fix to a lifetime of crappy eating and no exercise, do you think that a 7 day juice cleanse is going to fix your problems?

NOWHERE else in life is there a quick fix for success, and supplement companies and sloppy health guru’s line their pocket books at your expense. You’re better off drinking water, working out, and all the other shit you could probably reciter verbatim at this point. Wah wah waahhhhh.

2)  Juicing is a great way to drink a bunch of juice.

If you’re like Buster Bluth, and you can’t get enough of that icky sticky stuff, then you might LOVE juicing.

However, proponents of juicing claim that by milking the Vas deferens of the Amazon Bull Snake and mixing it with 6 types of French Lemon peel extract, you’ll start sweating off fat and succeeding at parenting.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

By juicing delicious fruits and veggies, you take out a lot of the phytonutrients found in the pulp, and you ditch all of the fiber found in most plant products.

You distill healthy foods down to just their carbohydrate form where they’re digested super super-fast by your body, which creates an insulin dump equivalent to that of drinking a Pepsi.

Instead of letting the fiber do its job and slow your digestion, you’re giving your body the people’s elbow and slamming it with a bunch of fast digesting carbs all at once.

Which is great if you’re trying to train your body to stop being such a whiny idiot, but not so great if your goal includes words like “health”, “namaste”, “cleanse”, and “OrganicWholeFoodsToteBag”.

3)  Cleansing is great!

So great in fact, that your body has a mechanism for doing it on its own!

Your body doesn’t leave things like this up to you. A process called autophagy is in place in your body, which transports broken and damaged cells to the Human Waste Management Plant, and replaces them with fresh shiny new ones!

I mean come on! You think that after a lifetime of hotdogs, food challenges, and that one night where you challenged Auntie Margret to a tequila drinking contest, that you can just “cleanse” that in a week?!

Your body is on its game day in and day out, regardless of if you own a 500.00 Nuclear-Juice90X.

One of the things that actually improves autophagy in the body is fasting. Like the Old Testament style, no-unleavened-bread-for-you kind of fasting.

And despite what Doc. Oz says on his twitter, you won’t go into starvation mode if you skip your donut breakfast with champagne chaser.

So go ahead and try 12, 16, 0r 24 hours if you’ve never done so before. It’ll give you a chance to clear you mind, give your body a break from processing, and it will show you how much time Americans spend thinking about food.

I dare you.

4)  Weight loss….right?

The average American might not ever have a chance of looking like Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey (circa every movie), but we all strive to at least look a little bit better in a swim suit.

According to experts, this means having nice muscle tone, and less fat.

However, juicing won’t give you the body that you’re looking for, because as with most things that are too good to be true, the claims are simply not supported by reality.

What can tend to happen is your body in search of amino acids to repair broken down muscle tissue will waltz right passed the turmeric and kale shake you just downed like a champ and start salvaging delicious proteins from your thighs.

This becomes a problem as you don’t want to lose any of your hard earned muscle in the search for a better body.

Instead, it would be more appropriate to adopt a diet high in protein in order to feed the muscle, and burn the fat.

New studies show that there is a very high energy cost associated with converting protein to fat, whereas the cost of converting carbohydrates to fat is roughly 3% of the overall calories.

The moral of this story is that you need to toss your juicer in the trash, and wash your body out with a big chicken breast and steak salad; hold the kale.