Let me preface this by saying, I was not sponsored or paid to write this. This is all me. I made the decision to try a juice cleanse because I was extremely skeptical of them BUT I’d reached my wits end on trying to lose weight and NOTHING else was working. I wanted to see if this could do the trick. I decided to try Jus by Julie after doing a lot of research on juice cleanses and finding that this one worked well for other people. They also had a good sale going on. It only cost me about $70 for a 2-day cleanse when normally it is $95. I thought, “Hey, it’s now or never.” So I went for it. And my results honestly shocked me.
Let me also add this- doing this juice cleanse will be so great after my Disney vacations, lol! I eat so much stuff there, so much that’s not in my usual diet. A good cleanse can really help a body out! (See, even though this isn’t ~technically~ Disney, it’s still a good Disney tip for you!)
PRE-CLEANSE
Before starting the cleanse, they recommend you start cutting meat, dairy, and sugar out of your diet. Not permanently! Just for a few days so your body can prepare. This was easy for me because I’ve been vegetarian for 7 years and have been slowly becoming vegan for the past year. It said to enjoy as many fruits and veggies with your meal as you want, so I made sure my dinners included lots of those! I pre-cleansed for four days before starting my juices.
DAY 1
9:30am- Juice #1: Sweet Spin
I’d been psyching myself up for this for days. I don’t do well with no food. I get hangry. I get mean. But I wanted to do this. I needed to do this. My body, for whatever odd reason, has been struggling to lose weight for the past several years. I was very thin for the first 23 years of my life (like I struggled to GAIN weight and was often very underweight and sickly-looking). Then, like a flash, I gained about 30 pounds in a year or so. For a year or so after that I was able to lose about 5 pounds and keep it off, but after that, I gained an additional 10-15 pounds and haven’t been able to shake that for a few years now. It’s been hard!! So I needed to try this.
The Sweet Spin juice was kind of like a smoothie. It was rice milk, spinach, kale, pineapple, mango, and banana. It tasted pretty good, mostly like pineapple to me! It had a good texture, and I felt like it was a good start to the day!
11:30am- Juice #2: Spicy Lemonade
I love, love, LOVED the Spicy Lemonade juice!! It was lemon, water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. So good! It was a great morning snack, but more just a drink rather than a “meal” type juice like the Sweet Spin was. This is honestly something I’d love to recreate. I LOVED the spiciness of it!!
12:45pm- Coffee Time!
With this cleanse, they recommend having a cup of black coffee or green tea if you’re starting to feel a drag. Around noon, I really started needing a pick-me-up. I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and I have a slight caffeine addiction, so my body was begging me for a little taste. This mug I used is kinda big, so I just filled it up halfway, and it really hit the spot. I got a little more energy and was ready to carry on!
2:00pm- Juice #3: Green Radiance
I’m not gonna lie to you. My taste buds did not love this juice. It was a blend of spinach, apples, strawberries, mango, coconut oil, and ginger. I don’t like the texture of apples in a smoothie, and I’m not a huge fan of ginger. Drinking two things I don’t love together was a little hard for me. I did taste the strawberries a lot, and I love strawberries, so that helped me get through it. But the ginger was honestly so strong to me. I was really having to coach myself through this hour- “You can do this. You can do this. You can do this. I will be worth it in the end.” It literally took me an hour to get through the bottle, but somehow, I did.
5:00pm- Juice #4: Chia Berry
Okay one word for Chia Berry- AMAZING! It’s a blend of strawberry, lemon, chia seeds, pomegranate, and agave. It tasted just like a strawberry lemonade, and I loved it. My stomach was starting to growl a bit around 4:30, so I couldn’t wait to drink this one. Maybe that’s why it tasted extra good? Haha! Regardless, I enjoyed this one way better than the last!
5:45pm- GUM!
So around 5:45, Ean and I went to Hobby Lobby, which is located behind a Chick-Fil-A. On our way there, we passed Pizza Hut, McAlister’s, and Salsarita’s. So all I wanted were some waffle fries, pizza, a baked potato with chili, and a burrito. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So Ean told me I needed to chew some gum to distract myself from all those foods, and it really helped!
7:00pm- Exercise!
I decided that since I’d been working and mostly sitting all day, I needed to do a little something for exercise. The Jus by Julie people recommend you don’t do anything strenuous, so my normal evening run was gonna be a no-go. I decided to join my sister, brother-in-law, and niece on their evening walk downtown. They don’t do anything too crazy, just a good, decent-paced stroll. That’s exactly what I needed! Surprisingly, I felt amazing both before and after. I thought by this point I’d be absolutely famished and so weak that I couldn’t do anything. That was not the case at all!
8:30pm- Juice #5: Watermelon Wizard
I was super hungry after the walk, especially since it had been 5:00 when I had my last juice. I was very excited to try the Watermelon Wizard, because I love watermelon. It did not disappoint! It was a blend of watermelon, pineapple, strawberries, lemon juice, rosemary, and maqui powder. I was a little nervous about the rosemary, because, though I like rosemary, it is sometimes overpowering, and I don’t like that. However, I didn’t taste it at all. I tasted mostly watermelon and strawberry!
9:50pm- Juice #6: X-treme Greens
They recommend having your last juice at least 2 hours before going to bed. I usually go to bed around 11-midnight, so I figured that, even though I was starting this one later than planned, it would be okay! The X-treme Greens is a blend of spinach, kale, orange, pineapple, hemp seeds, and lime. I liked it, thought it was very sweet and tasty, but the hemp seeds would not stay mixed well and just settled to the bottom. So the last few sips were very heavily hemp! I enjoyed this one while watching The Office 🙂
10:45pm- Celery
While on this cleanse, you’re allowed a cup of green vegetables if you really need to eat something. I was starting to feel a little weak right before bed, so I just had one celery and it hit the spot!
I went to bed around 12:30 and had trouble falling asleep. That isn’t anything to do with the cleanse as far as I know because I always have trouble falling asleep. My brain is just so overactive, it has a really hard time shutting down. I didn’t sleep well through the night either cause our dog Stella had us up at 4am, and it was so difficult to fall back asleep. But hey, what can you do 🤷♀️
DAY 2
I woke up this morning feeling really good and refreshed, despite the annoyingness of trying to sleep. I was a little shocked at how good I felt. I debated not doing the cleanse for a 2nd day in a row, and just saving day 2 to do another 1-day cleanse after our vacation. However, I just felt really good and confident, so I knew I needed to go ahead and do it!
9:00am- Lemon water and Juice #1: Sweet Spin
I was feeling a little dehydrated this morning, so I started out the day with 8oz of water with a lemon slice. I honestly need to start every day that way because it really helps! Breakfast was the Sweet Spin juice again, and it was just as tasty as it was yesterday.
10:50am- Coffee
I decided to have half a cup of coffee a little earlier today, because lack of caffeine can make me go downhill quick.
12:00pm- Juice #2: Spicy Lemonade
I got to enjoy another Spicy Lemonade today! It’s so refreshing!
1:00pm- Coffee part 2
I decided to go ahead and have the second half of my cup of coffee because I was getting a little hungry for lunch but want to wait a little longer before drinking Juice #3.
2:00pm- Juice #3: Green Radiance
I was hoping to love this one more than I did yesterday, but I still didn’t. I drank it while changing my sheets, doing some laundry, and listening to some Disney parks tunes, hoping all that would distract me from the taste 😂 It definitely helped! But it still took me an hour to drink the whole thing.
4:45pm- Juice #4: Chia Berry
I was super excited to be having this juice again! I was going over to babysit my niece Addie at 5:30, and I wanted to make sure to drink this juice before so I wouldn’t be too hungry. On a normal day, we try and eat dinner between 5-6 anyway, so my body always gets naturally super hungry around this time.
7:30pm- Juice #5: Choco-nana
This juice is the only one that was different from yesterday. Yesterday, juice 5 was a watermelon one. If I had to pick between the two, I honestly couldn’t, lol! They were both great!! The Choco-nana was a blend of cocoa, banana, strawberry, pomegranate, and coconut milk. I drank it while babysitting, and sweet little Addie kept asking for some. She still isn’t talking much yet (well, she talks, but she sounds like Doodle-Bob and you can’t understand anything she says), so she kept doing the sign language for please. I gave her a teeny tiny taste, and she loved it!
10:20pm- Juice #6: X-treme Greens
After I got home from babysitting, I had my final juice of the day and of the entire cleanse. Again, I had some trouble keeping the hemp seeds blended and ended up with mouthfuls of it at the end, but other than that, this juice is very good.
I fell asleep extremely well after day 2. Like, way better than I normally do! And I slept extremely well! My Fitbit sleep tracker said I slept 7 hours and 50 minutes with virtually no restless or awake moments, which NEVER happens. I wasn’t even extremely tired before going to bed! I think my body just really appreciated this reset!
POST-CLEANSE
I woke up the next morning feeling absolutely amazing. I wasn’t starving like I thought I would be. After I weighed in, I found that I had lost about 3 pounds! I haven’t been at 135 for about a year and a half now, so it was an amazing feeling. This cleanse was coming in on days 19 and 20 of 28 days of me super focusing on losing weight before our trip to the beach (something I’d been wanting to do since January but really fell off the wagon after like two weeks into the new year). I have been working out every day, eating healthy, drinking a protein shake for breakfast every day (Tone It Up vanilla from Target! I highly recommend!!), tracking my calories in My Fitness Pal, and drinking more water. Before I did the cleanse, I had lost about 6 pounds, so the 3 extra lost from the cleanse was the boost I needed!
The cleanse really helped boost my confidence. It’s something I NEVER thought I could or would do. I’m really good at telling myself “I can’t.” I can’t do a juice cleanse because I HAVE to eat or I’ll get a migraine (not true). I can’t do a juice cleanse because I’ll just be on the toilet pooping all day (not true). I can’t do a juice cleanse because it will just leave me starving and cranky all day (not true).
I never once got a headache. I never once had a “pooping attack” (people always say “Oh do THIS cleanse because other cleanses make you poop a lot and this one is safe and doesn’t do that.” So I always thought juice cleanses did that to you. Because that’s what literally everyone says…… but that wasn’t the case here. I never had a “pooping attack.” I don’t know where everyone is getting this information 🤷♀️). I never once got cranky or mean or anything! I was 100000000% surprised by all of this!
The Jus by Julie cleanse guide recommends slowly incorporating solid foods back into your diet, so the next day I had my protein shake for breakfast, a bowl of veggie chili from McAlister’s for lunch, and homemade chili and cornbread for dinner.
If you are curious about juice cleanses and maybe a little skeptical like me, try this one out. It was really great! You can do ones larger than two days, but for your first time, I recommend doing a one or two day, just so you can get a feel of it.
If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask me! I’m no expert, but I did enjoy the experience, and I did come into it as a huuuuge skeptic. So let me know what you’re curious about!
Until next time!
XOXO,
Hollie
MagicallyHollie 