Besides wonderful weather and warm breezes, summertime often brings another occurrence – rapid weight loss to look slim. Women – and men too – want to look fit whether they’re parading around the pool, swimming in the sea or enjoying a family barbecue.
Juice cleanses, often touted for being safe and effective ways to quickly shed a few pounds, are not all they’re bragged up to be. In fact, they can be quite dangerous for your health. While fruits and vegetables are powerhouses of antioxidants that can help prevent cancer, detoxifying your body with juice cleanses is not a healthy choice for trying to purify your body.
During National Fruit and Vegetable Month, learn about 5 dangers of juice cleanses and 5 alternative produce uses for improved wellness.
- While a juice cleanse might seem to work for weight loss in the short term, it’s not a long-term solution. Restricting calories just by drinking concoctions of juices causes the body to go into starvation mode, making it harder to actually lose weight. The shock to the system causes it to cling to every calorie since it doesn’t know when it’s going to get its next dose of energy.
- Your body needs a balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates in every meal. When you’re drinking juices totaling only 1,000 calories per day, you’re missing out on a host of necessary proteins and fats, along with nutrients in those foods. When your diet is missing protein, it breaks down and cannibalizes muscle fibers just to fuel the body.
- While just drinking juice, the high amounts of naturally occurring sugars cause blood sugars to spike and drop. The same thing that happens when drinking sodas or eating processed carbohydrates. Drastic changes in blood sugar can cause long term problems with insulin production and its release into the blood stream.
- When it comes to removing toxins from your body, there’s no evidence that juice cleanses actually work. Being a naturally existing carbohydrate does not mean it has any special properties to remove toxins. Actually, your body already has a dedicated system for doing this – the kidneys and liver. That’s what they’re for, and that’s what they do – detox your body.
- The attraction to juice cleanses is the speed at which they’re supposed to be working to lose weight. Losing weight quickly shocks the body and later causes it to store more calories as fat when normal eating resumes. Losing weight overnight is not healthy for the body, short term or long term.
So, what to do if juice cleanses for rapid weight loss and detoxifying your body aren’t beneficial. You don’t need to skip the fruits and vegetables, just enjoy them whole in a variety of ways throughout the day and night.
- Start out the day with a combination of fruit, vegetables, nuts, oatmeal and yogurt – all blended up as a smoothie. When you make your own from basic ingredients, you’ll give your body a steady source of nutrition for a couple hours. If you’re unsure what to try at first, find a few recipes on line or in a recipe book until you feel comfortable experimenting with your own.
- When it comes to snack time, munch on some crunchy carrots or a juicy pear – any fruit or vegetable will do. While some produce comes in convenient packs, it still might not be as portable as you need. Many fruits are available in easy to carry and enjoy dried form – from tangerines to peaches, and apples to pineapple. Be sure to check the calories and sugar grams in each portion as they can easily add up.
- Instead of drinking an 8-ounce glass of orange juice, just eat an orange. With 4 oranges needing to be squeezed to create an 8-ounce glass of juice, you would probably never eat that many oranges at once. Filled with fiber, slice up just one orange to see how filling and satisfying it can be.
- At dinner, load up half of your plate with steamed, baked or lightly sautéed vegetables. Fill the other half with approximately 24 grams of protein – about 4 ounces of meat, poultry or fish – and beneficial carbohydrates such as whole-wheat pasta or brown rice.
- For dessert, chop up some fresh fruit or scoop up some berries and pour low fat yogurt on top. Even sprinkle with a little oatmeal or oat bran. If you’re used to eating ice cream or pie for dessert, this may seem a bit basic at first, but soon you’ll be loving the simple taste.
Feel free to share this information with friends and family who could benefit from including more fruits and vegetables in their lives – without going on a restrictive diet of simple juice to try to quickly lose weight or detoxify.
Sources
http://www.webmd.com/diabetes/blood-glucose
http://www.choosemyplate.gov/food-groups/grains-why.html
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