3 Day Juice Cleanse/Fast: Part 1 – The Process

Right around New Year’s I was doing some Pinterest WORK when I came across a pin for Dr. Oz’s 3 Day Detox Cleanse.  I have been interested in doing a juice detox cleanse for quite some time, and especially so since my hormones went all haywire when I stopped taking birth control.  I asked Craig, half jokingly, if he wanted to do a juice cleanse, and he said simply, “Yes.”  So, I started researching.  I looked into several other options, but in the end, I came back to Dr. Oz’s program because it is very simple, has specific instructions, and the ingredients and components of the cleanse make sense to me – a good place to start for a complete newbie.

I found a weekend in the calendar that was relatively uneventful and made plans. I really only had the 3 Day Detox Cleanse One Sheet on Dr. Oz’s website to go off of, which doesn’t give much guidance on the HOW-TO part of this deal.  On the first day of our cleanse I was feeling a little lost, so I did a little more digging. I did manage to find two video clips from Dr. Oz’s show about the detox cleanse. They give more details on the WHY of the process, but not really the HOW. Hence, this post.  What the one sheet does do is give a simple and easy guide to the ingredients of each of the three “drinks” that make up the bulk of the cleanse.  It includes a shopping list with how much you will need of each item for the entire three day cleanse, handy dandy for the first part of the process:

Shopping for Ingredients

I split my shopping for the cleanse ingredients across two shopping trips, one the week before and one the week of.  In the first trip I purchased all the non-perishable items. I purchased all the produce and other perishables in the second trip. After shopping, I realized that the shopping list does not reflect the extra ingredients needed to make the 4th “snack” drink that is allowed on each day of the cleanse.

I spent ~$137 pre-tax for the items needed for both hubs and I to do the cleanse. That comes out to ~$23 per day per person. Here are some ideas on how to shave a little off the total cost of this venture:

• Cut out the stevia and the lavender drops. Neither of them really help with the cleanse – they’re just “comfort items”
• Purchase the Raspberries and Blueberries (and maybe even the mangos) frozen.  They’re cheaper that way, and IMO make the drinks taste better.
• Try to find coupons for the “shelf goods” like the vitamins, tea, coconut oil, flaxseed, cayenne, almond milk, almond butter, and coconut water.
• Pair up with someone else and share the cost of everything.  Even with the two of us, we had leftovers of several of the more expensive items like the coconut oil and the almond butter.

Making the Drinks

In the three weeks between when we scheduled the cleanse and when it actually happened, Craig came across a cheap brand juicer on clearance for $24 and bought it.  I was excited to give it a whirl.  However, once the cleanse started, I quickly realized that the drink recipes were not created for a juicer, they were intended for a blender.  On second look, I noticed that the webpage for the cleanse says, “All you need is 3 days, a blender and $16 a day!”  I ended up using a hybrid  of both juicing and blending to make our drinks.  While I was doing research on juice cleanses and fasts, I read something that said juice cleanses could actually cause you to gain weight because you aren’t really aware of how many calories you are drinking.  I found this a bit surprising, so I also figured the calories for each drink.  So, here’s the nitty gritty on each drink and how I made them.

Note: You drink green tea with lemon BEFORE your breakfast drink.  Make it as usual. Add as much lemon as you want.  Calories are pretty much zippo.

The Breakfast Drink

The breakfast drink can be put together completely in the blender. Yes, this picture shows strawberries when the recipe calls for raspberries.  I took this photo on the 3rd day of the fast, and I had run out of raspberries, so I used strawberries instead, based on the recommendation of my very nutritionally wise friend Kristen from Ultimate Daniel Fast. Basically, there aren’t enough liquids in this recipe to get it through the juicer, and of course the flax seed and almond butter don’t jive with a juicer at all. Trust me, I tried it in the juicer and over half of it went into the pulp bin. So, save yourself some dishes and just do it up in the blender all at once – Whee!

*Side Note: the kids loved watching the blender and juicer in action.  Who knew mommy and daddy’s diet could be so entertaining?!

The breakfast drink is easy to make and pretty easy to drink too (more on that in my next post). It has a total of 279 calories and weighs in at about 20 ounces.

The Lunch Drink

Ah, the lunch drink.  I had read in the comments of the Dr. Oz website that lots of people found the lunch drink to be very large and very thick.  So, I decided to do this one in the juicer.  It really juiced up nicely.

But it seemed like so much of the kale and pineapple had gone into the pulp bin!

I didn’t want to waste any of that green goodness, so I dumped everything in the pulp bin plus the juice I had extracted into the blender and mixed it all up. Indeed, this furnished a 28 ounce, very chunky drink that I called “salad in a bottle”.  For the second and third day, I left the pulp in the pulp bin and just kept the juice. However, the lunch recipe calls for coconut oil, which has the consistency of lard.  That doesn’t go through the juicer well, and you can’t really stir it into the juice.  So, I ended up putting it in the blender with the almond milk and blending the two together.

Then, I added the juice from the juicer to the blender and blended it all together.

The result was a much more manageable 24 ounce not-chunky, more juice than smoothie, drink.  There are 332 Calories in this power drink.

The Dinner Drink

Once again, for the dinner drink, you can go back to a straight blender mix-up.  Put the Kale in first, and then the heavier ingredients on top of it to help push it down toward the blades.

This one is a little chunky/leafy, but not hard to drink. It is about 24 ounces and has 345 calories.

Thoughts on the Process as a Whole

Overall, making the drinks is not difficult.  It’s less time and cleanup than making a traditional meal, so that’s nice.  Total, without the added “snack drink” each day, you’re looking at 956 calories. If you add in the snack drink, you’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1300 calories, which is a good amount for an average sized person with light daily activity.  However, we didn’t add in the fourth drink because I simply didn’t feel the need for it.  The last step in the day is the Detox Ultra Bath.  I’m not sure if ultra is a good descriptor, but it was an easy and nice relaxing end to each day. I’ll get more into all that in the next post, which will be more of a review of Dr. Oz’s 3 Day Detox Cleanse with Craig’s and my personal assessments of the experience.  Til then!

Get Part 2: The Review Here.

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