The Juice Cleanse Reset Diet (12 page)

Your digestive system has had a nice three-day vacation. If you ask it to do something difficult right away, it won’t be happy and it’ll let you know. The postcleanse menu will transition you from juice to solid food in a way that will be easiest on your digestive system.

Because you have removed toxins and reset your cravings, your healthy choices over the next few days should lead to more weight loss, if you are overweight. Many of our clients experience more weight loss in the few days that follow the juice cleanse than they did during the liquid portion of the diet.

Now that you have started to repair your skin cells and remove all the excess toxins, your skin looks great. The food you eat on the postcleanse will be alkalizing, nutrient dense, and full of live enzymes, and you’ll continue to see improvements in the way you look.

In addition to flooding your body with vital nutrients and enzymes, part of what makes the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet effective is what you
aren’t
consuming. Many people go through life with undetected allergies or sensitivities to very common foods. They never knew how badly they felt until they feel good for the first time. If you have already seen an otherwise chronic rash disappear, mucus and sinus issues decrease, digestion issues go away, a major increase in your energy levels, or other substantial positive side effects from the cleanse, you could be one of these people with previously unidentified food sensitivities.

Upon successfully completing the precleanse and juice cleanse, your system is clear of the primary potential trigger foods, giving you the unique opportunity to start with a clean slate. If you suspect that you have food sensitivities, we suggest that you slowly and systematically reintroduce common trigger foods into your diet in order to monitor your body’s reaction. Effectively identifying a trigger food
could mean the difference between boundless energy and long-term weight-loss success or depleted energy combined with a host of other health concerns, including long-term weight struggles.

The seven most common trigger foods are dairy, sugar/artificial sweeteners, soy, corn, gluten, eggs, and peanuts. Here’s how to gradually reintroduce these potential trigger foods back into your diet:

After completing the postcleanse menu plan below, you’ll be responsible for planning your own meals again. Follow the steps above for gradual reintroduction of your potential trigger foods. If you feel fatigued, get a rash, experience bloating, or have other negative symptoms after adding dairy, sugar, soy, corn, gluten, eggs, or peanuts back into your diet, it’s a good indicator that you have a sensitivity to this food. Once you identify sensitivity to a certain food, we recommend that you completely avoid this food for ninety days before experimenting with adding it back to your meals. After taking a complete break from the offending food for some time, you may be able to add moderate amounts of the food back into your diet without any negative effects. Listen to your body and determine this for yourself based upon how you feel. Enjoy following the postcleanse recipes and remember the rules for gradual inclusion once you venture into creating your own meal plans.

As you integrate whole food back into your diet, you need to be mindful that your digestive system has been shut down for the past three days. During the postcleanse, you’ll slowly add different types of solid food to your diet, beginning with the easiest to digest. That means starting with fruits and vegetables, adding legumes, and then eventually animal protein, beginning with seafood and eggs because they are easiest to digest. If you’re a vegetarian, or if you find that you
just don’t have a taste for animal protein right now, continue with plant-based food. What you definitely want to avoid during the next two days is eating red meat, dairy, greasy foods, and alcohol. None of these will make you feel good. It would be surprising if you crave any of those things, but if you are, use your new willpower to choose not to eat them for two more days.

Listen to your body! Be mindful of how each new item feels to you. If you don’t want to eat dairy, or meat, or gluten, or soy, you don’t need to. If there is any recipe below that doesn’t appeal to your newly reset cravings and taste buds, feel free to substitute from the same category in the precleanse and postcleanse recipe sections. For instance, if you don’t want to eat eggs for breakfast, go ahead and find another breakfast meal that sounds better, or stick with delicious smoothies every morning, if that feels better to your body.

If you’re feeling scared of “undoing” all the resets when you start eating solid food, know that this postcleanse phase is designed to help you succeed. After all you have accomplished, we want to help you move forward with lifelong habits and changes. We also want to make sure your transition to solid food is pleasant and easy, as we get your digestive system operating again after its three-day sabbatical. Now that you know the types of food you’ll be eating and why, let’s get you chewing!

If you want to continue on with the postcleanse portion of the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet for a bit longer, you can follow the precleanse recipes back out from your cleanse (see
this page
). In other words, on day 3, follow the menu for Three Days Before the Juice Cleanse and on day 4, follow the menu for Four Days Before the Juice Cleanse, and so on. We have found that some people who feel great after the
seven-day program are afraid to “mess it up” by eating the wrong things. By following the diet plan for five more days (by following the menus provided up to Seven Days Before the Juice Cleanse), your body will become so accustomed to healthy choices that your healthier cravings combined with your new mindful attitude will guide you in the right direction.

If you have completed the two postcleanse days and are ready to make your own meal choices, you’re finished with the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet. Congratulations! Regardless of whether you’re moving into the maintenance phase today, or in a couple of days, you don’t need to be afraid. Making the right choices is simple once you have the tools. In the next chapter, we’ll give you the knowledge about food and exercise to convert everything you’ve accomplished and learned over the past week into a reset lifestyle. Let’s get you started on the rest of your life.

During the Juice Cleanse Reset Diet, you bid farewell to toxins
, unhealthy cravings, lackluster skin, bloat, and excess weight by feeding your body only healing and energizing foods. You not only eliminated the junk from your diet and the gunk from your body, but you also fueled your insides with antioxidants, enzymes, and vitamins. At this moment, you’re in pristine fat-burning, toxin-flushing condition! You’re officially reset. Now for the million-dollar question: how do you maintain long-term success?

Achieving long-term success and maintaining the postcleanse buzz happens choice by choice. This chapter is dedicated to increasing your knowledge and empowering you to make smart choices to stay on track with your reset for the long haul.

Enzymes are essential to vitality, beauty, and health; they are right up there with antioxidants in defining what makes many superfoods super. On the flip side, a lack of enzymes is arguably one of the biggest causes of poor health.

All bodily functions require enzymes. Enzymes are the catalysts for every activity, from the proper functioning of your internal organs, to your ability to think, to the detoxification and replenishment of your cells. If you still need more motivation for increasing your enzyme intake, how about this—a lack of enzymes is a guaranteed way to accelerate aging! Wrinkles, bone loss, weight gain, and even illness may all be attributed to enzyme deficiency. Without enzymes, outer beauty suffers because your cells cannot repair themselves. Even worse than this, if you consume both processed foods and real food, then the enzyme inhibitors in the processed foods can interfere with the enzymes from the real food you consume. This is one of the many reasons why we encourage you to stay away from processed food. As you age, your body produces fewer enzymes, requiring you to take in more from your food and supplements in order to avoid a deficiency.

There are three main types of enzymes: metabolic enzymes, digestive enzymes, and food enzymes. Metabolic enzymes are in charge of energy production in your body. Think of metabolic enzymes like your indispensable executive assistant for cellular activity on every level. These enzymes process the nutrients provided by your food and disperse them throughout your body to assist with replenishment of healthy cells. Metabolic enzymes also work overtime at no extra charge, helping you to flush toxins from your body. If you wish to give a little thank you for your metabolic enzymes, direct your gratitude toward your pancreas, the main organ that produces these hardworking overachievers and releases them into your body.

Digestive enzymes assist your body to break down and assimilate food into usable nutrients. Beginning with amylase in your saliva, enzymes go to work from the moment food hits your mouth. This is why it’s important to chew your food before swallowing. It is also very beneficial to swish your juice and smoothies in your mouth for a moment before swallowing, because this will allow your digestive enzymes to get to work!

Your body requires different types of enzymes to digest fats, proteins, and carbohydrates.

Food enzymes primarily come from plants and are needed to break down food. Your body does not make these enzymes, but they are contained in the food you eat. Correction: they’re contained in the food you eat if you eat real food that is not damaged by heat and processing. Because food enzymes are destroyed by heat, it’s important to incorporate fresh raw fruits and vegetables into your daily diet as well as healthy essential cold-pressed or whole plant oils (for example, avocado or raw nuts) and, of course, juice or smoothies. Part of what made your juice-cleanse phase successful was the huge amount of enzymes that you consumed. Consuming enzymes through food boosts your body’s ability to detox and repair without taxing your internal metabolic enzyme system. Feeding your body enzymes is how you lend a helping hand, eliminating a bit of the burden from your internal systems.