The juicing trend has attracted many people who are looking to lose weight, detoxify their body, or treat and prevent a range of illnesses from the sniffles to chronic diseases like cancer. While it is true that fresh fruit and/or vegetable juice is nutritious and has lots of benefits to your health, juicing diets where a person is only allowed to take juices for several weeks in order to lose weight doesn’t really work and can even be dangerous. Here’s why:
1. Juice Is Not As Satisfying As Whole Food
You will feel more satisfied and fuller if you chew your meals instead of drinking them. This is because, according to Livestrong.com, juicing eliminates hunger-satiating fibre in fruits and vegetables. Therefore, juicing diets can actually work against your weight loss goals because it doesn’t satisfy your appetite or hunger for long, which makes this diet very hard to sustain.
2. Juice Cleanses Do Not Provide Complete Nutrition
Any type of diet that eliminates certain food groups entirely and calls for extreme food restrictions should be regarded with suspicion. Remember that a proper diet always includes different food categories, for the simple reason that the vitamins and minerals that are essential to good health cannot all be found in just one food group.
For instance, a juice cleanse typically lacks a good amount of fat and protein because these macronutrients are not commonly found in most fruits and vegetables. The ones that do contain them, such as avocados, olives or beans, are not the best ingredients to put in juice.
Inadequate protein intake can lead to muscle deterioration, brittle or thinning hair, nail and skin problems, slow wound healing, general weakness, and other problems. The lack of good fats in the diet also makes the skin and hair suffer, and harder for the body to absorb fat-soluble vitamins. Prolonged juicing can result in adverse effects to your body such as electrolyte imbalances and muscle loss.
3. Juicing Is Not Better than Eating Food Whole
Currently, there’s no sound proof that whole fruits and vegetables are better when they are in juice form. Actually, it can be the opposite. For instance, the loss of fibre during the juicing process means the fructose sugar in fruit and vegetable juices can be easily absorbed by the body and cause increased blood sugar level.
4. Juice Diets Encourage Yo-Yo Effect
It’s not surprising that people are able to lose weight by sticking to juicing for weeks. Of course they will lose weight, because of the drastic calorie reduction. But is it healthy? As stated above, it’s not. Will their weight loss be permanent? The most likely scenario is that they will gain back whatever they lost and probably some more when they’re done juicing; a common situation among dieters known as the yo-yo effect.
The primary reason for this is the fact that whatever weight is lost during such an extreme diet is only water weight. This is true for any type of crash diet, which is what a juicing diet really is. When you’re crash dieting, it’s a stressful situation for your body because it craves food and needs food. Without enough food for days, the body goes on starvation mode and instinctively slows down metabolism as a survival mechanism.
Going on a juice cleanse for one to three days is perfectly fine, but cleansing any longer than that in the hopes of losing weight is not the ideal way to do it. In fact, instead of experiencing permanent weight loss, extended juicing can permanently lower your metabolism.
While the facts above dispel many of the claims of juicing fanatics, it doesn’t mean you should stop drinking fresh or pure juice. The best thing to do to truly improve your wealth and wellbeing is to eat a diet that includes juices, healthy whole foods, and other supplements that will give you a complete and balanced nutrition.