When I was still living in Seattle, the juicing craze was just getting started and I seriously considered doing a three-day cleanse meaning three juices as a substitute for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days. My thought process was that I would probably feel really healthy for doing it and like I had done some sort of a detox on my body, but that afterwards, I’d probably be pretty hungry. I wasn’t really thinking about some of the negative side effects that might occur from it and how this might affect me differently than it would for any other person perhaps someone who might be a little bit more healthier than me.

I put the idea of a juice cleanse behind me. That was until I went to the Stanford Shopping Center three weeks ago and stopped by Pressed. I figured that if I wasn’t ready to do the real juice cleanse that I intended a year and a half ago, I could at least try it or modify it to be more appropriate for my diet. I purchased three bottles each from a different category – citrus, roots, and greens. At the store I sampled each of them and decided that the flavor was okay enough for me to finish a whole bottle of it.

On my first night I substituted one bottle for dinner. Granted I had a meal before having the juice, but it was a late lunch and the only meal I ate for the day. After drinking the first bottle, I didn’t feel hungry later that evening. Instead, I felt pretty content. It was challenging to finish a whole bottle in one sitting though and I realized that the two days after I would get through half the bottle and put the rest in the fridge for 30 minutes until I would go back to finish the second half.

The second and third bottles didn’t act as meal substitutes, but were consumed when I came home from work as a snack. Like my original assumption about juicing, I felt healthy in the sense that I knew I was putting good things into my body. However, I did feel like I was consuming a great deal of natural sugars. I later felt the side effects from that on the second, third, and fourth day when I would get sporadic headaches. I wasn’t changing anything else about my diet those days while I was juicing so I’m fairly confident that they were caused from that. I probably won’t ever be able to do a full juice cleanse because this was a pretty strong indication that my body may not be able to handle it consistently, but I think if I walked by Pressed again and felt like having a juice, I would pick one up without too much of a second thought.