It’s Easy To Mess Up Your First Juice Fast

Juice fasting is becoming an ever more popular endeavor, but there’s more to it than meets the eye.

It’s a very high maintenance style of eating.

Moreso than an act of will, successful juice fasting is a learned skill that takes a little bit of planning at the beginning to be completed successfully at the end.

What I want to go over here are the biggest mistakes most people make when beginning a juice fast.

1). You don’t buy a good juicer.

Sounds obvious, I know, but having a juicer well suited to the job is key.

Most juicers are fine, but many are not suited to a full-fledged juice fast.

To juice fast successfully you’ll need to drink close to a pitcher of juice each day and that’s a lot of stress on smaller or lesser brands.

If you can afford it I’d recommend a Breville 800 JEXL. They’re not cheap, but you get what you pay for. It costs $299.

A less expensive, but still worthy brand are cuisinart juicers. You can get it for $149.

2). You don’t buy the right foods

The best foods for juicing are hard with a high water content.

Apples, carrots, and beets are typically the three staples of juicing concoctions. They’re sweet, fairly inexpensive, and give you a lot of juice for the money.

Citrus fruits also juice well. Leafy greens do wonderful things for your body when juiced, but it’s hard to get enough juice out of them to make them the main constituent of your drinks. I once made a glass of juice entirely out of kale and broccoli. I felt great after drinking it, but the glass probably cost me $9 to make because I went through so much produce to make it.

Add them at the end. Avoid soft foods with low water content like bananas and avocados. Anything else inbetween can be juiced to varying degrees of success.

3). You Go On A Juice Fast To Avoid Forming Good Habits

I meet some people who hope going on a juice fast will alleviate some condition they’ve had all their life, or rectify conditions that are the result of poor lifestyle choices.

Going on a juice fast can certainly help these ailments, but it can’t solve them all by itself.

Serious problems require serious, long-term solutions and a juice fast is only temporary. You can’t drink juice the rest of your life.

Instead, a juice fast is a good “kickstarter” to put your body on the right track.

4). You Stop Juicing After Your Fast

If you just juice for 3-7 days and then forget about it you’re not reaping the full benefits of your fast.

You’ll obviously do it less than when you finish, but maintaining some skeleton of your eating habits after your fast ends is where the real benefits kick in.

This might seem hard, but if you do your fast the right way you’ll experience enough of the benefits of juicing to make sticking with it easier.

On days that I juice I usually have more energy, less hunger, and if I do it consistently for a few weeks I have a better skin complexion and muscle tone. Who doesn’t want that?

5). You don’t get enough calories.

If you drink only juice during your fast your calories will be very low.

This is good, since high nutrient, low-calorie fasting is very good for you.

However, if you don’t get enough calories you’ll quickly be able to feel the consequences of your mistake.

Your energy levels will be low, and worst of all….you’ll be really hungry!

Chances are you’ll gorge big time, which undoes the whole purpose of the fast to begin with.

To avoid this problem it’s best to make a lot of juice in the morning so it will last you most of the day.

The good news is that the calories from your juice will get you really far. A few glasses in the morning will often last me into the afternoon. The bad news is that is still a lot of work.

When I went on my first fast I didn’t get an adequate amount of calories, and I regularly got an empty feeling in my stomach that was impossible to shake.

My body felt good, but it could tell it was not getting the calories it needed.

If you’re going on a prolonged fast, it’s a good idea to eat one meal a day with your fast. The key is not going berserk and falling off a cliff entirely when on your fast.