Many moons ago I arranged and participated in a juice cleanse + workout challenge with a couple good friends of mine, one other trainer and one who owned the juice business. It was something along the lines of 3-5 days of juice, a couple of those being ONLY juice and then a certain, pre-approved menu of sorts, paired with workouts taught by myself and the other trainer.

I distinctly remember my juice friend coming over the second day of the juice-only portion of the cleanse and very quickly realizing that I was not going to make it and I was going to need to add food into my personal version of this adventure. I was hangry, miserable and the original plan just didn’t work for me. It stands out in my mind as the first time I fully realized that we all have very different relationships to food, health, and change.

A lot of people really enjoy juice-fasting, regular fasting and all sorts of extreme practices around food. Like most young trainers, I bought into some of the fads for a while and tried a bunch of different things. The more I learn, the more I learn about how most such practices have some use in certain situations for certain people, and that some are completely unnecessary and not worth the trouble. For example, your body is very good at finding homeostasis and it is constantly “cleansing” itself. It is unnecessary to entirely remove food for this process to occur. It can, however, be extremely effective to support this process by removing substances that interfere with the process and make it more difficult (i.e. sugar, alcohol, caffeine…). Instead of fluctuating widely between eating anything and everything to not eating at all, I find it very useful to know the “baseline” foods that I can always return to that I know fuel my body well, cover a lot of nutritional ground and make me feel good. Whenever I feel like i need a “cleanse”, I return to those foods and allow my body to reset itself. THat works way better for me than doing a well-marketed, expensive juice cleanse.

Most of us do not do well with extreme, sudden changes, especially when it comes to food and health. The extreme measures are tempting because they are packaged as the “quick fixes” - you can lose 5 pounds, feel sexier, suddenly regrow all your hair…all you need is THIS. The reality is that most of those quick fixes are solutions to made up problems or snake oil for your real problems. Health is gained slowly, over time, by way of many, many small decisions and incremental changes. While there are trends and commonalities, optimal health is individual and each person has different specific needs and details to their routines and their “baselines”.

When you’re finally ready to “get healthy”, it can be extremely tempting to try to do all the things, all at once. The most typical outcome of this is a frenzied, overly perfect routine that lasts at best about 10 days followed by a complete backslide into overwhelm and our same ‘ol less than ideal routines and habits. It is simply too daunting to try to eat all the vegetables, exercise every day, sleep soundly for 8 hours, meditate for world peace, communicate kindly and have a perfect looking butt all at once! And let’s say by some miracle you actually accomplished even half of that, what happens when you get a cold? Or you lose your job? Or have to move? If doing all of those things is daunting on a good day, then it’s downright impossible when life’s stress flares up.

Healthy living is not the perfect morning routine that so often pops up on your instagram and facebook feed. Healthy living is the combination of many tiny habits and choices that work best for you. For me, it is things like knowing that after I got food poisoning last week I needed some probiotics and a big pot of chicken soup. And that I like to swim and run, but not more than twice a week. And that in the summer I like to eat more salads, but in the winter I prefer roasted, warm vegetables. There is nothing very glamorous about the things that make me feel my healthiest. It truly is an assortment of habits and choices that I have discovered over many years through a long process of experimentation and problem solving. I love drinking a good glass of juice. I hate juice cleanses. Everything that you see and hear other people talking about are things that work for them, that doesn’t mean they have to work for you. Use them as ideas of things to try when you want to and remember that you get to choose for yourself.

I often recommend to my health coaching clients that they try 1-3 small things (i.e. try a new vegetable, turn your phone off 1 hour before bed, go for a 5 minute daily walk) for two weeks at a time. It is long enough to find out if that particular habit is a good fit or not. For those of you desiring change, pick something small and try it for the next two weeks! If you want some accountability, email me or comment below on what you’re trying and we can do it together.

Making gradual and sustainable changes is more effective than attempting extreme measures or quick fixes. Small habits and choices add up over time and can lead to significant improvements in your overall well-being. By focusing on consistent, incremental changes, you give yourself the opportunity to build a strong foundation for long-term health. Skip the juice cleanse, enjoy the juice, and have fun in your exploration!

Always rootin’ for ya,

Jessie