Written by Anyi Cheng

When I was a kid, I was told to stay away from juice. I knew that if I drank too much juice, my teeth would fall apart and I would suffer extreme organ damage—at least, that’s how my teachers and parents made it sound. But then juice cleanses came along. As part of a new wave of crazy—sometimes mind-boggling—fad diets, the trend of eating nothing and drinking juices for an extended period of time took the health-nut world by storm with its seemingly overnight results.

Now, I took AP Biology and therefore consider myself a reasonably educated girl; it was pretty hard for me to believe that juice cleanses were the miracle they were touted to be. But health bloggers raved about the almost-instantaneous results, how they felt invigorated and that the abundant “toxins” in their bodies had been flushed out. To achieve this bodily nirvana, all I had to do was drink juice? Count me in. Of course, we weren’t talking about drinking a gallon of orange or cranberry juice in one day. Turns out, the juices I needed were full of green leafy things with big names like “spirulina” and “kale.” Well, so be it. Beauty is pain! I headed to the grocery store, loaded up on Odwalla bottles and pre- pared myself for a day of eating nothing and drinking juice. By noon, I felt like I was starving. I was in a bad mood, I felt unbearably hollow and I was having the biggest cravings for non-juice things, like pumpkin pie and chicken alfredo. Suddenly, I was counting my lucky stars that I had planned to only do one day of the cleanse. It sure didn’t feel like toxins were flushing out of my body, even though I was hitting the bathroom a lot more frequently than I usually did. How was I going to make it to dinner—excuse me, I meant my evening bottle of apple-flavored spinach puree—without giving up?