What Happens in Your Body During a Juice Cleanse

By John Breaux | January 21, 2020

As the health and wellness trend continues to sweep across the nation, cleanses and detoxes have become a popular thing to do after all the overeating that took place during the holidays. Many juice cleanses promise to rid your body of toxins, and replenish it with nutrients and vitamins through a series of juices. While sounding great on paper, they are usually vague in nature, without being able to specify exactly how they will benefit your body. 

The idea of doing a juice cleanse has gained traction as being a “quick fix” for a variety of health reasons, mainly being that of rapid weight loss or shifting your mindset toward practicing healthy eating habits. Most juice cleanses can last anywhere from 1-10 days and usually promise to have lasting effects that will continue to manifest long after completion. 

When you see something that promises such incredible benefits in such a short amount of time, it’s likely too good to be true. With such a short amount of time, juice cleanse can often be unnecessarily extreme on your body, to the point where the benefits will not be sustainable in the long run. 

So what exactly goes on in your body during a juice cleanse? 

Typically, this will involve drinking a series of juices loaded with various fruits and vegetables. By doing so for a period of time, you’ll end up losing weight. This, however, should not be construed as your body going through a detox, but rather your body simply using its glycogen stored in the muscles. Eating a diet drastically low in calories will you burn through your glycogen along with water weight. 

Without receiving vital nutrients like protein, fat, and carbohydrates, your body will resort to burning muscle tissue to provide itself energy. This, coupled with the lack of fiber, leads many with the feeling of being “cleansed.” In the end, you’re left with a bit of weight loss, but the majority of that will be from water, which will just be replaced once you return to a normal diet of whole foods. 

Our bodies are already equipped with the necessary means to accomplish detoxes far more efficiently than by drinking a bunch of juice. Thanks to our trusty kidneys, lungs, and liver, our bodies can do the heavy lifting of removing toxins without much effort on our part! 

Overall, doing a juice detox is likely to be harmless albeit unnecessary to a degree. If you really want to overhaul your nutrition, save your money by skipping an expensive detox kit and instead try out a diet reset like intermittent fasting or shifting to a focus on minimally processed, whole foods.