juice cleanse diet

Juice Cleanse Diet - Why Juices Are Good For The Body

This video is a great introduction into juice cleanse concepts from well known advocate Joe Cross.

Juice Cleanse Concepts

Joe Cross: Here's a thing which I share with people, is that the penalty for not eating has to be severe, Sonia, because if it's not severe, you and I wouldn't be here. You see, you gotta breathe, you gotta drink water, you gotta eat food to stay alive. You don't need to do anything else. You put those three things in your body to stay alive. If you don't breathe for five minutes, you're going to be dead, so there's a strong reaction to someone when they block your airway. You will fight to get air.

Sonia: Exactly.

Joe Cross: With water, you have this thing called thirst, which makes you thirsty. It's a mechanism to save us from death. It says, "I need to drink. I need to drink."

Sonia: I'm getting thirsty now that you're saying that.

Joe Cross: And hunger is the same thing. Hunger is a mechanism to allow us, to remind us to eat. So for two or three days I'm not eating, and just putting water or, what I like to say, water filtered through plants, which is what juice is.

Sonia: I like that term, yes.

Joe Cross: That's what it is. It's the same thing. It has the same effect, so when it hits your stomach, your body doesn't know that it was water from a plant. It just thinks it's water. Because it doesn't have the fiber in it, the way that your body assimilates that nutrition, the enzymes are not generated. And because those enzymes aren't generated, your brain gets a message saying, "You know what, Joe? It's been 12 hours, mate, and you haven't eaten. You know what, Joe? It's been 24 hours, and you haven't eaten. We're going to turn up the headache."

Sonia: I'm getting hungry thinking about it.

Joe Cross: "We're going to turn up the pain."

Sonia: Right, so for the first how long were you in pain?

Joe Cross: The first 72 hours, I felt like a Mack truck had run over me and then reversed back over me. I thought I was going to die.

Sonia: So you just felt headache, anger, frustration?

Joe Cross: I could take up the rest of this interview with 2,000 profanity words of how I felt. I had never felt as bad in that first three days, because remember, I went from somebody who was incredibly toxic, who was living on white, brown, and black food. And I didn't even have the sense, because I didn't know what I know now, to actually start putting some high-fiber foods through my body when I was going to start my juicing. My last meal was chocolate shakes and sundaes and burgers and sushi and beer.

Sonia: So it was just a …

Joe Cross: Then to that. Now I've got no fiber, so now I'm blocked up.

Sonia: Meaning blocked up, you couldn't go to the toilet either?

Joe Cross: Number twos were not on the radar.

Sonia: Sorry. Sorry, we aren't going to go into it.

Joe Cross: Now, I would spend my whole life now talking about number twos. I mean, what goes in must come out, right?

Sonia: So nothing came out?

Joe Cross: Not for the first three days. I was in serious trouble. I mean, I was like …

Sonia: But why was that? Sorry, I hate to even ask.

Cleansing For The First Time

Joe Cross: Why is that? Because I had no fiber in my food. I was like high-processed, and because I'm drinking juice now without what's called the soluble fiber … I had the insoluble fiber, no insoluble, which is the stuff you can see. Now there's no assistance. The bottom line was, I was a happy boy on day four and five, because number two started working. I had some relief. But I'm still going through massive withdrawals. I'm going through a caffeine withdrawal, a sugar withdrawal.

Sonia: So headache?

Joe Cross: I don't think "headache" does it justice, what I was going through. Talk about having nails driven into your brain.

Sonia: It didn't seem that bad in the movie. You actually seemed quite jolly, maybe because you're just quite a jolly person.

Joe Cross: Well, here's what happened. Because I didn't know anything about making films-

Sonia: Because I'd be literally just, strangle somebody and throw them to the ground.

Joe Cross: Because I didn't know anything about making films, I had locked them out, because I didn't want to have this on camera. Stupid, right?

Sonia: Oh, because I bet-

Joe Cross: I let them in a few times to see me in bed on the third and fourth day, which there's a few shots, but the reality was, is that I was like, "Leave me alone. I think this is not going to work."

Sonia: And by Phil you knew that, because you saw Phil going through it.

Joe Cross: Correct.

Sonia: Yeah, I wanted to see you really suffering, not to be mean.

Joe Cross: No, no, a lot of people did. But had I known how to make a movie, I would have had the cameras following me four or five days before. I would have shown the last meal, but I didn't know. I didn't know.

Sonia: But you would have killed them by that point. You were in such a bad mood, especially when you went to Mexican. After the five days you felt better, because you'd done number two, and then you just started getting better and better?

Joe Cross: It wasn't only because of going to the bathroom. It was more the fact that it doesn't take long … and this is the magic of the human body … is that after like 72 hours of not eating any food and going through all those signals that the brain says, "Joe, we're going to make this the single focus point for you to get food, because without food we and you are going to die." Think about your four trillion cells that are all in unison harmony singing, saying, "Joe, go and eat food." That's what happens when you starve yourself. You go to this point where everything is about eating.

Joe Cross: But then, through the wonders and magic of Mother Nature, you switch over to a point where in order to survive, the brain says, "You know what? Plan A isn't working. Actually, making Joe miserable, making Joe angry, making Joe with headaches, making him exhausted, that's not helping us find food."

Sonia: How cool is the body?

does juice cleansing really work

The History Of Human Fasting

Joe Cross: We are back on the savanna. When there's a famine on, we need this period of time to now switch and turn off hunger. I can honestly say, from day five to day 60, I was not hungry once, because hunger turns off. Now the body is on the hunt for food. Eyesight, incredibly sharp, because why? Back on the savanna, you want to be able to see vegetables, and you want to be able to see food. Hearing, off the chart. Smell? Blowing me away that I could finally smell for the first time in my life, because when you eat a lot of processed food, you're blocking those sorts of smells.

Joe Cross: And this is what the tens of thousands of people that have followed in my footsteps, the biggest thing they talk about is how their senses come alive on day four or five, that they've never known what their senses were like. And then of course, the big thing is the ability to focus, the ability to concentrate, because now you haven't got the ups and downs of the sugars or the caffeines or the processed food. You haven't got the fats. You haven't got the liver working overtime to process. You've got this incredible peacefulness and harmony.

Celery - The New Super Food

Joe Cross: Now the body is in what I call survival mode, because it's out to try and find energy. What I was doing, is I'm still tricking it, you see, Sonia? I'm tricking it, because I'm not just drinking water. I'm giving my body all the nutrients from plants. And here's something. We'll go back to our little stick of celery.

Sonia: I love celery.

Joe Cross: Okay. When you eat this celery, when you eat this-

Sonia: I used to eat this growing up, just like that.

Joe Cross: Well, that's why you look so good as you do now, right?

Sonia: No, but I love celery.

Joe Cross: If you eat this, what essentially is going to happen in your body is you are going to masticate it with your teeth, and you chew it up. What's going to happen is, and let's just say we take out a little piece here like this, and we do that. Now you hold that.

Sonia: I'm dying to chew it. Can I eat?

Joe Cross: Yeah, yeah, put that in. Put that in. When you are doing that-

Sonia: I love celery.

Joe Cross: What's going on now is you're masticating it. Your body is getting ready in your stomach to receive this celery. Now, what is the celery made up of? It's made up of water, it's made up of fodder nutrients, and it's made up of a cellulose.

Sonia: Like strings. What's the string?

Joe Cross: Well, the cellular structure is the fiber. It's the structure that's holding the plant together. Now, here's something that a lot of people don't realize. There is zero nutrients, no nutritional benefit at all, in that fiber for your system when it gets digested into your gut.

Sonia: Really?

Joe Cross: No. What it's great for, it's great for slowing down metabolism, obviously it's got some sugars, and it's great for bowel movement and colon.

Sonia: Oh, back to number two.

Joe Cross: It's great for that, but when we're talking about being assimilated by the gut and what's absorbed in and sent to the cells-

Sonia: It's not necessary.

Water With Nutrients

Joe Cross: Well, not just not necessary, there is no benefit at all from fiber. What we do when we are juicing is we are essentially outsourcing the digestion to a machine. We are stripping out that cellulose. We are bringing the water with all the nutrients, so that it's rapid absorption. When you juice celery, the exact same effect is happening to your four trillion cells as when you just ate it. The difference is now you've got some fiber that you need to exit the door. And because you've got the fiber in your body now, your body's reminded that you are not on a famine, that you are on a feast. So you are going to get hungry in a couple of hours, because you've eaten.

Sonia: So to reboot, you actually can't have the fiber?

Joe Cross: Well, that's correct. I mean, I talk about juicing and rebooting in two different distinct ways. There's the way where you are doing a reboot, juice only. That's when you are going back in time, and you are creating a famine.

Sonia: So trying to lose weight?

Joe Cross: No, I think about that not for losing weight. I think about that for trying to regain health and get yourself off some kind of chronic illness. That's how I think of it.

Sonia: Wow, that's great.

Joe Cross: Then I talk about juicing on a regular day, every day, to incorporate juices and smoothies as part of a regular balanced approach.

Sonia: That's what I would do, right?

Joe Cross: Yeah. There's two ways. It's not one or the other. Some people do both. Some people just do one, which is the regular way. But I don't encourage people to juice specifically to lose weight, because what will happen is-

Sonia: I like that, because that just puts too much pressure on you.

Joe Cross: And also what it does, is it doesn't do anything for the long term.

Sonia: I kind of want this celery now.

Joe Cross: Yeah, yeah, go ahead. It doesn't do anything for the long term, in terms of helping you maintain and be strong, in terms of your choices. To me, there's that benefit of rebooting the system so that you start to actually crave and love plant food.

Sonia: Wow. So once you came to New York, we didn't get all the main stuff on camera.

Joe Cross: No, and I didn't tell you why I went to 60 days from 40 either.

Sonia: Oh yeah. Tell me that.

40 Day Juice Diet

Joe Cross: When I was sitting down with the crew, and I said, "I'm going to juice for 40 days," one of the guys said, "You know what? Actually, Joe, I just don't want to say too much out loud, but you know your initials are JC, and there was a another bloke who did 40 days?"

Sonia: Jesus Christ?

Joe Cross: "So maybe you should not try and bring down …"

Sonia: Oh, I was just going to say that's like Jesus in the desert.

Joe Cross: I said, "You're right. Maybe I should do 60 days, just to knock that bloke out of the park." We put the challenge out to do 40 days instead of 60, which I'm actually glad I did the 60. In fact, if there were no cameras running, I actually probably would have gone longer. I was feeling so-

Sonia: Really?

Joe Cross: Oh yeah, I had never felt better in my life.

Sonia: Would you have gone 90?

Joe Cross: I probably would have gone 100. I was feeling the best I'd ever felt in my life, on day 60. Never felt better in my life.

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