What Juice and Smoothies Can Do for You

START with four or five juices a day. If you insist on staying very active, add a smoothie for extra energy. Keep the movement light, walking and gentle yoga.

Your bathroom visits might be dramatic or barely there. It's different for everybody. In the beginning, you may have some big ones. On longer cleanses, things get smaller, sometimes down to tiny little pellets. Don't worry about it. Your body is just doing its thing.

Get out of the office and into the daylight as much as you can. Once a day, lie on your back with your eyes closed in corpse pose for ten minutes. Don't fall asleep. Just breathe.

Be kind to people and keep your stress low. Redirect your mind toward positive things, like reading good philosophy or finding a way to be of service.

I WANT TO HELP YOU understand what juice and smoothies can do for you, and how they can change your life for the better.

The first thing to consider is what you're actually consuming when you drink a fresh juice from us. You're drinking the essence of the fruit, including its water, along with trace amounts of fiber. You can see that fiber settle to the bottom when a juice sits in the refrigerator. That's completely natural, because fiber is heavier than water. You're not getting all of the fiber the whole fruit would give you, and whole fiber has its own benefits. But what you're also not getting is all the garbage found in most of the foods we buy at the supermarket, the foods we've trained our eyeballs to see as perfect.

We also tend to combine foods that don't work well together. One of the benefits of juice is that you're getting calories in a form where everything is compatible, because there's very little digestion involved. It's easy on the digestive system. It gives the whole system a break from work that burns energy. To be clear, we're not saying digestion stops. You can't give your heart a day off, and the digestive system doesn't shut down either. It simply works less, and that rest is part of the healing mechanism. It's part of rest and digest.

The other dietary mistake most of us make is eating processed food. When you drink juices and smoothies, you eliminate that mistake for at least one meal. And when you eliminate dietary mistakes one meal at a time, there's always an immediate improvement in your overall chemistry, and in whatever tends to come up in your chemistry when you eat junk food.

The good news is that juice has calories, especially when it includes starchy vegetables like beets, or fruit, which carries calories from its naturally occurring sugar. That sugar is the energy you need to survive. More than anything, it's brain food, because glucose is what the brain runs on, and being deprived of it is not good.

TWENTY FIVE YEARS AGO, juice was a mystery to a lot of doctors. They looked for every possible way to pick it apart because it was outside the scope of what they knew. But when you really think about it, juice is simply the liquid extracted from produce, with some fiber still in it. When you drink a solid green juice, you're getting minerals and a lot of nutrients that rarely get talked about, like phytochemicals and antioxidants. It's just good.

Plenty of people have lived on juice for long stretches. You'd get very lean, maybe a little too skinny at first while your body adapts. You're certainly not going to take it to that extreme, but it helps you understand why a 7 to 10 day juice cleanse can be very manageable, as long as you're getting enough calories and enough rest.

It's a mistake to put yourself in a calorie deficit on a juice cleanse and then go berserk in the gym trying to crash diet your way to weight loss. That's a compulsive, anxious, addictive behavior pattern, and it will have a negative effect. When we do a juice cleanse, what we're really trying to do is eliminate all dietary mistakes while we meditate and breathe our way into deeper, more relaxed states.

A CLEANSE is also a chance to study our eating patterns. We want to give ourselves a break from late night eating, daytime snacking, processed food, refined sugar, too much coffee, rich foods, animal protein, and refined starchy carbohydrates.

And overdoing protein is not healthy either. You can't keep piling on more and more protein and expect no consequences. The idea that you can never get too much of a nutrient is simply untrue. You can have too much fat. You can have too much fruit. You can have too much protein. That's just how chemistry works. Too much or too little of anything is not correct.

So the benefit of a juice cleanse is that you're getting clean nutrients and leaving out your dietary mistakes for that period of time. You will improve. But you're not going to lose a dramatic amount of weight in three or four days. If you drop a couple of pounds, it may just be water weight you'll gain back in a couple of days. You might stay exactly where you started for the first few days.

Instead of watching the scale, notice other things. Do you sleep better on a cleanse? Maybe you sleep worse. It's different for everyone. Just observe, and learn how your body and your mind work together. It takes years of practice with cleansing before you really start to understand the benefits.

I don't recommend going crazy in the gym or piling on aerobics classes to sweat more. That's nonsense. While you're cleansing, take long walks in nature and breathe, whether it's Central Park, upstate, or by the beach. Meditate on gratitude, because it has an incredible impact on your chemistry. We know negative mind states affect our chemistry in a negative way. In the very same way, directing your thoughts toward gratitude, even if it sounds a little spiritual, is extremely helpful for longevity.

Take a deep breath right now.

If you're a beginner, pick up four or five juices and try one day. If it feels easy, keep going into a second day. If it feels hard, take a break, eat a raw salad without animal protein, and finish the day with juice. Then wait a week and try three days of just juice, and relax more this time. Your gym time can become very gentle yoga with lots of breathing, or tai chi if you prefer, or a long walk. You can always return to intense exercise afterward.

THE BEST WAY to start a cleanse is to simply start. You don't need a warm up for a short cleanse of three days or so. When you finish, ease back in with salads and whole fruit. By the second day after the cleanse, start eating cooked vegetables again, and settle into a sustainable way of eating, minus the junk food and minus the excess protein.

Here's a balance with animal protein that's easy to maintain. Eat it no more than three days a week, skip a day in between, and don't have it at every meal on those days. That's about three portions of animal protein a week. At first that sounds like very little. It sounds like you'll be starving and your body will go into shock. But once you live this way, you realize three days is actually a lot, and fresh foods, along with chicken, fish, or red meat on those days, will keep you satisfied.

I've been vegan for 16 years. I had a small relapse about 14 years ago for a couple of months and went right back, so call it 14 years of pure vegan living. Here in New York, with plenty of stress and a business to run, here's what I've noticed. In the cold months I dress much warmer, because I'm not eating foods that generate a lot of heat, so on the downside, I feel the cold more. On the upside, my immune system feels very strong, my moods are consistent and stable, and I've kept the same weight I had at 35. I'm 57 now, and I exercise a lot. The only junk food I eat is the occasional salad bar at a high quality salad place that adds a few extras to its sauces I'd leave out if I were making them in my own restaurant.

My mentor, Fred Bisci, taught me that the body doesn't have to be pristine or perfect. If 80 percent of your diet and your other lifestyle habits, like exercise and positive thinking, are on track, you can afford about 20 percent mistakes. The body is resilient. Being 100 percent perfect would be better, but no one achieves it, and you couldn't measure it accurately anyway. What tool would you even use to grade your diet in percentages? Still, it's a good starting point. You can allow yourself a 20 percent margin of error while working hard to keep the other 80 percent honest.

That doesn't mean going 100 percent for a month and then falling apart for six days. That swing is a shock to the body and does real damage. The 80/20 idea is a measure of daily practice, a way to keep yourself off the up and down roller coaster. Consistency with positive habits is what allows your chemistry to reach its full potential.

ALWAYS remember that the body is a miraculous healing machine. The key to activating it is getting out of its way. One way we get in its way is prolonged anxiety, which is a psychological part of life we work on in other ways beyond diet. The other is dietary mistakes. A juice cleanse helps us clear those away.

If you don't want to do a juice cleanse, you can still clean up your diet. Cut out processed food, eat about 70 percent of your food uncooked, and bring animal protein down to one or two days a week from a very clean source. At that small amount, it matters less whether it's chicken, fish, or red meat. Honestly, I wouldn't call any of them clean, especially from the supermarket. If you insist on animal protein, consider something unusual, like frozen ostrich meat. Farms that raise those animals tend to keep small herds, the conditions are usually much cleaner, the animals aren't fed garbage, and they roam free, or at least freer, until slaughter.

Those conditions matter, because an animal's suffering makes its way back into the human body. You are what you eat is true. Even more true is that you are what you eat eats. If you eat an animal that was fed junk, you're eating that junk too.

A juice cleanse is a great time to reset other areas of your life, too.

TRY BEING OF SERVICE in ways nobody will ever notice. I remember one or two seasons when I spent a lot of time at the beach, picking up garbage on long walks. Part of me was thinking, this is ridiculous, I've become that old guy cleaning up the beach. But I came to see the service in it, and the mindful practice it gave me. While I was out there, I thought about my own use of plastic and how I've contributed to the pollution problem. You usually see older people doing this kind of thing, but it's even better to start thinking this way while you're young, so you don't have to be part of the problem.

Take a ballroom dancing class. Show up at work joyful, happy, and grateful, and let your coworkers catch some of that energy. Sit up straight at your desk, and treat it as exercise for your abdominal muscles.

The juice cleanse is the trigger. It gives us a reason to focus on ending our bad habits and becoming a better version of ourselves.