Many people try to follow a juice diet as a detox diet to aid better wellness and weight loss. It is an extreme method of dieting, as it involves drinking only fruit juices and water, and eating no solids, so is good for your wellbeing?
The point of using a juice detox diet for weight loss reasons is to consume fewer calories than your body will burn on a daily basis, or your current metabolic rate. However, you might find that you’re consuming just as many calories in the juice you’re drinking. Juice diets come in many forms based on lemon, orange, carrot, vegetables and other possibilities, but let’s take an orange juice diet as an example. Are you squeezing yourself fresh orange juice or is it coming from a carton? Most packaged juices are sweetened, so if you’re drinking 8-10 glasses of orange fruit juice, then you might be consuming a large amount of sugar, which makes you store fat rather than shed it.
You might therefore assume that an unsweetened fresh fruit juice detox diet or vegetable juice detox diet means you can still lose weight, as you’re not consuming the extra sugar calories but fewer calories. If it were merely a question of calories then you might be right, but unfortunately the situation is a lot more complicated than that.
Vegetables and fruits are loaded with vitamins, minerals and nutrients, so you assume that their juices are also good for your health. However, a juice diet completely deprives you of macro nutrients like protein and fat. Your muscles need protein to help protect your bone structure from injury, and store energy for your body. Without enough protein, your body experiences muscle catabolism which means that your body uses muscle protein to maintain essential muscles, and this lowers your muscle mass and, in turn, your metabolic rate. Fat is also an essential component to the digestion process, as it improves the absorption of nutrients in your body.
Finally, there are other adverse risks to your healthy with a juice diet. You could suffer hypoglycaemia, leading to severe headache and low blood pressure, or acidic blood or ketosis, with side effects including fainting, dizziness, low blood pressure, heart arrhythmia, hunger, vomiting and more. Juice diets can also interact badly with prescription drugs or medications, so if you want to lose weight, the safest and best way to do it is with a balanced diet and an effective exercise routine.
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