Cleanses and detox programs are awfully tempting. The packages are covered with catchy phrases and promises for better health within just days. Lose weight! Detoxify! Boost antioxidants! Alkalize your body! But is there any merit to these? Should you do a juice cleanse on a keto diet?
Why Do a Juice Cleanse?
It’s understandable to want what a cleanse promises to deliver. Unfortunately, the marketing hype and clever buzzwords often prey on a lack of understanding about how their own bodies work. For example, consuming antioxidants in fruit or vegetable juice doesn’t automatically translate to increased antioxidant production or increased free radical scavenging in your body.
Your body’s most powerful antioxidants are the ones it makes, itself, and these are enzymes—which are proteins. Fruit and vegetable juice aren’t exactly rich sources of protein.
As for making your body—or more specifically, your blood—more alkaline, here, too, juice would fail to deliver. Your body maintains your blood pH (the acidity or alkalinity) within a very narrow range, about 7.35 to 7.45 (very slightly alkaline), and it does this regardless of what you eat and drink.
It can be life-threatening if your blood becomes overly acidic or alkaline, so your body regulates this level very tightly rather than leaving it up to the whims of we mercurial humans, who might do things like drink a quart of raw green juice every day in an effort to become more alkaline.
It’s true that consuming larger amounts of alkaline foods can influence the pH of your urine, but this says nothing about the internal state of your body. Plus, there’s the not-so-little fact that different compartments of your body maintain a different pH at which they function best.
For example, while your blood is slightly alkaline, if you want to properly digest all the great keto foods you eat so you can absorb the nutrients they provide, then you want your stomach to be highly acidic. (If you want to learn more about the acid-alkaline myth, this presentation from ancestral health expert Chris Kresser is a great overview.)
Are Keto and Juicing Compatible?
No, not really. If you’re doing a true ketogenic diet—not just a low-ish carb diet, but a diet that’s truly ketogenic—it would be difficult to consume juice on a regular basis and still get the results you want. It’s possible to do, but the juice probably wouldn’t be very tasty.
Since you would need to keep your carb intake very low, you’d have to use fruit sparingly, maybe just a handful of berries. The majority of your juice would come from low-carb vegetables, like kale, celery, spinach, cucumber, and tomatoes. And the carbs—even from those foods—would add up pretty quickly, so you would only be able to consume a small amount on any given day.
Foods rich in protein and fat are the cornerstones of a keto diet, so it’s hard to see how juicing could be compatible with this way of eating.
Do You Need a Reset?
People tend to be drawn to juice cleanses when they’ve strayed from their usual healthy eating habits and feel like they need a “reset” or a jumpstart. They want to “detox” from junk food and give themselves a clean slate to start back on a better path.
This is perfectly understandable, but you can get back on track without giving up solid food for a few days. The best way to get back to basics on keto is to just. Cut. The. Carbs. Keep your carb intake ultra-low (20-30 total grams daily), and you’ll notice within just a couple days that your appetite and sugar cravings are significantly reduced.
And once that happens, it’s pretty easy to just keep going. After all, it’s easy to stay away from sugar when you’re no longer craving sugar.
And here’s the most important thing you need to know: being off-plan and eating higher carb foods isn’t a sin you need to atone for. You don’t need to do a juice cleanse as penance to make up for perceived dietary transgressions. Try to move away from that kind of thinking regarding food. There’s no morality involved. Your worth as a human being isn’t defined by what you eat and don’t eat.
Bottom line
Should you do a juice cleanse on keto? That’s a hard no. The best way to get back on plan is to just do it. Prepare your environment as best you can (do a big grocery shopping, prep lots of food in advance, clear out the high-carb foods as much as you can without triggering a family revolt), get your head in the game, and stop looking for gimmicky “hacks” driven more by marketing than by metabolism.
Need advice for getting re-started on keto? Here are 5 tips to help you get back on track.
Looking for an easy way to replace fruit on keto?
Then check out Keto Chow! Keto Chow is a low-carb shake with delicious flavors like Blueberry Pie, Strawberry, Piña Colada, Raspberry Cheesecake, and more. These flavors are just as good as their high-carb replacements, and even better: they won’t kick you out of ketosis. Additionally, Keto Chow only takes seconds to make!
