I’m sorry but doing a juice cleanse is just not gonna work for me. Drinking just a few juices a day will turn me into The Hulk and make everyone around me unhappy. In fact it did a few years ago when a friend told me I had to stop because I was so crazy from not eating. And so when a friend told me about a cleanse she and her sister had done that was healthy for you and reasonable, I had to check it out as I wanted to try something to get my body back to square one.
The program, Isagenix, is a weight loss and cleansing system that helps you cleanse the healthy way. You are given five stimulant-free nutritional components that infuse your body with nutrients for optimum health and safe weight loss over eleven (or thirty if you wanna go radical) days. I wasn’t gonna kid myself and go whole hog so I opted for the eleven-day and was given the following to achieve my goals:
1) Cleanse For Life: a powder or liquid that nourishes and feeds your whole body with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and botanicals, not through the use of diuretics or laxatives.
2) IsaLean Shakes: a powder (in chocolate or vanilla) that you blend with water and ice that helps maximize the absorption of key nutrients. A meal replacement, they are only 240 calories!
3) Natural Accelerator: A small pill that is full of cayenne, green tea, cinnamon, and ginseng that helps your liver metabolize fat quickly and does so without potentially harmful stimulants including, caffeine, ephedra or ma huang.
4) Isagenix Snacks: Little Chocolate Pellets that contain high-quality whey and casein protein, healthy fats and energy-boosting carbohydrates to help curb appetite and avoid eating unhealthy snack foods.
5) IsaFlush: A pill to help you safely improve digestion, encourage regularity and soothe internal discomfort (if any) as you cleanse. Not a harsh laxative!
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In the eleven day program you have seven shake days and four cleanse days where you drink or eat certain things. But the constant was the massive amounts of water you are supposed to drink, which was basically half your body weight in ounces. I took one look at what I could eat (on shake days: one healthy meal of 400-600 calories each day and one organic apple/one hard-boiled egg/or one small green salad with lemon and olive oil) and all of the liquid I would be consuming I thought to myself THIS IS CRAZY. I can’t do this!
The kit came with so much information I was overwhelmed a bit at first, but quickly figured out how it all worked and portioned out each day into Ziploc sandwich bags with the times I had to drink/eat certain things and additional information (yep, I am a little OCD).
When I first told people I was doing this thing, everyone thought I looked “just fine”, was “normal looking”, and certainly”didn’t have to lose any weight”. Well thank you friends but I’ve been battling ten pesky pounds for the past few years and well wanted/needed to try something new.
So how do I feel? Well I’m on Day eight and feel amazing. I have already lost one full inch in my abdomen and lost close to 5 lbs! And while I love those numbers, the most surprising results have come from how I really feel, not how I look. My digestion is more balanced, I have reduced cravings to basically nothing, and have seen a huge energy boost. Day one wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I mean ya, it sucks to see food you can’t eat but I had to remind myself that I am on a journey and need to be true to myself and stick with this thing to the end.
Isagenix has definitely helped me realize that I a) eat for no reason… whether I am bored, see something I wanna eat, or think I am hungry but I’m not and my mind is just telling me that and b) need to make healthier eating decisions. Take for example yesterday’s “healthy lunch” I had at Life Thyme Market in Greenwich Village. I went to their salad bar and created a balanced meal of salad and protein, something I would have never done 8 days ago! And just as I was tempted to add one of the eggplant rolatinis (filled with mozzarella cheese) I reminded myself that I didn’t need it and managed to get the best of my momentary weakness and set the serving spoon down! My internal cheerleader was going crazy and I had a smile on my face for a good five minutes!
I’m quite anxious to see how Day twelve (my first day off the program) goes. I mean I’ve been telling myself that if I completed the entire program without cheating (which I have so far) that I would treat myself to a juicy burger, fries and milkshake from my beloved 67 Burger but at this moment I don’t know if I event want to!
At the end of the day Isagenix has given me exactly what I wanted….It has helped me change the bad eating habits I previously had, increased my energy levels, cleansed my body by bringing it to an alkaline state, and weirdly made my skin glow as if I were pregnant or something (for the record I am NOT). But Isagenix has also made me become a much better feeling ME and that’s all that matters.
I don’t wanna sound too preachy but it works! If you are interested in learning more about this program, just send me an email at mckenzie.mahoney (at) gmail (dot) com and I will hook you up with my Isagenix rep/coach Jess.
Filed under: McKenzie Attempts
