The Rainbow Juice Cleanse {Review & Giveaway}

While I don’t need to lose any weight, my girls and I do juice often and are always interested in new juice recipes, so we were happy to review the brand spankin’ new book by health guru, Dr. Ginger Southall, The Rainbow Juice Cleanse.

The Rainbow Juice Cleanse is based on the premise that juicing fruits of any kind really botches weight loss efforts during a cleanse.  Instead, to get the most bang out of a 7-day cleanse, you should stick to juicing only veggies and wait until after the cleanse to add a minimal amount of whole fruit back into your diet.

Why no fruit during a weight-loss juice cleanse?  The book explains the science and reasoning behind this concept nicely.  It also explains in lay terms how sugars affect the body, where unhealthy sweeteners are hiding in processed foods, and how a sugar addiction prevents weight loss.

Here’s how the rainbow cleanse works: each day of the 7-day juice cleanse should focus on a particular color of the rainbow.  On Day 1 you drink red veggie juices, on Day 2 you drink orange veggie juices, and so on.  The book organizes the juice recipes nicely by color so it’s very easy to work through them.  As an avid juicer, I appreciate that the recipes in this book are quite simple and call for veggies available at most organic grocers.  I ran into trouble finding purple cauliflower the week I reviewed the book, but otherwise I had no problem finding the other produce like bell peppers, mint, celery, cabbage and cucumbers.

One day the girls and I had fun making one of each color juice so we could see the jars of colored juice all in a row. We then invited my mom and sister to join us for a little “juice buffet” to sample them all and get honest opinions.  Admittedly, we are all (including my two toddlers) seasoned juice makers and drinkers so do not shy away from green juices that taste like celery.

I made five juices – red, orange, yellow, green and violet.  I made them to spec according to the book and out of the five, two were pretty bitter so adding a few drops of stevia (permitted in the book) made them much easier to drink.

My girls both loved the purple juice (made with red cabbage) straight from the book, but asked me to add an apple to the orange juice (made with orange bell peppers) because the peppers were unusually bitter and the stevia didn’t quite smooth out the flavor.  I added one green apple and one carrot, which did the trick for the girls, but of course would defeat the purpose of eliminating fruit for the sake of losing weight.

Here’s my take away from testing a variety of the recipes from The Rainbow Cleanse: these juices are pure health.  There is no doubt about it – they are 100% veggie awesomeness and that’s hard for some people to swallow, especially those that have a sugar addiction. But anyone who is serious about detoxing from sugar and serious about losing weight will find this book easy to follow and the juice flavors tolerable.  They are not sweet. They are not salty. They are not the flavors we tend to seek when eating for pleasure. They are made of veggies, so taste like veggies. Once you get over that mental hump and let the veggies do their work in your body, cleaning out your system and revitalizing your cells, you WILL feel amazing.  If you have never done a juice detox or cleanse before, it would probably be a great idea to start with the 2-week Rainbow Warm-Up described on the website and in the book.  This eases your taste buds into the pure veggie flavors by incorporating one juice a day with regular meals before jumping into the 7-day course of only juices.

THE GIVEAWAY

Win it: US/CAN readers, enter to win a copy of The Rainbow Juice Cleanse book  ($21.50 value) via Rafflecopter below. Good Luck!

Disclosure: I received a sample of a product to facilitate my review. No other compensation was provided and all views and opinions stated on this post are 100% my own.