Review: BluePrint Cleanse Diet

Fact: Juice is tasty. Lemonade on a hot mid-summer day, a pitcher of fresh OJ at Sunday brunch, POG and white rum on ice. But consuming nothing but juice for five or six days? That seems a little, I dunno, totally insane.

Those hip to the practice call it a juice cleanse, and they describe the light, energetic glow it provides in the same terms the rest of us reserve for illicit substances or orgasms.

People have been cleansing or fasting for health and spiritual clarity for centuries. There are stacks of books about it. But the practice often gets mixed up with religious dogma or hairy hippie hogwash that turns most people off.

So the marketing around BluePrint Cleanse is kind of brilliant. It's aimed at neo-crunchy urban types, the people who dabble in yoga, drink from Klean Kanteens and frequent the sandwich counter at Whole Foods, but who stop short of extremes like Reiki, veganism and Phish tour.

Essentially, the BluePrint Cleanse provides an easy path into the world of juice-as-enlightenment. Secular, cash-positive individuals without the knowledge, time or kitchen appliances necessary to do a juice cleanse themselves will consider it a fun adventure. The website is filled with crisp, hip copy and gentle FAQs. They send you encouraging e-mails while you're juicing. They're on Twitter. They're from Brooklyn. I'm surprised there isn't an iPhone app.

BluePrint Cleanse offers several different programs, most of them involving six bottles of juice per day. The bottles are delivered to your home or your office in the mornings in a box stuffed with freezer packs. It is expensive though, between $65 and $90 per day – and much of high price comes from shipping costs. But the convenience of having your juices show up in front of you first thing in the morning makes it much harder to cave and eat a bagel.

There's also a program called "Juice 'Til Dinner" that supplements four bottles of juice with a modest vegan meal at the end of the day. It's what BPC recommends for first-timers – the website quips: "It's tough to go from zero to liquid, so we did you a solid" – and I figured it was a sane level of commitment for a n00b like me.

My girlfriend and I did the Juice 'Til Dinner cleanse for two days, then BPC's juice-only program for two more days, and eased back into reality with two final days of Juice 'Til Dinner.

I'm not going to lie, it was effing brutal.

Yes, the juices are delicious, especially the pineapple-based P.A.M and the cayenne-spiked lemonade. Hell, even the foreboding, greenish-brown vegetable juice you get for breakfast tasted pretty good.

But by the end of day one, I was white-knuckling it. Even though you're getting around 1,000 calories per day from juice, the hunger was intense. I was salivating and grinding my teeth all afternoon. I was talking to people and writing at my usual pace, but all I was thinking about was if there's anywhere in the city that makes a chilaquiles pizza. The kale salad and quinoa tabouli the missus and I inhaled around sundown was cold comfort. I whimpered as SF Giants fans slurped their Gilroy Garlic Fries in glorious HD on my living room LCD.

Surprisingly, we woke up on the second day with very little hunger. I rode my bike to work and went about my routine feeling pretty normal, and I didn't even crack open my tall bottle of liquified salad until after I had been awake for about four hours.

Days three and four were juice-only days, and that's when the desperation set in. The lack of that cold soup and vegetable wrap at dinner time – or, more likely, the knowledge that it won't be there – was torture. You work your way through six juices one-by-one (they're numbered, in case you grow delirious) savoring every drop of every bottle. You even chew on them a little bit, just because, oddly, you really miss chewing.

Bonus: As you can imagine, when you're not eating food, juice moves through your system quickly. Very quickly. With ruthless vigor. Some extremely strange things come out of your body during your most private moments. Maybe that's why they call it a cleanse.

The whole point of this torture is to reset your system, and to educate you about your relationship with food. It teaches you that what, when and how much you eat affects your energy level and mood in very big ways. After moving back to the juice/dinner hybrid on the final two days, I noticed the familiar lulls were gone. Those patterns of highs and lows – dictated by things like the morning coffee, the burrito lunch, the post-gym Odwalla and the wine-soaked dinner – weren't there. It was smooth sailing all day. Hunger ceased to be an issue. I was sleeping like a baby, and I was alert right when I woke up. I was able to achieve very deep focus while writing, and I was more productive. I lost about five pounds.

Which is not to say we were sad to rejoin life among the normals, but our return was measured. My first day back, I ate very well, abstaining from sugar and processed foods, and keeping the servings small. I'm about five days beyond my last juice now, and I'm still eating more healthily than I did pre-cleanse. And I'll continue to do so until I find that mythical chilaquiles pizza.