Love Grace - 9 Reviews

This is it. I have reached the end of my three-day juice cleanse. Well I guess not really the end, as I won't be eating again until the morning, but I've made it to my final bottle of juice. In the past three days I have consumed 18 bottles of juice. Some were incredible, others I had to choke down for the nutrients. I always wondered how I would fare in a post apocalyptic world, as I can be a picky eater, but I was able to drink every last drop of this cleanse, so I now have more faith in my ability to survive.

This here is the juice that I ended every day of the cleanse with. It is a liquid version of carrot, beet, celery, cucumber, parsley, spinach, lemon and orange. Some of those ingredients sound great, and some of them are a little ehh. Have I mentioned that through out the past three days my taste buds have turned against me? Juices that I had no problem with, and thoroughly enjoyed at the beginning of this run, are just gross to me now. My body doesn't want to deal with them anymore. Most of that are the greens that they are rebelling against.

The first night I had this I didn't think it was bad at all. The second night I wasn't so sure. Tonight I think I'm back on board. Each sip is a bit different. When the orange, beet and carrot flavors run this drink it's great. It has a bit of that dirty, earthy taste that I like in juices. It also has a ice citrus sweetness to it. If it was always like that I would love this undyingly. Unfortunately in other sip the celery and parsley a major players and it's those sips I could do without. After this cleanse it's going to be a long time before I have celery again. It was in a decent amount of these juices and it just stands out so much to me.

So I've lasted the full three days on this cleanse. There were moments where I definitely thought I was going to give in and eat something, but I held strong. I had on and off again headaches from the first night on, but I shockingly never felt weak. I really expected to spend most of this time in bed or on the couch watching movies and not wanting to experience any other part of life, but I stayed fairly active and went on with my normal life as if nothing was wrong. I did have some nights of sleep that were far from stellar, and a constant nagging in my stomach, but I made it through with much less damage than expected. I don't feel any major difference in my heath, but I do feel a bit lighter and I can tell that I have lost some weight. I'm going to estimate 4-5 pounds, but I won't know until the morning. I just feel leaner, but I guess self-starvation will do that to a person. It's been an interesting ride, and if you have interest in it, I say take it for a spin and see what it's all about. I doubt I'll do it again, but I did clean some garbage out of my body with relatively minimal discomfort. That certainly counts for something.

Thanks to Love Grace for supplying us with the juice for this cleanse. I am poor and cheap and never would have spring for it myself, but it was something I'm glad I was able to experience, and I hope my ranting encourages others to give their cleanse a try.

The morning after update:
After my final weigh in this morning I have officially lost 6 pounds on the Love Grace juice cleanse. I know that weight loss isn't the main reason to do a cleanse, and I know I'll gain most of it back, but that's a lot of weight to lose in three days. After eating a bowl of cereal this morning I also feel great. Without the nagging hunger and headaches, I can see that the cleanse did actually do something and I feel way better than I did when I started this three days ago.

Dear Love Grace,
I am sorry, but this is completely vile. It's not just my hunger or my hatred of bananas either. I actually don't even think this tastes much like banana. I made my girlfriend try it as well, as she loves fancy juices and bananas. She said it was one of the worst things she's ever tasted and it reminded her of vomit.

One might think that a mixture of banana, goji berry, cacao, maca, vanilla bean, dates, coconut oil, flax seed and Himalayan sea salt might be tasty. One would most definitely be wrong. Cacao in its pure form and fruit is always a bad idea. The bitter and the sweet just never mix right. I've had goji berries and dark chocolate together before and I thought that was gross with 70% chocolate. This is nearly unbearable.

It's also so damn thick that it wouldn't pour out of the bottle. I had to shake it into my mouth. Once I made room in the bottle I added a bit of water to thin it out so I could chug it. I needed that flavor in my mouth for a short of time as possible, while still getting the nourishment. I instantly drank a glass of water to wash it all away. Unfortunately for the next 15 minutes I kept burping it back up. Ugh. This was enough to make me never want to do a cleanse that involved it again.

Halfway through the last day of my juice cleanse, this is exactly what I needed. It's a nice simple drink, well sort of. This is lemon, shilajit, cayenne, agave and Himalayan sea salt. Basically this is an ever so slightly salty, spicy lemonade. This is a better version of the lemon detox drink (lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper), with shilajit (a concentrated tar form a plant) replacing the maple syrup. My roommate did that detox once years ago and I don't think its benefits outweighed how bad he felt/looked. Being one drink out of 18 though, it's nice. The cayenne gives it a nice burn, similar to the ginger in the other drinks, without being too overpowering.

It's probably the sweetest of all the juices I've had so far, and that's a nice change of pace. I never thought I'd get sick of juice, but I'm just about there. Well, if it was 100% fruit juice I'd probably jump all over it.

There is a lot of green going on in a juice cleanse. From the money you pay for it to all the veggies you drink. I thought I was okay with that. From time to time drinking a juice with things such as chard, kale, spinach, celery, cucumber, apple and lemon in them (like this juice) isn't bad at all. You drinking something healthy and you tend to feel good about it, that is when you have a belly full of other food, or know that you will be eating in the near future. I've had juices similar to this a handful of times in my life and I don't remember ever wishing I were eating a “real” meal instead. You know what I would happily be eating a salad composed of everything in this bottle over drinking it, because it tastes exactly like I'm drinking a salad, whose only dressing is a little sprits of lemon. It is a very accurate juice. I can make out each and every one of the ingredients in the flavor. It's just not something that I want to drink when I haven't eaten in two days. I wonder if some added ginger would fix this right up. Ginger is healthy, it's in the other juices, and I love it. The burn would help this salad go down all the easier.

Seriously, I can't even walk by the kitchen without my stomach rumbling. I only have one day left, but it's going to be a long day. All for health, right?

Edit:
I added some ground up ginger root to this, and it did what I expected. I am enjoying this much more.

I'm now a day and a half into this juice cleanse and I shockingly feel fine energy-wise. By this point I really expected to just be curled up on the couch, miserable and not wanting to do anything. Instead I went for a couple hour walk to enjoy the brief stint of nice weather we're having. I have been experiencing some on and off again headaches, but apparently that is normal. It is getting to the time of day when I eat dinner, and I can feel that in my stomach. Luckily it's time for my protein smoothie of the day. Unlucky for me that smoothie contains banana, flax seed, kale, dates, spirulina, hempseed, chia seed, coconut oil, lemon, Himalayan sea salt and wheatgrass powder.

Now I eat a lot of kale in my day-to-day life and I love wheatgrass, but everything else in here are ingredients that I don't really have a taste for. I expected this to be all banana, but it's pretty bland and the majority of the flavor seems to come from the various seeds involved and the lemon. The banana is there more in scent than taste. It's also super, super thick, almost to the level that I feel like I should eat it with a spoon. It's thicker than applesauce, which I tend to drink for the record.

I got no pleasure from the taste of this smoothie, but I finished the whole bottle for the sake of my health and this cleanse. I would never in a million years drink this outside of a cleanse, but it's not really something that you would come across in day-to-day life. Besides that healthy doesn't always means it tastes good and sometimes you just have to bite the bullet. Also note that our rating on Thirsty Dudes is based on flavor and not functionality. It's gets two for flavor, but it would get a five for health.

To this drinks benefit it definitely curbed my hunger a bit and for that I am grateful.

We've entered day two of my juice cleanse via Love Grace. I was doing great all day yesterday until about 10PM when I got a decent sized headache, and I started to feel pretty weak. I assume it's due to toxins working out of my body, and you know hunger. I woke up this morning and felt a lot better. I'm hungry but it's manageable.

I started off my morning with a bottle of Purify, and now it's time for my second juice of the day: Ginger Bomb. This is just great. It's orange, ginger, lemon, oregano extract and Himalayan sea salt, which when mixed together make for an intense little juice. It's a citrus-ginger explosion in your mouth, which then continues to erupt down your throat and into your stomach. It's pretty strong lemon-wise and the orange makes it a little less intense, but it's still pretty sour and slightly salty. The ginger is there more as a burn than as a flavor. I wish the taste was more prevalent, but the burn is so great that I can't really complain.

It seems like this is the most functional juice of the entire cleanse. It's anti-inflammatory, helps with digestive health, it's anti-bacterial, anti-viral, it improves circulation, supports metabolism, boosts the immune system, is adaptogenic and balancing. On top of all that I think it tastes great. It has made me feel more normal than any of the other juices I've had so far. 4oz of magical explosions.

Bananas very well may be the bane of my existence. I don't understand how anyone gets even a smidge of enjoyment out of them. The flavor is gross, and the texture might be worse. When I opened my box of juices and saw this I knew I was in for an unpleasant experience. With banana, flaxseed, almond, lemon, dates, vegan probiotic, Himalayan sea salt and coconut oil all mixed up there was zero chance that I was going to enjoy this. As a result I decided I should get it out of the way on the first day, so that when I've reached my full “hangry” potential, at least the drink that is helping to fill me up won't be disgusting to me.

Was it gross? You betcha. I thought bananas were gross on their own, but mixed with lemon it's even worse. That being said, my ladyfriend who is a fan of the yellow devil forced me to give her a sip and absolutely loved it. I will not hold my banana prejudice against this smoothie. I'm going to assume that most people would think this was probably the best out of the bunch, so keep that in mind and ignore my complaints because they are all founded in my hatred of a fruit that goes from green to yellow to brown to black.

Besides the banana and the lemon mixing weirdly, this is somewhat salty, which I find weird in a juice, but I think with the proper fruits I could really enjoy. The rest of the ingredients kind of mix together to try and balance out the banana flavor a bit.

This is indeed a smoothie as it is pretty thick, which was unfortunate because it made it hard to chug the bottle just to get it over with. One good thing I will say about this juice is that I was getting to a point where I was beginning to get annoyed due to hunger. You know when you're hanging out with friends and you're all starving, but you can't agree where to eat, so hours pass and you just want to punch them in their collective throats for being indecisive, but then realize that you're also being indecisive so you then want to punch yourself. I was getting to the beginning stages of that point, and this get me through it without snapping at anyone.

Continuing on in my juice cleanse I have come to the most initially appealing of the juices for my tastes. This Super Cider is simply apple, carrot, ginger and lemon. I'm a sucker for cider and ginger, so throw the two together and it's inevitably going to be a party in my mouth.

I did not expect the ginger to be so strong in this juice, and it was the best surprise I've gotten all day. I would say that this tastes more like ginger than anything else. It certainly has mainly an apple base, but it's the taste and burn of the ginger that make this drink so great. It has the kind of burn that you feel in your stomach. That's a good burn. The taste of the carrots is only apparent if you concentrate on finding it. The lemon just rounds things out. It's more visible in some sips than others, but it's never really at the forefront of the flavor. The ginger really doesn't quit with this. I could see it being a bit much for some people, but for those of us who love a little heat in our drinks this is just perfect.

Like all of the Love Grace juices this is raw, you know how juice should be. It's too bad that raw juice doesn't have a very long shelf life because it always taste so much better, and is better for you.

Juice cleanses are all the rage these days. I personally think that it's great. I am a lover of juice, and the fact that people are making an effort to be healthier is a move in the right direction. The fact that some companies are expanding their cleanses into other grocery stores besides Whole Foods so that it reaches a wider audience of “Everyday Joes” is an even better step. There are so many chemicals are garbage added to food these days that most people aren't even aware of that it's a good things to take some steps to cleanse your body of them from time to time. Juice cleanses are also used to gain mental clarity, improve overall well being, and the biggest allure for people is that it helps in losing weight. From an outsiders perspective it is a healthy way to starve yourself and get your body to work unnatural things out of your system.

I've wanted to do a cleanse myself for sometime, but the downfall of it is that there is a hefty price tag on this healthy live (Love Grace's is $168 for a three day run). Keep in mind you do get 18 bottles of juice for that price, and you have no need to purchase any other food in that time as well, so in the end it's not all that terribly expensive, but it does look like a large sum to drop at one time. Thanks to my involvement with Thirsty Dudes Love Grace sent us a three-day cleanse for review. I am starting it today, and I expect to be fully miserable for a while. I most definitely become easily annoyed when I am hungry, so I would probably steer clear of me until Thursday. No one likes to be “hangry.”

The first juice in the cleanse is this bottle of “Purify.” It is a collaboration of coconut water, celery, chard, spinach and cucumber. This is a first step in what is going to seem like a very long road. I am generally a bit weary about juices that have celery in them. On it's own it's a wonderful vegetable that I really enjoy. The problem is that when it is juiced and mixed with other juices it tends to take over the flavor of any drink. Love Grace worked out a nice solution to that problem; the use of coconut water. It dulls the flavor of the celery a nice amount. It's still very prevalent, but it's not a full on assault to your taste buds. When you hold this drink in your mouth it tastes just like coconut water with some greens juiced into it. It tastes mostly like spinach and cucumber, actually I couldn't taste the celery at all until I swallowed and then it's just in the aftertaste. There is a natural sweetness to this, so it doesn't taste like you're just drinking a salad. I mean you are, but it's no where near as gross as that sounds.

Well done, Love Grace. You've made the first step of this cleanse very enjoyable. It gives me hope that I'm not going to want to murder everyone around me before I reach completion. Sure I'll still be hungry, but at least I'll have some good flavors to help me along.