Last week I tried my first juice cleanse. I actually won this collection of Garden of Flavor juices through a giveaway on I Heart Cleveland. I’d been wanting to try Garden of Flavor for a while, so I was super excited for the opportunity. I eat pretty well normally, but I’m no super woman. I like sugar and I like pizza. So I loved the idea of flushing all the junk out of my system.

Garden of Flavor is a Cleveland-based company that makes juices that are raw and organic, with nothing extra added at all. Their juice cleanse consists of six bottles of juice consumed in order every 2 to 2.5 hours throughout the day. I started around 8 a.m., and actually wrote out a schedule for myself so I didn’t get too off track throughout the day. They recommended starting in the morning with some warm lemon water. I don’t drink coffee, so the lemon water was a great start. I might never drink plain water again!

The first juice of the day was Goji Pineapple and it was delicious. It was sweet and fruity, with a surprising zip from ginger. Yay! Lemon water! Pineapple juice! I was doing great. I was so going to kick this juice cleanse’s butt!

A couple hours later, I moved on to juice #2, Cucumber Fresh. Well. Here’s where you should know a little something about me. I’m picky. I don’t think I’m a terribly picky eater, but I just have a hard time making myself drink something that I don’t love. I don’t drink coffee or tea because I don’t like the taste. I think beer is gross. I can’t even drink emergen-c when I’m sick because yuck. Pretty much I’m a horrible candidate for a juice cleanse and probably should have known that ahead of time. So. The Cucumber Fresh tastes like a salad. It’s really crisp and fresh and cucumbery… if you like that kind of thing it’s probably awesome. I tried. I made a valiant effort. But by around noon I felt gross. I was hungry. My hands were shaking. My head was pounding.

I ate a little bowl of blueberries, since soft fruit is a good supplement if you get hungry during a juice cleanse, and moved on to juice #3 to see if I liked it better than #2. Nope. It was another green drink that tasted like salad, and by this point I was super hungry and super grumpy. I gave up. I guess green juices aren’t for me. And now we know. I really thought I’d last longer, but at a certain point I wanted real food and I wanted it now.

And then…

Pizza for dinner. Ahhhh. At least there was salad on my pizza, right?

I drank the rest of the non-green juices over the weekend, and they were so good. Oh well. I’m just bad at this. Clearly I have no discipline and I’m a huge baby. But I’m glad I tried, and I was super impressed with the quality of the Garden of Flavor juices. Even if I’m not cut out for an all-day cleanse or even a green drink here and there, I like the idea of incorporating more (fruity) juice into my regular day, maybe instead of an afternoon snack or alongside my breakfast. I will definitely be picking up some of my favorite Garden of Flavor varieties at Heinens.

Ok, so have you ever done a juice cleanse? I’d love to know how it went. Feel free to shame me completely with all of your success stories, haha! — Kerry

(P.S. This post is not sponsored, so all opinions — and failures — are my own.)