3 Day Clean Eating Detox Diet -- My Experience and the Outcome

If you have been following my blog, then you already know I did a 3-day Detox diet and I've posted the recipes for the dishes to eat during the cleanse in the past couple of days. I wanted to do a post on everything that's involved with the cleanse, in case you are interested in doing it yourself. 

Disclaimer: I am not a dietitian or nutritionist -- I followed the Clean Eating detox program from Clean Slate cookbook and I'm simply giving what's written in the book. 

Other Detox Diets: You can google 'Detox Diets' and there are quite a few different ones available (there's Dr. Oz's detox, Gwyneth Paltrow's detox, then there's all-juice detox). Read through them and pick one that fits in to your lifestyle.

Preparing for a Detox Diet: First of all, committing yourself to a detox program needs motivation, so make sure to think of what your goal is at the end of the cleanse. For example, it could be a long term goal like weight loss or starting to eat healthy or something in those lines.

Once you have that, you need to start preparing yourself, your family and the house for it.  It took me about a week to mentally get ready for the cleanse during which I was able to clean up the fridge and pantry of all the unnecessary cravings. Then another 1 week to slowly prepare the body for the cleanse -- slowly eliminating the processed foods, added sugars, dairy, gluten, alcohol and coffee.

Starting a Cleanse or Detox Diet: No matter how many days cleanse you want to do, make sure to pick the best possible time to do it. Take into account birthdays, office parties or other such occasions before embarking on one because these cause temptations which in turn cause failure and disappointment.

Is 3-day Detox Enough: 3 days is just long enough to boost the body to support digestion and detoxification and to eliminate unwanted cravings. It is easy enough to follow a diet routine for 3 days before it starts to make anyone waver.

3-Day Detox Diet I followed: As I said before I followed the program from Clean Slate cookbook and it has the same menu for the three days.

Here's the grocery list to buy:

Breakfast: Smoothie with Strawberry, Grapefruit & Ginger

Lunch: Salad with Beets, Arugula & Avocado

Dinner: Soup with Carrot & Green Beans

Snack: You can eat 2 snacks a day (making sure to eat only when you are hungry) -- 1oz. mixed nuts and 2 pieces of fruit. 

Some more things to think about during the Detox: Sleep for at least 7.5 hours. Take a media break -- curtail time spent surfing the web, watching TV and so on.

How we felt during the detox: At no point I felt hungry or deprived. The 2 snacks were quite enough to keep me going through the day between meals. Frequent bathroom visits made me recollect my pregnancy days -- but that is the way body flushes out the toxins. It got a little boring eating the same food by the third day, but it wasn't too bad.

Outcome of the 3-day Detox: Both my husband and I lost 3 pounds in the 3 days. It could be because we were eating less than what we normally would or could be the actual weight -- I'm not sure but the numbers definitely came down. My goal was not weight loss but I'll take it. My husband is very inspired from this detox and he wants to do it again. I think I'll do it again but not right away.