The festive season is over and 2017 has now truly begun. After a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s spending time with your friends and family, enjoying and relishing every morsel of home-cooked food put on your plate, you might be feeling a little heavier, a little sluggish, and a little unmotivated to make this year your best year for health and fitness yet.
There’s no better way to kick-start reaching your health and fitness goals in 2017 than with a short-term cleansing diet. These diets are designed to ramp up your metabolism and give your body all the vital nutrients it needs to support weight loss, a glowing complexion, boundless energy, and a healthy mindset.
We’ve put together a list of some great cleansing diets you can use to start this year off positively, feeling great and healthy.
3 Cleansing Diet For New Year
1. The Juice Diet
The juice diet is probably the most common cleansing diet that people use to kickstart their health goals. It involves spending a short period of time, consuming only fresh and varied combinations of fruit and vegetable juices. You can mix up the amount of juice that you drink depending on your own needs, as you need to make sure you’re still getting enough energy to go about your daily tasks.
A good place to start would be with one liter of green vegetable juice each day, add more if you get really hungry! Doing this diet for one to three days gives your digestive system a holiday from having to break down complex foods such as meat and dairy, and is known to help with health issues such as fatigue, headaches, constipation, diarrhea, skin issues, irritability, and excess weight problems.
Make sure you’re prepared, and stock up on apples, celery, kale, spinach, cucumber, carrots, lemons, oranges, and beetroot, as well as any health-boosting supplements you may want to add (such as spirulina, turmeric, and maca or lucuma powder, just to name a few).
Remember to also drink lots of water to curb the hunger pangs, and when it’s time to finish, ease your way back into solid foods by starting with light salads, rice, and soft fruit.
2. The Master Cleanse Diet
The Master Cleanse diet is a very strict, however, potentially very effective cleansing diet. It involves doing a “salt flush” in the morning (drinking a liter of warm water with added salt) on an empty stomach and then drinking six glasses of the Master Cleanse lemonade mixture throughout the day.
This mixture is formed of purified water, maple syrup, fresh lemon or lime juice, and cayenne pepper. This diet should be done for a minimum of ten days; it is said to eliminate years of built-up waste in the body’s digestive system.
Perfect for people who have excess body fat and want to shake-up their health regime after years of bad habits, the Master Cleanse is an opportunity to reset your system and can leave you feeling empowered to make better eating choices in the future.
Master Cleanse can seriously affect your energy levels, so strenuous exercise should definitely be avoided. However, it’s a great mental challenge, as it is recommended to avoid solids entirely during the cleanse.
3. The Watermelon Diet
The watermelon diet is another option if you’re after a cleanse that will help you lose weight and feel fresh in the New Year. It’s pretty simple really – for three days, you only eat watermelon.
This may sound crazy, but watermelon is 90% water and so is incredibly cleansing and the fiber in the watermelon flesh helps you to feel full for longer. You still get some vitamins and minerals from the fruit, and the natural sugars will help with your energy levels, all while giving your digestive system a well-earned break.
Just remember to keep your fluids up and again, avoid any strenuous exercise on any kind of intense calorie-restricting diet.
Cleansing For A Fresh Start
Getting rid of that excess weight after the festive period can be tricky, as we all want to make being fit and healthy one of our New Years resolutions in 2017.
Completing a short-term cleansing diet can be a great way to kick-start your metabolism and refresh your digestive system, as long as you make sure to stay well-hydrated, avoid excessive heat and strenuous exercise, and make sure to slowly introduce healthy, solid food back into your diet once you’ve completed the cleanse. Give it a go!
