All’s Well That Ends Well: 9 Easy Recipes To Break Your Cleanse

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The easiest mistake that any juice cleanser can make is to eat the wrong foods when coming off their cleanse. While, naturally, we spend most of a cleanse dreaming about the foods we are going to indulge in when we're done - a big juicy burger, a gooey brownie, a bowl of mac 'n' cheese - we must be diligent about making good food choices after the cleanse. Your digestive system is very delicate after a cleanse, having barely digested anything for days. Your body has been on hiatus, focusing solely on pushing toxins out and healing tissues. Therefore, if you choose to binge on high-fat, high-sugar, hard-to-digest foods, you will not only feel the physical repercussions of those decisions – think stomach cramps, headaches, bloating – but you will actually hinder the progress you have made while cleansing. The days after you finish your juice cleanse should not be seen as calorie 'make-up' days, but as an opportunity to continue the detoxification process. At this point, your body has efficiently gotten rid of toxins and increased the functioning of its detoxification pathways (liver, intestine, kidney), making its ability to clear toxins that much more effective. Therefore, if you ease off of the cleanse with healing, easy-to-digest foods, you can further promote the clearance of toxins, thereby maximizing the effectiveness of the juice cleanse itself. This is something worth investing in, especially if your goal is to use juice cleansing as a means for permanent changes, not simply a quick fix. The best foods with which to break your cleanse are soups, vegetable purees, superfood smoothies, and steamed vegetable and gluten-free grain bowls. It is best to eat in this manner for the three days following your last day of juice cleansing. Post-cleanse, don't simply dive right back into old habits of making poor food choices, but take the opportunity to start anew, focusing your diet on plant-based, green vegetable-rich meals.