ALL THE IMPORTANT THINGS

You can hear Joel on the Kate, Tim & Joel drive show from 3-6pm on the Nova Network

I DID a juice cleanse. Honestly, go ahead and roll your eyes right now … everyone else has, including myself as it arrived at my front door. Look, my partner Jack and I were bored on holidays in lockdown.

We were so bored. We had completed Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Doordash, Tipple, Jimmy Brings and Mr Yum (which is so funny to say as a grown adult … ). We were feeling sluggish and carb heavy. After an 11pm pizza delivery one evening we were scrolling Instagram saying, “Why did we do that?” while simultaneously still eating/

contemplating a McFlurry and scrolling when I landed on some Insta “hottie” flogging juice cleanses. The suggestion was made, research was done and several minutes later we had landed on the three-day skin and immunity cleanse from Karmic juices.

We forgot about the cleanse until it arrived at our door 24 hours later (very prompt, impressed) in an ice chest with 48 little bottles inside. All perfectly lined up and labelled. The first morning, I was halfway to my local cafe to grab a coffee when I remembered … today’s the day. After a quick Google to see if coffee was still allowed (a firm no) I headed home to begin. The first juice was called

something like “Zingy” and was full of ginger, lemon and, well, other “zingy” things. It sorta woke me up and got my day started. Kinda. I squeezed in another hour of sleep before I really had to get up. It was also time for my next juice. That was something green and full of kale. Soooo trendy.

The day went on and my hunger was ok. Every 90 minutes I’d have a juice. Sometimes it’d be with beets, other times a bone broth situation. The highlight was the final juice of the day, which was an almond milk with bee pollen. How fancy does that sound? Not going to lie though, we were in bed that night doubled over going, “Why are we doing this? Do we just quit now?

We have another two days!” We both woke up the next day with splitting headaches but good ol’ “zingy” started to work.

The third day I bounced out of bed. Was it the cleanse? The finish line? Who knows. But someone at work asked me, “Are you ok? You’ve just got so much … energy!” So I’m taking that as a win. And it’s set me on track to eat well. I made a salad for lunch. Hello? Who are you and what have you done with the Joel I know. But it’s only been a day or two. There was heavy debate whether a Big Mac would be allowed at midnight, day three. It was all systems go until we fell asleep that evening at 8pm. Seems our zing had run out.