I’ll try anything once. (It’s true, ask my high school boyfriend.) So when my friend suggested I take part in a juice cleanse at her yoga studio, I said, Sure! I said, Sounds like fun! It took a week for the realization to sink in: No food. For 3 days.

I like to eat. As a kid I would go to parties just for the cake. I’d take my piece to a spot in the corner and eat it alone, like I wanted to give it my undivided attention. I once convinced a bouncer I was hypoglycemic so I could bring a bag of cookies into a club. But I’d heard a lot about juicing, and I was curious. I’d just never been brave or motivated enough to try it.

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to get in the kitchen and make juices everyday and not eat, so I went with a prepackaged cleanse from Juice Hugger in Brooklyn. For $45 a day, you get six juices per day (one for every 2 hours), already bottled and numbered for you. Each day includes a mixture of juiced greens, fruits, and veggies. The juices were surprisingly tasty and varied enough to keep it interesting. The second day—usually the most difficult for people—featured a tomato soup, sweet potato juice, and a lentil mixture, all of which could be heated and placed in a bowl to simulate the act of eating. (I personally found sipping juice from a spoon to be even more depressing than drinking something called “Lean Lentils.”) Below is a day-by-day blow of my experience.

Day 1

All I think about is food. Not because I’m hungry, but because I know I won’t eat for days. I try to read a book but the main character is painstakingly describing his mother’s job at a bakery, where the doughnuts “roil” to life in grease. I mark the next time I can have a juice, 2 hours from now, on my bookmark.

My neighbor burns toast and my mouth salivates like Pavlov’s dog.

Two hours crawl by. I take small sips of the juice, wanting it to last. I cross out the hour I’d jotted down on the bookmark and write the time for my next feeding. I’m reminded of a prisoner counting down his days.

I clear my fridge of anything chewable and put away the dishes on the dish rack, as if to rid myself of the notion that cooking can and has happened in my kitchen.

My stomach snarls at me. I can’t help it; I start seeping gas. I make a note to leave the house as little as possible.I feel fine. So light! So lean!

Damn that fucking neighbor. Who cooks bacon at 4:27 in the afternoon?!?

I decide to take a walk. I nearly rip a chicken wing out of a little girl’s hand.

A friend comes over and eats a bag of chips in front of me. I want. To. Kill. Her.

Day 2

The juice almost falls on my dresser while I’m getting ready. I lose several breaths catching it.

I go to work. Not so bad today, actually. Feeling kind of energized, in fact. Maybe the trick is not being anywhere near my kitchen. Drinking green tea also helps.

A couple times I catch myself thinking, “I’m hungry, I should eat something.” Then: “Oh wait, I can’t. I paid $145 to starve myself for 3 days.”

I channel my mother. She is so good at not eating. She once did the “Cookie Diet” for months. Nothing but a few terrible-tasting cookies and a Lean Cuisine frozen dinner everyday. I was convinced the cookies had speed in them.

The smells of pizza, bread, and beef in the streets are beginning to faze me a little less.

And yet, every now and then it looks like this in my mind: CHICKEN WING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Day 3

All day I fantasize about the produce I’ll buy on my way home tonight, the meals I’ll make tomorrow. I look up recipes. I stop working to make an extensive grocery list. Surprisingly—comfortingly—I don’t crave anything fatty or processed. I want a salad, a bright green avocado, crunchy celery, whole grains, yogurt with bananas and honey, a vegetable stew. I can feel the textures coating my mouth. (I attribute my health-conscious cravings to the fact that I’d been eating “clean” the week leading up to the cleanse, cutting out red meat, greasy foods, alcohol, and when I could stand it, coffee. Or maybe I just wanted to put something in my mouth that I could really chew on.)

I get to the grocery store late, as the gates are being pulled over the doors. I fantasize about burning the place down. I hope I’ll have the will power to come back in the morning, before I convince myself that the tin of leftover Christmas cookies in my cabinet is an apt reward for my suffering.

I drink my final juice: cashew milk. In my opinion, the most delicious treat in the batch. Almost worth the 3 days of not eating. I go to bed early, excited about the next day’s breakfast.

Post-Cleanse

Friends had told me juice cleansing would be the solution to my health problems, whatever they might be. I was told my whole body would be “reset” and that I’d need to scrub my skin because I’d have so many toxins coming out of my pores. One friend described a cleanse in an email as EVERYTHING!!!!!!!  I did not experience that.

What I did experience was more mental clarity, a loss of the belly bloat I’d developed over the holidays, and a fierce feeling of accomplishment. I felt leaner and was more aware of overeating. Caffeine gave me a headache. About three days after the cleanse, I embarked on a 12-hour period where I ingested whatever I wanted (let’s call it an experiment), including red meat and fried foods, two coffees and a beer, and my first cigarette in months. I was so sick to my stomach that night I couldn’t sleep. By midnight I had diarrhea and was vomiting.

I’m not going to get all “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead” on you and tell you that juicing will save America. I think it’s a diet trend that will eventually go the way of the Atkins, South Beach, Acai Berry, Paleo, and Mayo Clinic diets. Would I do it again? Probably. It was a fun challenge. But I also think I could achieve similar results just by keeping to a clean, mostly vegetarian diet.

My experience got me thinking about the time I tried Bikram yoga and told my mom I was disappointed that it hadn’t changed my life the way people had promised it would. She took a deep breath and said, “Usually if everyone says something’s changing their lives, they’re all living the same lie.” My mother, in her infinite wisdom, knew: You have to do what works for you. Even if it means nothing but speed cookies for months.