Still, there's a reason why some juiceheads—including the yogis and health-food-store denizens for whom juicing and periodic fasting are part of an age-old lifestyle—aren't just out to spring-clean their colons: Not eating sharpens one's navel gaze considerably. Within 36 foodless hours, I had developed a sense of otherness and—okay, maybe I was bit delirious—a vague sort of superiority. I was a juice supremacist, an ascetic robot capable of survival, food or no food. Every whiff of emotion, every physical sensation could be correlated to the cleanse: Is this stuff making my hands cold? Is it making me tired? Sad? Irritable? Me! Me! Me! (See where I'm going with this?)

On Thursday, well past a work deadline and desperately in need of a chocolate chip cookie to temper my temper, I pondered food obsessively. Alone on my couch that night, picturing all my solids-eating friends out in the world chewing themselves into oblivion, I allowed myself one of the semisanctioned "cheats" on Blueprint's list: a measly cup of brown rice*, which made me feel both absurdly guilty and utterly uncomforted.

But "transitioning"—as it's known in juice-speak—off the fast was mind-blowing. Not only did I feel healthy and recharged, I also seemed to be an amazingly disciplined new self, insusceptible to cravings, bored by carbs, totally over refined sugars. For several weeks, I stocked my fridge with soy milk and fruit galore, sweetened my green tea with all-natural agave nectar, and left Mr. Coffee unplugged.

Fasting, I had already been told, was not a long-term strategy. "If a fast lasts much longer than two or three days, the body actually begins to break down some of its own tissue to get enough amino acids," Canfield says.

And there was this from Rosenthal: "When you go a week or a month on just juice, the body doesn't know your head decided to do this. It responds the way it's been programmed to for centuries when there's no food: holding onto its calories and then demanding all the nutrients that were lost. When I check in with people three or six months after a fast, a lot of them have gone back to their former eating habits, in some cases to worse."

Still, curiosity got the better of me: If five days could get me this far, what could 10 do? But by the time I borrowed a friend's juicer and lugged home seven jars of iZO Cleanze, plus a jug of maple syrup just in case I decided to try the Master Cleanse (strictly for research, of course!), the cold arrived. More precisely, the respiratory infection. And the shingles, aka adult chicken pox—painfully new to me and apparently a harbinger of immune system doom. "But I've never eaten so many fruits and vegetables," I wailed to my doctor. "I cleansed! I purified! I flooded my system with phytonutrients!"

He cut me off. "I'm not saying that going on a juice cleanse gave you shingles, but did it give you enough zinc? How about magnesium?" he said, scribbling out a prescription. "Nutrition is about balance. And you, by the way, sound like an infomercial."

* Editor's Note: Brown rice is not, in fact, an allowed Blueprint cheat. I blame this mistake on starvation-induced insanity. Instead, the company recommends that cleansers in need of extra sustenance try celery stalks, cucumber, avocado, or warm, low-sodium vegetable broth. M.B.

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