Celebrity Favorite Ritual Cleanse Put to the Test

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We Did It For Science is our semi-regular feature in which we offer ourselves up as retail guinea pigs. All for your benefit.

When we got the email about Ritual Cleanse and then read online that it's supposedly a celebrity favorite, we laughed. We imagine many of the big name celebs probably sleep in designer oxygen chambers and do dialysis with the blood of virgins on a semi-regular basis to maintain their healthy glows. While we read the press release again, we happened to glance at what we had for breakfast?

Celebrity favorite or not, it might behoove us to try it. The claims sounded good: increased energy, healthy skin, better sleep. Sign us up, please! We placed an order and waited for the fun to begin.

Day 1. Zang! Door to door service. Went out for a run and came back, around 7am, to find a big heavy bag full of juice at the doorstep. It's a chore to lug inside. Every bottle contains a single serving. No mixing, no guessing. And all the bottles are labeled with a number -- if you can count as high a seven, you can figure the cleanse out.

Since a 16 oz can of Diet Rockstar and a Powerbar have already been consumed, it's probably already too late to start. But naturally, it must be sampled. There's a celery-veggie-orange one, that makes up the bulk of the cleanse, another juice that's more along the lines of the standards mastercleanse. One of the Ritual Cleanse selling points is that it's all organic -- wholesome, nothing but juice.

First impression: right off the bat, this stuff is super tasty. Very healthy and naturally sweet. Admittedly, it's nothing like a Jamba Juice, but it's all really yummy. There are two kinds of nut-milk-goo; the cashew one tastes a little like horchata. We decide we can totally live with this stuff.

Day 1, for real: Is it terrible to admit that, right out of the gates, we're cheating? No time to deal with the sluggishness and headaches that go along with a limited caffeine intake, so we gulp a can of diet energy drink, then guzzle the first bottle of the day, at 7:45am. Yum! Feeling good.

RAVENOUS by 10am. Beyond starving. Drink another juice and hope we'll get used to being hungry. Also battling a cold, so we can't figure out if we're run down because of the cold or because of the hunger.

It's 1pm. Drink another juice and congratulate ourselves. The two times we've tried to do mastercleanse, we lasted for maybe three hours. The record has already been bested. Whoot!

Day 2: We do the same cheat, the 16 oz. diet energy drink. I drink the pre-shred juice, a special mixture that's designed to be consumed prior to hitting the gym (it's really sweet -- the beets are really sugary and probably give the necessary boost to power a workout). Head for the hills and do a two hour hike. Feeling a little weak, but again, that could be the cold. We make it back and gulp one of the yummy post-shred drinks.

Day 3: OK, no effing around. We forgo the energy drink, guzzle the pre-shred, and go straight to the gym. We get on the treadmill and feel pretty strong -- run seven miles, no problem. Then start to bonk, struggle through another two. Finally stretching, back home for the post-shred and the first juice. On the whole, we feel surprisingly energetic. There is actually a visible difference in skin clarity. Probably all of the crappy toxins being flushed out -- oh, and drinking a gallon of water a day will do that to you.

Day 4: Solid food, I've missed you. To objectively evaluate the experience, we look at the claims for the product on the website. Here's what they say Ritual Cleanse will do for you; we've rated the experience on a scale of 1 (hell no!) to 10 (eff ya!):

Mental clarity: 8
Abundance of energy: 7
Happier mood: 9 (was really happy to eat a bagel on day 4)
Better digestion: 8
Decreased desire for salt and sugar:7
Craving for fresh fruits and vegetables: 10
Glowing skin: 8
More restful sleep: 6
Weight loss:7
Increased sex drive: Noneyo

On the whole, we were pretty pleased. Admittedly, Ritual Cleanse is an investment -- prices for the whole enchilada start at $80 a day. But this stuff is GOOD. And it's so easy to do. We'd totally do it again: we rate the overall experience at a very strong 8. If you want to try it, check the coupon in our dealfeeds.
· Ritual Cleanse [Official Site]
· All We Did It for Science content [Racked LA]