Hillary Lewis tried a juice cleanse once. It did not go well.
“Three days of it made me totally bloated,” the bubbly Florida native said. “It reset my metabolism, and not in a good way.”
Ms. Lewis’s organic juice company, Lumi, has a different recipe than Juice Press or Liquiteria—shops that hawk $60 (or even $200) cleanses with the mystical promise of “detoxifying” the body. Lumi, available online and in select stores, is all about living a balanced lifestyle and promoting self-love. The name, Ms. Lewis added, even stands for “Love U, Mean It.”
“My passion is to help people live healthier lives,” she said, presenting me with an array of charmingly-named juices. There was “Minted Greens” with orange, spinach, cucumber, mint and lime; “Farmhouse Greens” with kale, cucumber, celery, apple, lemon and parsley; “Miami Mango” with carrot, mango, orange and lime; “Morning Sunrise” with grapefruit and lime. There were also two two-ounce shots: “Hot Shot” with beet, lime and jalapeno, and “Fully Loaded” with broccoli leaf, lemon and ginger.
All of Lumi’s juices are cold-pressed—juice-speak for what happens when fresh fruits and veggies are instantly pulverized in a grinding chute rotating 4,500 times per second, limiting the food’s exposure to oxygen and maximizing its nutritional value. Then, to rid the juice of bacteria, Lumi uses a tactic called High Pressure Pasteurization. With H.P.P., extreme
Retaining as much as possible of a fruit or vegetable’s natural taste and nutrients is important to Ms. Lewis. Growing up on a horse farm in South Florida, the now-Virginia-resident recalled eating oranges directly off the trees near her home. “I could never understand why oranges didn’t taste like Tropicana,” she said. “I’ve bottled that bite-into-the-orange flavor.”
Ms. Lewis will not entertain the idea of marketing cleanses.
Lumi “will never offer cleanses,” she said firmly. A drastic dietary regimen that works for one person will not necessarily work for another, she said, and should someone undergo a juice cleanse, it should be under the supervision of a dietician—”someone who knows your body type.”
Instead, Ms. Lewis recommends customers incorporate her juices into their regular schedules. “Have a juice a day instead of a coffee,” she suggested. “It’s more sustainable than coffee to have one of these [juices] in the afternoon.” She, personally, is a fan of starting her mornings with a Hot Shot. The splash of jalapeno? “That’ll get you going,” she said. (I drank a Hot Shot on the way into work the other day—it certainly does jolt one awake.)
Later that day, I delighted in drinking a Farmhouse Greens on the subway ride home from work—and followed it up with dinner and dessert, too.
