Good Food road-test: 'Reboot With Joe' 5-day juice cleanse diet

The premise: Nothing but fruit and vegetable juice for five days to ''regain vitality, lose weight and kick-start healthy habits''.

The results: A couple of years ago when I caught the doco Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead on late-night TV, starring overweight Aussie Joe Cross on a journey to save his own life, I was taken with the possibility he advanced that ''juicing'' could right all the wrongs of the modern diet. Like everyone, I've read a lot of theories around food, but not a lot of hard facts - is meat good (paleo) or bad (vegetarian), or is it gluten, sugar, salt, caffeine or alcohol that makes you feel sluggish? About the only thing most people can agree on is that vegies are chockful of good stuff. So why not eliminate everything else and treat my insides to the colonic equivalent of a spring clean?

Well, chewing, for one thing. Mastication, I've discovered these past five days, is vastly under-rated. The clue I missed was when I told co-workers - who were subjecting themselves to weeks-long diets of various description and severity - of my plans to do a five-day juice cleanse, and they responded with ''Oh God, are you sure? Maybe just three days?'' They understood what I didn't - that juicing equals hardcore privation.

The shiny new juicer I bought for this exercise has dominated our house this past week, noisily whizzing up five separate juices a day and producing more pulp than a Tasmanian timber mill. I have juiced a veritable forest of kale, an orchard of apples, and fields of carrots and cucumbers. I have spent hours planning, listing, shopping, prepping, juicing and cleaning.

Despite manic adherence to the juicing rule book, I didn't suffer any of the detox headaches, aches or fatigue that were forewarned. I almost wish I had; then I would know that my body had been challenged. And even though the program makes no weight loss promises or predictions, I did think such a radical shift would shed a bit more than 1.9kg. For those reasons, I wouldn't do it again.

The pros: Proved a great conversation starter and talking point among friends.

The cons: It's expensive (around $50 a day for the produce); time-consuming (two hours a day in prep/clean-up); and uncomfortable (diarrhoea attacks, wind pains, vegie burps and furry teeth).

Dish discovery: None.

Dish disaster: Anything with beetroot in it. Great on a sandwich, too strong for a juice. Also turns whatever comes out the other end a slightly alarming shade of pink.

How hard is it to eat out? Utterly impossible - unless you enjoy watching other people eat, and apologising to the next table for the stricken gurgles of your tortured stomach.

Did it work? Not really. By Day three my energy levels seemed a little higher than normal, and overall I lost a moderate amount of weight (1.9kg), about half of which came back in the first 24 hours afterwards. But I was looking for a far more tangible effect, good or bad.

What will you keep? I may not eat another vegetable for the next six months. After that, I will probably choose more salads and vegies, and fewer stodgy, processed foods.