Most of us have been stuffing our faces and beating up our livers for the past month or so. These facts combined with the pressure to choose a New Year's resolution make this time of year a particularly busy one for the body detox industry.

There are all sorts of capsules, bottled concoctions, and powders you can buy that promise to help you shed the pounds that have crept up on you over the holiday season. But in my opinion, the best cleanse is one that is done with water, plant foods, and raw organic juices, which you can make fresh in your juicer at home or purchase at a juice bar. (No, Tropicana and Welch's are not juice-cleanse approved!) The energy you get from these sources is pure, organic, and powerful, in contrast to the strange bottles of "detox" sludge that often contain a host of chemical preservatives, fillers, and artificial colors and flavors.

When you drink raw organic juice in lieu of solid food, you save your body the energy it normally expends during digestion. Your body can then redirect this surplus of energy toward healing and improved organ function. The raw vegan juices also supply a highly-concentrated dose of phytonutrients and immune-boosting antioxidants. This is why many people who suffer from auto-immune diseases, cancer, and other maladies are able to heal without drugs when they make juice fasting part of their therapy. This is why I think of juice cleansing as a gift to the health of your internal organs, where the loss of impacted food weight and excess fat is a welcome side effect.

See also:
- Detox Cleansing Without Cravings or Fat Rebound.
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Now that the holidays are over and the smorgasbord of sugar cookies, fatty meats, cheese plates and cocktails of all kinds has come to a halt, many feel like such lard-asses that their instinct is to embark on a sudden and drastic plan of deprivation.

Their New Year's resolutions to counterbalance the havoc they've wrought on their organs and figures throughout these months make perfect sense, but experts like Alina Zhukovskaya, who is the Detox Specialist and Raw Food Guru at OnJuice (a new organic juice home-delivery service launched by Boca-based DeliverLean), caution that it's better to ease into a juice cleanse rather than fall straight off a cliff of greasy pastries into a stream of raw bok choy juice. (Trust me; she's right. I've tried doing juice fasts without planning a gradual separation from or return to solid foods, and the result was a maniacal post-fast food binge that left my stomach protruding like a watermelon from underneath my rib cage.)

Zhukovskaya practices what she preaches. Having imbibed a few too many flutes of champagne on New Year's Eve, she's about to embark on a juice cleanse of her own, but not before she readies her system for the purification process.

"It's all about balance. Have a good time and then get back on the healthy wagon and feel good again," Zhukovskaya said. And the amount of time you've spent "having a good time" can help to determine how long it will take to straighten yourself out.

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Wheat gluten has been dogged on so much over the past few years, you would think it was a serial killer rather than a cereal protein. But jokes aside, there's a reason that the weirdly named food component has become such a nutritional pariah. Incidence of celiac disease, an illness that causes an autoimmune reaction to gluten that flattens the little hair-like protrusions in the small intestines and causes bloating, gas, rashes, chronic fatigue, diabetes, diarrhea and early osteoporosis, has risen about four-fold over the last 50 years, and it's not just that people are diagnosing the condition more often, as research shows.

But some contend that the problem with wheat goes beyond celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. In fact, Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist and a self-proclaimed "seeker-of-truth in health," has written a New York Times bestselling book called Wheat Belly, in which he details how food scientists' bastardization of gliadin, a protein and a component of gluten, is to blame for the obesity epidemic, the soaring rates of type II diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cancers, and a long list of other health problems that plague modern society.

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New Orleans is known for its jazz, its eclectic cultural milieu and its gumbo, a thick stew usually anchored by beef stock and crowded with shrimp, chicken and sausage. So what the heck would vegan gumbo look and taste like? Your guess is as good as vegan chef Keith Kalmanowicz's, but he'll work it out before Sunday, when his monthly plant-based smorgasbord takes over a new venue: the new New Orleans-inspired Lagniappe (pronounced "Lan-yap") in Midtown.

Kalmanowicz is the creator and head chef of Love & Vegetables, a by-donation vegan dinner event that usually pops up at Earth N Us urban farm in Little Haiti the third Saturday of the month. His last two dinners --- a nine-course chakra-balancing feast characterized by dishes like beet-red quinoa and blueberry polenta; and a Thanksgiving-inspired meal featuring vegan green bean casserole and lentil loaf --- were so popular that he and his co-organizers were inspired to expand the reach of their plant-fueled parties. The event at Lagniappe in Midtown on Sunday will mark the first time the gentle chefs will venture off the farm.

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For all who would like to go vegan but who don't know where to begin, there's now a comprehensive multimedia guide that breaks it down day by day. The 30-Day Vegan Challenge, created by vegan chef and author Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, is a guide that includes audio, video, and written resources in bite-sized chunks, delivered daily to your email inbox so you can take your vegan experiment one day at a time.

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau wasn't raised vegan or vegetarian, but her family taught her from a young age to respect all living things. "My parents encouraged me to love animals. I was taught that this relationship was so special and important," she said. "And yet I grew up eating everything that walked or swam or flew. It created this split and this contradiction in how I viewed animals, and the fierce compassion I was born with became dulled."

The mainstream behaviors and attitudes toward animals are extremely confusing, Patrick-Goudreau pointed out. "If a child is not kind to animals, we know it's a danger signal that the child is very troubled," she said. And yet we give kids the message that passive violence toward animals and eating of animal flesh is just fine.

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When you hear the word "Thanksgiving," no doubt the first image that comes to mind is a big fat glistening roast bird. But if you think about it, most of the stuff that usually surrounds that slab of turkey on your Thanksgiving plate is plant-based. Traditional mashed potato, green bean, cranberry, and stuffing dishes are all just a few ingredients away from being vegan, so it doesn't take much effort to make your holiday table totally animal product-free.

But the world of vegan cuisine offers a lot more interesting stuff than bland white potatoes whipped up with soy milk. You can make some delicious soups, scrumptious healthy desserts, and some grain, lentil, or nut loaves that make great turkey replacements. Here are a few "out of the box" holiday-ready recipes from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, author, chef, and creator of the new 30-Day Vegan Challenge program.

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The love of cheese is without a doubt the most common excuse vegetarians offer for not going whole-hog vegan. There's nothing mysterious about this; their cheese-clinging is rooted in chemical addiction. Mother nature installed an opioid substance in cow's milk to inspire the rightful drinkers of dairy --- baby cows --- to march back to the teat frequently so they can grow up big and fat. That same opioid substance affects humans, basically making them feel like they took a hit of smack every time they get a bite of cheese, a substance in which the chemical, called casomorphin, exists in much higher concentrations than it does in liquid cow's milk.

But in case you haven't noticed, cheese is far from a health food. Most varieties are high in saturated fat and cholesterol, and since the average American eats more than 30 pounds of cheese a year - up nearly three-fold from just 11 in 1970, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest -- the Center figures it is the nation's number one source of artery-clogging saturated fat.

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It's suddenly sweatshirt weather in Miami, and even though the sun still warms my rosy vegan cheeks, I've been craving some traditional fall flavors to do the same for my belly. With Thanksgiving just three weeks away, it's also a great time to start scouting out some raw, plant-based holiday recipes that are ripe with the flavors of the season's freshest produce but that don't take tons of money and work to prepare. I wanted to find some semi-substantial vegan recipes that would thaw my bones (60 degrees is cold for us South Floridians!) and provide clean fuel for some long runs in the cool air. I sought to incorporate some Thanksgiving favorites like pumpkin and cranberries to bring my tastebuds home to the northeast.

The Raw Truth by Jeremy A. Safron is an excellent resource for raw recipes that skip the cooking and leave you with all the nutrients of unadulterated plant foods. In addition to hundreds of recipes for everyone from the raw rookie to the wheatgrass wizard, the book provides a guide to transitioning to the raw lifestyle, a breakdown of the four raw food groups (fresh, sprouted, cultured, and dehydrated), and insight about what makes certain foods "bio-active" and others "bio-degenerative." (I love that Safron places "foods made with anger" in the latter category.)

Dr. Joel Fuhrman, one of the world's leading authorities on plant-based nutrition and disease prevention, says a diet high in raw foods is "a key feature of an anti-cancer diet style and long life." Below, find three easy, fall-friendly "rawcipes" that I've hand-selected and adapted from Safron's book for your Thanksgiving and anytime eating pleasure.

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One day, Rich Roll, a 41-year-old father of four, was out for what he planned would be a five or six mile run. Maybe it was the plant-based vegan diet he had recently adopted, or some primal, ancestral energy stream he had suddenly tapped into, but on that particular day, Roll didn't want to stop at six miles. He didn't want to stop at 10, or 17. After a whopping 23 miles, a distance he had never before come close to running, a stunned Roll finally decided to head home and strip off his sweat-soaked shorts and socks. This was a stark contrast from his state of being six months earlier, when he experienced chest pains upon walking up a single flight of stairs. After his impromptu near-marathon run, he knew his new lifestyle choices were unlocking some powerful strength and health. But he still could not have anticipated that within a matter of a year, he would be tackling the Epic5 endurance race, one of the most grueling voluntary physical challenges on the planet, which entails completing five back-to-back Ironman competitions within five days on five different Hawaiian islands.

Roll's miraculous health transformation was not the first metamorphosis he had undergone. About ten years before his health scare on the staircase, Roll had entered into recovery from alcohol and drug addiction and ceased the decades-spanning abuses he had inflicted on his body and mind. He began a successful law practice and met his health-minded, vegetarian, yoga-instructor wife, now the mother of his four children.

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When my little posse and I rolled up to the fence surrounding Earth N Us Farms in Little Haiti, I wore a confident face in an attempt to reassure my obviously skeptical guests.

The truth is, though, that I was nearly as apprehensive about the vegan pop-up event we were about to attend as they were. All I knew about Earth N Us was that a number of hippie-types live on-site, some of them in a tree house. Our first glimpses of the 2.5-acre farm showed us plots of greens with the occasional granola-type crossing our path and offering a serene smile and a welcoming hello. I picked up the scent of farm animals somewhere ahead. Having never seen pictures of the area the volunteers behind the once-monthly "by donation" vegan pop-up designate for the event, I wasn't sure if we'd be sitting in the dirt, eating with our hands, or chanting for our supper. I love earthiness, but as a vegan who's a bit more J. Crew than thrift store, I was a little nervous that this experience might be a bit far out for me and my golf-playing, Jeep-driving, Ralph Lauren-wearing little gang.

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