Every Sunday like clockwork they come. A long trail of idling SUVs with plates from the tri-state area queue like a herd of circus elephants on far West 19th Street. The cloud of their exhaust all but blots out the squat brick buildings of the housing projects behind them. The women inside these cars have come all the way from Greenwich, Conn., Matawan, N.J. and Brooklyn Heights to get their fix. One-by-one, they dart out from the heated leather seats and ring the buzzer of apartment No. 4 at 432, a dilapidated two-story industrial building next to the Service Wagon Repair Shop. They stamp their Uggs in the cold, rub their cashmere Loro Piana gloves to stave off the chill. Buzz and buzz again and by now a small cluster has formed.
The sound of a man descending a set of stairs makes them tremble with anticipation. Finally, the door creaks, moans and opens. A small black man appears in a winter jacket and beanie, bearing bunches of small lunch bags in black, purple and green. “Taylor!” the man calls out. A woman steps forward and grabs three small sacks. She throws them into the trunk of her white Mercedes, and speeds down the street. “Baker!” The sequence is repeated. “Raider!”
Sharon Raider, a 43-year-old fashion designer from Brooklyn, steps forward and grabs her bags. Before she even gets to the car, she’s ripped one open and twists the cap from a 6-ounce green bottle to greedily suck down the contents. A fleck of green juice is all that mars her otherwise perfectly made-up face.
Welcome to ground zero of a new New York addiction: The Blueprint Cleanse.
Inside these Blueprint headquarters, a row of white-coated, hair-netted men stuff mountains of romaine, mounds of apples and bouquets of celery into a Norwalk juicer. The hundreds of gallons of green pulpy juice that come out are the raw material of The Blueprint Cleanse. The juice is bottled, numbered and put in discrete ice-packed cooler bags. For customers, this is all they will ingest for up to 10 days. They’ll get hungry and possibly sick. But these are, according to Blueprint, just detox symptoms. A three-day cleanse, according to the Blueprint gospel, will “help the body rid itself of old built up matter and cleanse the blood.” Cleanse for five days and you’ll start “the process of rebuilding and healing the immune system.” Don’t eat for 10 days, and “take care of problems before they arise.”
According to one user, however, blood purity isn’t why she shells out $65 a day for juice. “I wanted to lose weight. Period.” So do many others. According to Erica Huss Jones, one of The Blueprint Cleanse founders, “the number of clients is growing exponentially.”
The notion of cleansing oneself is ancient. Moses detoxed with a 40 day/40 night fast atop Mt. Sinai. Later, Jesus did the same fast but in the wilderness. In fact, history is scattered with tales of fasts, cleanses and enemas. But the zealous fervor skinny women have for The Blueprint Cleanse feels different. It’s a strange idol to worship. The idea of paying through the nose to go hungry even as more and more Americans are driven to food banks and soup kitchens may seem counterintuitive. But for these women—and it’s mostly women—it’s not a choice. These are clients the same way corner slingers call junkies customers. For all intents and purposes, they are addicts.
“Some people are addicted to coffee,” says one juicer, “I don’t abuse any other substance. I’m addicted to cleansing.”
In 2000, almost two millennia after Jesus’ cleanse, Zoe Sakoutis, then a 21-year-old bartender at the trendy Hudson Hotel, came down with a cold. She followed the advice of a friend and started drinking a vegetable-based juice. After a week, Sakoutis claims she was miraculously cured. “I’ve been a hardcore raw foodist since,” she says. (According to the National Institute of Health, the common cold typically clears up after seven days anyway.)
Convinced juice was the panacea to cure her ills, Sakoutis quit her job and became a Certified Nutritional Consultant (CNC). Teaming up with her friend Erica Huss Jones, a restaurant publicist, Sakoutis concocted The Blueprint Cleanse. The philosophy behind the cleanse is to undo the ravages of the hard-living lifestyle Sakoutis and other hipster yuppie bobos enjoy: nights at The Beatrice, packs of Parliaments, carb-loaded gnudi at The Spotted Pig.
This cleanse is for the “burger-and-red-wine crowd looking to periodically offset the damages of their indulgence,” explains Sakoutis. The two devised a three-day menu of juices that, when ingested exclusively, supposedly detoxified the body. The juices are heavy on produce. The mainstay of the cleanse, simply called The Green Juice, contains romaine, parsley, lemon, spinach and lemon. “You almost can’t go wrong drinking anything that is fresh pressed,” says Sakoutis. They field-tested the drinks on the housewives of Connecticut and on their fashionista friends. Then Sakoutis and Huss Jones came up with a catchy motto: We Think. You Drink.
Nine years later as the no-longer-youthful-bodies of Sakoutis’ peers whither under their still-youthful habits, The Blueprint Cleanse has developed an ardent following. The duo ship their juice around the country and have a stable of celebrity clients like Oprah (pre-200 pounds, that is) and Julia Roberts. When Blueprint juices are delivered to a Darien, Conn., drop-off point (Elements Yoga Center), spandex-clad women swarm the truck like jackals. The company charges $65-a-day for the privilege of not thinking and not eating: More if you want your fix delivered to Connecticut.
“We don’t share hard numbers,” says Sakoutis, “but we can safely say that the number of clients we serve each week has tripled from where it was a year ago.”
Not everybody is convinced that not eating food is good for you. In fact, the general consensus among health experts is that eating food provides one’s body with nutrients one needs to live. Dr. Lisa Sasson, a Clinical Associate Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU, is one of many medical professionals who views these quick-fix cleanses with a mixture of concern and contempt. The Blueprint cleanse “is just rhetoric,” she says. “It’s a lot of hype.” The secret to good health, insists Sasson, does not lie in cramming your body full of ground chuck and whisky for 25 days and then “flushing” it out with juice for three. Bodies don’t work that way.
“These cleanses are over-simplistic,” says Sasson. “Having a healthy diet, lifestyle—including adequate sleep and physical activity—is what is most important to ‘cleanse’ the body.”
Others, like Dr. Stephen Barrett, M.D., of Quackwatch.org, question Sakoutis’ qualifications. “The CNC credential should be regarded as bogus,” he writes. In 2004, the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, which awards the CNC diploma, he notes, once issued the same certification to a dead cat named Henrietta. Clearly, he suggests, this indicates their standards aren’t very high.
While there’s no Blueprint body count yet, the ravages of an obsession with cleansing obsession are. In January 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow was admitted to the hospital after doing the L.O.V.E. Fast, a raw food cleanse substantially less austere than Blueprint. And it should be noted that in 1984, Stanley Burroughs, founder of the popular Master Cleanse, was convicted of second-degree murder after claiming to be able to cure cancer with abdominal massage. (It didn’t work.)
One 27-year-old social climber has had the juice monkey on her back since May. The brown-haired, big-chested, pouty-lipped blogger seems like she stepped out of July in a pin-up calendar. (Somewhere a cow is going unmilked and a stool unsat upon.) You wouldn’t pin her as a “cleansehead.” Although she looks like a square pom-pom girl, she’s been geezering Blueprint juice for eight months.
“By the time I tried out Blueprint, I had tried every cleanse before,” she confesses. “Blueprint was the only one that I didn’t want to go off of. Now,” she admits, “I’m obsessed.” She doesn’t count herself among the waking unless she’s had her morning juice. Many days, the only solid meal she eats is dinner. Instead, she subsists—juice-to-juice—on liquid. “People says it’s about anorexia, but it isn’t,” she says, “this is the fucking healthiest thing I’ve done in my life.” By her own estimation, she does the full cleanse “at least two days a week.”
“When I’m on the cleanse,” she says, “I get so high by the end of the day, I’m super high on life.” Without her juice, she becomes desperate, cranky, ill-humored. “When I don’t have my green juice,” she says, “it fucking sucks.”
When jonesing for a fix, she calls Huss Jones, whose cell phone number she has on speed dial. “I’ll call Erica and say, ‘I really need these juices. I need them.’” Once, while in Chicago for Thanksgiving, she needed the green so badly, “I emailed and said ‘I’m gonna die if I don’t get my juices. I’ll do anything for them.’” They were Fed-Exed the next day. She consumes nearly 18 juices a week—a $195-a-week habit. But, in exchange for hawking the product on her weblog and converting her friends, she gets her juice for free. Now one of her co-workers is hooked on juice, too. “It keeps your body articulate!” she claims excitedly. “People think, like, it is a cult or whatever,” she affirms, “but, like, if this is a cult, we should all be members.”
Not all addicts are so lucky to have a free connection. When Flavia Masson, a 24-year-old comedian, was preparing for her debut at Caroline’s in July, she shelled out $450 for a six day Blueprint Cleanse. “I wanted to look good,” she explains.
Every morning, the juices would be delivered to her discreet doorman building on East 57th Street and First Avenue. The doorman would then ferret them to Masson’s apartment, a place she rarely left.
“During the day,” Masson says, “I felt so weak, I thought I was going to faint, so I stayed inside.” She would, on occasion, leave her bed to go get “silly straws so drinking the juice would be more fun.” Nevertheless, the juice took hold. In September, merely two months after her first cleansing ordeal, Masson had another show coming up, this time at Comix. “I went back on the cleanse,” she admits with chagrin. “I ordered three days, but I couldn’t even get past day one. I felt too weak and couldn’t go on.”
And then there’s the story of a 23-year-old magazine editor: “It was drizzling on the day of the gay pride parade, and I had just come back from the beach,” she begins. She and her two friends decided to try out Blueprint after reading about it in the pages of a now defunct gossip magazine. Through the light rain, she could see a woman she describes as “skinny and fancy” buzz no. 4. “I knew I was in the right place.”
Soon enough, “this little Mexican man came down and gave me my packs. He never spoke to me.” During the cleanse, she says, “I felt great. I’d go out for a green tea [one of the few non-juice liquids one can drink on the cleanse,] and I’d see all these office workers doing their little office-worker lunch. The cleanse made me feel a little better than them. I thought, ‘You need food! I don’t need food.’”
But soon after she finished the cleanse, the journalist was once again an office drone, dashing out of her fluorescent-lit office warren for a coffee and an overpriced panini from Europa.
“At first I felt empty and good but then—bloop bloop bloop—it creeps back up, and you have to do it again.” Good for Zoe Sakoutis but, Dr. Sasson might say, bad for you. Sadly, once you’re hooked, the opinions of medical professionals don’t stand a chance. Drinking, after all, is much easier than thinking.
anonymous
