My Experience with the 7 Day ZenCleanz Rainbow Kit

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Always read the label and follow the directions for use.

The ZenCleanz Rainbow Kit is a seven day liquid fast. No solid food for the whole week, your first meal on the morning of day eight, and the two single day kits sitting at either end of it: ONE on day one, FORGIVE and its flush on day six. The four days between them are liquid enzymes and around three and a quarter litres a day.

That is the part people are most often surprised by, so I have put it first. If you were picturing a week of light salads, it is not that, and it is far better to know now than on day two.

For nearly twenty years I have been curious about the ways women have always paused for a stretch of days and then returned. Almost every wisdom tradition has a version of it, and this is a modern, bought version of a very old idea.

What I want to tell you about is the rest of it. What the week actually asked of me, how I timed it to my cycle, which days were hardest, and who I would steer away from it altogether. Not because your week would look the same. It wouldn't. But because almost nobody describes the ordinary shape of these seven days, and I remember how much I wanted someone to tell me before my first one.

What is ZenCleanz?

ZenCleanz make fermented plant enzymes. Their formulas are fermented slowly, three years, drawn from a library of more than a hundred and fifty plants, which is the whole idea in one line: nothing rushed, nothing stripped, plants broken open by time rather than by heat.

They make a good deal more than the cleanse kits, including everyday enzymes you can take without doing anything structured at all. Three of the kits are the foundational cleanses, and those are the ones worth knowing about here. ONE and FORGIVE are single days and are where most women start. The Rainbow is the seven day one, and it is those two single days held together by a week of liquid enzymes. So ONE and FORGIVE come up throughout this post, because they are both inside the week. Which kit is which sets the three of them out side by side if you want them properly compared.

Why enzymes rather than a water fast

This is the part that made me interested in the first place, so it is worth explaining properly.

Enzymes are biologically active proteins found in living cells. Digestive enzymes break food down along the digestive tract, metabolic enzymes work inside the cells, and I have written up what plant-based digestive enzymes are properly elsewhere rather than repeating it here.

Your own output also drops as you age, and that part is not really in dispute. The research on the ageing pancreas puts the peak at around forty three, with a slow decline after it. Your body carries on managing, with less room to spare than it had at twenty five.

What I am not going to tell you is that drinking enzymes tops that back up. I went looking for research saying so, and what I found was written almost entirely by people who sell enzymes, which is not the same thing as evidence.

Here is what I can say plainly, and it is the honest difference between this and most of what gets sold as a cleanse. Most of them work by taking away. Water fasts, laxative teas, juice with very little in it, seven days of subtraction. This is fermented fruit and vegetable material, taken five times a day through the middle of the week. Whatever it is or is not doing, you are being given something rather than only having things stripped out.

What is the ZenCleanz Rainbow Kit?

The Rainbow, sold as the Rainbow Protocol, is a bundle rather than a separate formula. It takes the two single day kits, ONE and FORGIVE, and holds you between them on liquid enzymes and the three gut essentials. There is a longer twenty day version too, so it is worth checking you are looking at the seven day one.

The week runs like this. Day one is the ONE kit, which is sixteen timed drinks and which I have written up on its own. Days two to five are the quiet ones, five doses of Hygieia and the gut essentials, and around three and a quarter litres of liquid a day. Day six is FORGIVE, ending with the flush at nine at night. Day seven completes it. You eat again on the morning of day eight.

That last line is the one to read twice. The four days in the middle are not filler, they are the reason the bundle exists, and the whole seven days is a liquid fast. It is a week to plan your life around, not one to fit around a full diary.

Before you buy it, check in with yourself

Seven days is a real commitment, and this is the largest thing they make. It is worth sitting with the question honestly rather than ordering it on a good day and starting it on a bad one.

One thing worth knowing while you weigh it up: this is not a water fast. You are taking in liquid enzymes made from fermented fruit and vegetables the whole way through, five doses a day across the middle of the week, so it is not seven days of nothing at all. If going entirely without is the part that frightens you, this is not that.

If you are not sure, start smaller. Which kit is which sets them out side by side, and the one day kits are where most women begin. There is no prize for starting with the biggest one.

And if you are weighing it up and would rather talk it through with someone who has actually done the week, message me on Instagram. Anything to do with symptoms or medication belongs with your doctor, but the practical side of it I am glad to help with.

Day one of the Rainbow is the ONE kit, so do read my ZenCleanz ONE review alongside this one. It breaks that first day down in far more detail than I do here: what is in the kit, what the day asks of you, and who I would steer away from it. This post covers the rest of the week.

When is the best time in your cycle to do a cleanse?

For women this is the part that actually matters. There are phases where a week like this sits well, and phases where it works against you. With the Rainbow it matters more than it does with a single day kit, because you are clearing seven days of protocol plus the morning you come back to food.

Why the research is so thin

When researchers looked at a decade of exercise studies, women were somewhere between twelve and eighteen per cent of the people taking part, and the authors named the work of accounting for the menstrual cycle as one of the reasons women had been left out. It is complicated to study and it costs more, so it gets avoided. Worse, the women who do get studied are largely studied in their steadiest week, because the follicular phase is when researchers test them, chosen deliberately to keep hormone variance out of the results. The reviewers say the consequence themselves: an intervention that works in one phase may not produce the same outcome across the rest of the cycle, which leaves women "blinded to the optimization" of the other three weeks. So the advice that reaches us was not only built mostly on men. The part that was tested on women was tested on women at their most stable, and then handed over as though it described all of us, all month. What I find hopeful is that this is exactly the kind of messy analysis that is becoming possible now, and I think the next ten years will teach us more than the last fifty did.

While you are bleeding

You are rebuilding what you have just lost, and a week without food is not how that gets done.

The follicular phase, & why I choose it

Oestrogen is rising while progesterone stays low, which makes it the steadiest stretch of the month hormonally, and it is also when your body is best at handling blood sugar. Researchers measuring this found that insulin sensitivity improves in the follicular phase and that effect disappears in the luteal one, which matches the insulin resistance that turns up naturally in the second half of the month. Steadier blood sugar is the difference between being hungry and being shaky, and that is mostly what decides whether a week like this is bearable. Appetite tends to sit lower here too. It is the spring of your month, and a simpler week fits inside it comfortably.

Ovulation, the hinge in the middle

Ovulation is a hinge rather than a phase you settle into. Oestrogen peaks and then falls away, and your temperature is about to climb. Energy is often good around then, which is exactly the trap, because it feels like a fine moment to begin something and a seven day block started there finishes squarely in the luteal half.

There is a better reason than comfort to keep the week clear of it. Going properly without food does not simply make ovulation uncomfortable, it can delay it altogether. Restricting energy lowers FSH, so no dominant follicle develops, so there is not enough oestrogen to trigger the surge that releases the egg. That is a documented effect of eating very little, not a theory, and seven days is not a small ask of that system. I would far rather the whole thing was finished before ovulation than running straight through it.

The luteal phase, & why I leave it alone

Here the numbers are unusually clear. After ovulation your core temperature rises by about a quarter of a degree and your energy expenditure goes up with it. You are running warmer, burning more, and hungrier, because progesterone does that, and your blood sugar handling has gone the other way. Fasting then means being cold and hungry while your body is trying to do the opposite of both. When I have pushed through it anyway I have held onto weight rather than lost it, which felt exactly like a body protecting itself. It is also why what you eat in your luteal phase looks so different from the first half of the month.

When to start

This is the practical difference between a week and a day. With a single day you pick a phase. With seven you are choosing a window that has to stay inside one, and the follicular stretch is not much longer than the protocol itself, so it wants to start early in that stretch rather than late. In practice that usually means starting around day four or five, even if you are still bleeding lightly. Waiting until the bleed has finished completely often pushes the whole week too far forward, and you end up finishing in the luteal half after all.

The rule I keep

So the rule I keep now: if I cannot rest, I do not do it. The week gets moved, even if that means waiting until the next month. Body always first. Nothing about this is urgent.

If you are not sure where you are, three months of one line notes will tell you, and it is the cheapest useful thing in this entire post.

If you are trying to work out where your week would land and it is doing your head in, come and ask me on Instagram. Timing is the question I get most, and it is much easier to talk through than to read about.

How to prepare for the Rainbow Kit

The groundwork is the same as for a single day, and I have written all of it out in my ZenCleanz ONE review: what to eat in the days before, why you want to be going to the toilet every day already, and how to make the house somewhere you actually want to be. I would rather send you there than say it twice.

Two things are particular to the Rainbow, and both come from it being seven days rather than one.

Clear a week, not a day. The bridge days are quieter than day one and day six, but you will still be timing drinks all day and going to the bathroom constantly, and there is no version of this that fits around a demanding week.

Read both manuals, the ONE and the FORGIVE, before you begin rather than on the morning you need them. Follow theirs rather than inventing your own, and I would say that to anyone: follow the directions that come with what you are taking, not a stranger's blog. Including mine.

What are the 7 days like?

Every day is different, which is not obvious from the outside. Day one and day six are the heavy ones and the days between them are quiet and long. Through all of it I let myself rest properly: naps when I wanted them, no hard exercise, walks and gentle yoga and a lot of lying down.

Day one, the ONE kit

Sixteen timed drinks, roughly half hourly through the morning and again through the afternoon and evening. It is the busiest day of the week by a distance and the one people underestimate, because you are on a schedule from nine in the morning until nine at night.

The abdominal massage matters as much as the drinks do. I have studied abdominal massage, so I was glad to find it built into the protocol rather than treated as an optional extra. On your back, knees bent, working the small intestine in circles outward from the centre, then the large intestine in reverse, from the lower left around to the lower right.

If you cannot get through all sixteen drinks, that is anticipated rather than a failure. Manage five or six, close with the Fiber Crystals in the evening, and take the rest the next morning spaced at least half an hour apart. My ZenCleanz ONE review walks through this day on its own, because it is a whole cleanse in itself.

Days two to five, the quiet ones

Five doses of Hygieia and the gut essentials, around eleven intakes a day, and roughly three and a quarter litres of liquid, so you are never far from a bathroom. Keep the massage going through days two and three. What arrives in these days is better described as evacuations than diarrhoea, since there is no solid food going in to speak of, and it is expected rather than a sign anything has gone wrong.

This is where it got hard, days three and four particularly. That is when the tiredness properly arrived. I felt nauseous through part of it, slept badly one night, and was not good company. By five it had settled: the tiredness lifted, the days went quiet, and it stopped feeling like something I was getting through.

Day six, FORGIVE & the flush

The other heavy one, and the day the whole week turns on. Nine sachets through the day, then the flush at nine at night, then lying on your right side for forty five minutes with your head and shoulders propped above your feet.

There is a cluster of rules around that flush and they are the ones that catch people out: sips of water only beforehand, both bottles shaken together and drunk in one go, propped up rather than flat, and no castor oil pack until after the drink. This is exactly why you read the manual the day before rather than at five to nine with the jar in your hand.

The team at ZenCleanz call this a watery emissions day and give one further warning, which I will pass on in their words: do not trust the farts. Consider yourself told. A sachet of Quantum Particles straight after the flush drink helps with the aftertaste and the nausea.

Day seven, & nearly done

Packet 10 at six in the morning. This is the one people take a day early, so it is worth separating it out from the rest of the FORGIVE kit before you start, because by day six you will not be in the mood for sorting sachets.

After that you are back in the rhythm of the quiet days, the Hygieia and the gut essentials, and it is much easier knowing the hard part is behind you. Mostly what I remember of day seven is being ready to eat.

What helps when it gets hard

You are not just waiting it out. There is a fair amount you can do, and days three and four are when you will want it.

More warm water than you think, first of all. A heating pad, or a castor oil pack if you use them, though not on day six until after the flush drink. Abdominal massage, which is part of the protocol anyway and worth doing properly. Slow breathing. A short walk. A nap without setting an alarm.

For nausea specifically, ZenCleanz suggest fresh air, slow deep breathing, and pressing the point on the inside of your wrist, a few centimetres below the crease. Ginger tea if it comes to it, half an hour away from the enzymes.

Two practical ones nobody mentions. Have witch hazel and some coconut or castor oil in the house, and use the bidet if you have one, because things can get sore by the middle of the week and it is much easier to have that sorted beforehand. And keep a notebook. You will want to know what happened when and how you felt, both while you are in it and the next time you consider one.

The part nobody warns you about

Emotions came up for me, and they do for a lot of women.

It feels like when I stop eating, I make space for what I have been holding to come up. I felt irritable. There was grief. And I really noticed what food had been helping me avoid.

If something surfaces and you want someone to talk it through with, message me. You are not doing it wrong.

What do you eat before, during & after the cleanse?

This is the part I get asked about most and the part nobody sets out properly, so here is all of it in one place.

The week before

Give yourself a full week of simpler eating before day one, and treat it as a slope rather than a cliff. Seven days is long enough that walking into it off a heavy weekend makes the first few days harder than they need to be.

Softer and warmer is the whole direction. Soups, broths, steamed vegetables rather than big raw salads, fruit, rice, oats. Less fat as you get closer. Meat is the first thing I would drop, and I would let alcohol and coffee go a few days out rather than the night before, because coming off caffeine on day two on top of everything else is miserable and entirely avoidable.

If you already eat a lot of raw food, go gentler rather than stricter. Warm and soft, not cold and virtuous.

My ZenCleanz ONE review has the full lists of what I aim for and what I leave out.

During

Nothing solid. Liquid only, for the whole seven days.

What you have is the schedule, the enzymes and sachets and capsules, and a great deal of lukewarm water. Not cold, which is worth knowing before you fill a jug from the fridge on day one.

ZenCleanz set the rest out as an order of preference rather than a single rule. Warm water and the liquid enzymes on their own is how they intend it to be done. Fresh raw juices and herbal teas come next. And if you truly cannot hold a fast for seven days, the smallest amount of fresh raw juice and small bites of raw food are named as the fallback rather than treated as failing at it, which I was glad to see written down.

What they ask you to leave alone is anything caffeinated or acidifying, so coffee and ordinary tea are out, along with alcohol and cigarettes for the week.

Beyond that I would not improvise. The one thing they name for nausea on the flush day is sipping ginger tea, kept half an hour away from the enzymes.

Food is far and away what I get asked about most, so if you are standing in a supermarket wondering what to put in the basket for either side of this, just ask me.

Coming out of it

You can eat again on the morning of day eight, or around midday on day seven. This is the part I would not rush, and the part I think matters more than the week itself.

Start small and warm. Broth, a fresh green juice, fruit, steamed vegetables. Small portions. No fat on the first day if you can manage it. Raw food and sugary juices can wait a couple of days, and your first meal back is not the moment for a big one.

Then give the following week the same care. Simple, warm, light, and slow.

Leave any enema or colonic until day eight or later.

A week without solid food changes what you want, and those few days afterwards are when that either turns into something lasting or disappears by the weekend. It is the whole reason I still do this.

I felt calm. I wanted plainer food, and it was easier to eat that way for a while.

I make room for a week like this a couple of times a year now, and I mean the week rather than the product. The rest, the simplicity, the clearing of the calendar. That is the part I would keep if I could only keep one thing.

Who is this cleanse not for?

Please talk to your doctor before you start if any of these are you.

• •Pregnant, breastfeeding, or trying to conceive.
• •Any kidney trouble, because of how much water the week asks you to drink.
• •Taking any medication.
• •Living with a diagnosed condition.
• •Any history of disordered eating.
• •Unwell right now, in which case the week will wait for you.

The same list in my ZenCleanz ONE review goes into more detail, and all of it applies here.

Keep reading

• •What to ask yourself before any cleanse, which is where I would start
• •My ZenCleanz ONE review, the single day kit and the one most women start with
• •ZenCleanz kits explained, all three compared, with what is in each box
• •Is ZenCleanz available in Australia?, how ordering works from here
• •How to track your cycle, so you know when your slower week belongs

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I hope that if you do decide to do this, you have a beautiful week of it.

And if you need anything along the way, come and find me on Instagram. I am always here.

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