18 Days Without Leaving the House, Living Only on Internet Services | Day 15: A Day of Juice

唐云路 · 2015-08-18 · English translation

This is not a contest to see who can stay home longest. QDaily Lab wants to find out whether the new wave of at-home services can give us a better life.

A busy, ordinary Monday turned a little strange because of a juice-fasting package: hunger sharpens your focus, but craving food makes it impossible to think.

This is Day 15 of our stay-at-home experiment (click here for the full explanation). By spending "18 days without leaving the house," we want to put today's popular at-home services through an intensive stress test and see how much they can really improve our lives.

I had already tried plenty of ways to solve the problem of eating, including Soylent meal-replacement powder, so I decided to cover a whole day's energy needs with fruit and vegetable juice and use the time saved on meals for something else. I ordered the juice package in advance through a mobile app, so I count it as an at-home service too: after all, you no longer have to follow a recipe, wash and chop more than thirty kinds of fruits and vegetables, and press a day's worth of juice yourself.

A delivery delay pushed the juice cleanse planned for last Saturday back to today. As it turns out, replacing three normal meals with a light fast on a workday is not a good idea.

[Juice] Enjoy-Früt Actually

Ordered: last Monday; scheduled window: 09:00-11:00; delivered: 09:20

Cost: 179 yuan

A detox juice package ordered from Enjoy, delivered by SF Express

After last Saturday's setbacks (click here for the story so far), I finally began my day of light fasting on juice. A little after 9 a.m., SF Express brought a cardboard box to my door with a "refrigerated" label on the packaging.

Inside was a foam box holding my food for the day, packed with ice to keep it cold. Unlike the Vigorous detox juices I had tried before, this brand's portions are smaller, just 250 milliliters a bottle. You drink one bottle every two hours, six bottles a day, and the stated goal is to "make you feel light."

Probably because I work from home and don't move around much, the six bottles roughly covered my energy needs for the day, and I had no symptoms such as low blood sugar. But for anyone who has to go out to work, especially by public transport, that amount would be risky.

If there is a next time, I probably won't try a juice cleanse on a workday. On a Monday when you need to stay sharp, you want food in your stomach to feel steady. Close to dinnertime, a friend asked me, "Do you feel light yet?"

Very light. Anyone who goes a whole day without eating would feel that kind of lightness.

Over the past year or so, you may have heard of "detox juice". It is expensive, the stuff of legend, and often not very tasty. Made with a cold-press method imported from the United States, these juices have become something close to a religion for their fans.

Whether in the United States or in China's first-tier cities, a bottle of brightly colored juice usually comes from the same kind of small startup, and they have been in fashion for a while now. These juices have their place in gyms and in Instagram selfies.

A 310-milliliter bottle usually sells for 35 to 50 yuan. Why so expensive? Because the marketing for every one of these products says cold-pressed juice "avoids the rapid oxidative damage that heat from the high-speed spinning of ordinary juicers does to fruits and vegetables."

Yet no study so far has shown that the "nutrients" cold pressing keeps in the juice are really that necessary for the human body.

If you believe in this lifestyle, replacing normal food with juice now and then is worth a try. But if I had to pick something I could drink quickly in place of a meal, I would rather try the bottled version of Soylent, which at least has enough calories and fills you up.

[Beauty] Xiaomei Daojia | Arrived on time

Ordered: Aug. 16, 14:06; scheduled: 12:30; arrived: 12:30

Cost: 138 yuan; new-user discount, 55 yuan paid

The toolbox and backpack the Xiaomei Daojia beautician carries with her

Before the service began, the beautician spent a few minutes setting up

Since I was drinking juice today and didn't need time for lunch, I decided to use my one-hour lunch break to try an at-home beauty service. Dianping's at-home beauty section lists five beauty services, including Xiaomei Daojia and Private Beauty Therapist. My choice was simple: going by each one's discounts, I picked the cheapest treatment that wouldn't take too long.

But plans rarely survive contact with the day. When I booked the slot yesterday, I never imagined that the beautician would knock on the door before I had finished my morning's work. Since the experience is part of my job too, I put the work off until the afternoon.

The beautician, Xiao Xue, was only in her twenties. She wore a standard uniform and peach-pink shoes, which, she told me, match the colors of the uniform, toolbox and backpack. Before starting, she spread a non-woven sheet, a face pillow and towels on the bed, then switched on an essential-oil diffuser and some music. The setup took a few minutes.

The treatment included a full back treatment, a neck and shoulder massage, a facial cleanse, a facial and eyebrow shaping, and took 90 minutes. Maybe it was the usual Monday fatigue, or maybe the treatment really was relaxing, but halfway through I dozed off for a while.

Xiao Xue has worked as a beautician for more than four years. Her start as an apprentice in a beauty salon was rocky: she had to "steal" some techniques by watching others, and only gradually found her footing. Before starting at Xiaomei Daojia, she went through about two weeks of training on care products, procedures and service standards.

For me, the advantage of a beauty treatment at home is privacy. Beauty salons usually stress at the door that they are places to relax, but undressing in an unfamiliar place and being attended to by a stranger can still take some mental preparation.

[Social] Yuejian | Earned 50 yuan

Strictly speaking, this was moonlighting on company time. If the man who invited me hadn't introduced himself as a product manager at the "Tongcheng Yuejian" (same-city meetups) platform, I would not have agreed to meet him during work hours.

The day was packed. The beautician hadn't left yet when he arrived downstairs, so I had to ask him to walk around the neighborhood and wait a bit. After seeing the beautician out, I still had work to finish, so I had to ask him to wait a little longer on the sofa.

[Plants] Taidi Fresh Flowers

Delivered: 16:20

Cost: 88 yuan/month, or 22 yuan/week

The flowers Taidi Laundry delivered this week are roses again

If the Taidi Laundry courier hadn't called to ask whether I was home, I might have forgotten that today my monthly flower subscription was due. Beijing's air is dry, and the flowers he brought last week had already spent two days in the entryway as dried flowers.

Since I hadn't called him in advance to ask for a particular flower, he brought a bunch of pink roses again. We had chatted for a long time on his last visit, so this time I was happy to leave him trimming the stems in my entryway while I went back to the living room to talk with my visitor.

After a while he called out to me from the door, reminded me to add water to the vase, and left, closing the door behind him.

To me this is just the right distance: not so unfamiliar that you are on guard, not so close that it intrudes on your life. Through my experience with at-home services, I have already saved the numbers of a manicurist, a trainer, a cleaning lady and a repairman.

The next booking still has to go through each one's service, but I can skip the time spent vetting services and people. Once users and service workers build a certain amount of trust, the product has a hold on its users.

[Cleaning] Ayibang | 97 minutes early

Ordered: 12:10; scheduled: 18:00; arrived: 16:23

Cost: 75 yuan; new-user coupon used, 50 yuan paid

After yesterday's party, the range hood and the living room needed a professional clean. At noon I went through several cleaning-booking apps on my phone, booked a 4 p.m. slot on Ayibang, and waited for the system to assign me an available cleaning lady.

Soon customer service called to ask whether I could push it back to 6 p.m. Auntie Liu, who came later, told me that her previous client's home needed a lot of work and she wasn't sure she could make it in time, so after taking my order she asked customer service to help reschedule. In the end she still arrived within the window I had hoped for.

I had assumed two hours would be more than enough for an apartment this size. When I got up from my computer and walked to the entryway, I found she was more meticulous than my own extremely picky mother; she had even sorted and put away the clutter. By comparison, my own daily tidying felt like nothing at all.

Auntie Liu told me that before coming to Beijing she had been a hairdresser, run a beauty salon and done clothing wholesale. She thought Beijing had more opportunities, so she left her two children with her mother-in-law and came to try her luck. "As my daughter puts it, you can't catch a wolf without risking a child," she said.

When the two booked hours were up, one room still wasn't done. Learning that she had no more orders that day, I asked her to stay another hour and finish the whole job.

The apartment should now meet my mother's standard of clean.

Today's At-Home Service Tips

This one comes from the cleaning lady: "Some clients follow you every step of the way, which is very uncomfortable." From the at-home service workers I have met so far, if you respect their work, they put care into every task. As someone curious about people, I have already heard plenty of their stories, and they are wonderful.
Total spent today: 77 yuan