Juice'n It

Well, I wasn't sure I should blog about this because I didn't want to go on record as a wierdy, but it's what I've been thinking about and doing, so why not share!  It's probably too late to protect my reputation anyway.  Besides the photos are really colorful and I would like to see some color right now. 

For almost a week and half I have been making juice every morning and eating no foods all day, just drinking fresh vegetable and fruit juice.  This isn't the first time I've done a juice fast.  The first time Brandon and I did it together, and at the time we were working together out of town doing field work and feeling gross and fat from eating in restaurants for every meal for weeks on end.  I find it very hard to eat healthy when I'm on the road.  Particularly since we spend so much time in tiny out of the way places that don't offer a variety of options.  Sometimes the local grocery doesn't even sell vegetables, at least not any appetizing ones.  There's nothing like eating at a Huddle House every meal for a week or two to make a person entertain extremes in detoxifying. 

Several years ago we watched a documentary called "Sick, Fat, and Nearly Dead" on our netflix account and we were inspired.  The show is about a man who decides to change his life and his diet and heal his body.  He goes on the road with his juicer and gets other people to do it too.  So we tried it for ten days.  The first day is really hard and comes with headache and whining, but by day three you don't care about food anymore, and after that you feel great.  Lots of energy, deep sleep, blood pressure down, pink skin, synapses firing, and fat melting away.  Like Jamie said after he tried it, you wonder why you don't just do it forever, then you eat some real food and you remember why. 

Mmmm.... food...yummy food...so hungry....  Sorry, I just lost focus - what was I saying? (joking!)

Making juice at home is much easier than doing it in a hotel room.  I'm sure hotel house keeping's staff see it all, but I wonder how many times they've had to clean celery pulp from the bathtub drain!  Hey, hotel sinks are small. 

Since there aren't many types of fruit in season right now, I've been using apples and oranges with carrots, celery, kale, Swiss chard, and ginger. During the summer I like to make juice out of all sorts of things. Believe it or not, but parsnip juice and sweet potato juice are both good, and a combo with cilantro, apple, cranberry is wonderful. Cucumbers make lots of juice, and you can even get juice from lettuce with the right kind of juicer.  I wouldn't recommend beet juice on it's own, it nearly paralyzes your vocal chords. Brandon has violent things to say about the juice I gave him that featured onions. ha he he...

We figured out pretty quick that the juices without many ingredients taste better.  In the beginning I was cramming a little of everything in the juicer and making what Brandon calls garbage juices.  I still think it's good to get lots of variety, but I like the taste better if I drink the different juices separately, or in combinations that work.   My lunch time green juice pictured at the top of the post is an entire celery bunch, and entire kale bunch, and two or three green apples.  It's like drinking sweet chlorophyll, and it makes me feel like I could run a marathon, or at least get up off the couch and do the dishes, which is good enough for me.  The orange colored juice is an entire bag of carrots, some apples, an orange, and about an inch of raw ginger.  So tasty, but super sweet.  I try to buy all organic produce if I can afford it.  Even though it seems like most of the produce comes out the end of the juicer in the pulp cup, I don't feel like it's wasted since the chickens eat most of it, and what they don't eat stays in the compost to make good soil amendments for my garden.  I might have the healthiest chickens in Kentucky!