Juicing- Week One

A week or so ago, my husband and I watched a documentary called Hungry For Change.  It wasn't planned, just a chance meeting with Netflix that changed our lives.  The documentary focuses on the things that are in our food that we know about but don't really know about, if you catch my drift. 

There are loads of things that I didn't know about my food...or maybe didn't want to know.  Take snack food for example.  I knew it was "bad" for me but I didn't understand what made it bad and once it was all laid out there in easy to understand language, my husband and I were disgusted.

There are reasons we are overweight, prematurely aging and have lack of energy.  There are reasons, that even through our strongest efforts, we can't lose weight.

After watching it we vowed that we were going to change our eating habits, our eating lifestyle.  This is not a diet.  It's not about restriction, hard core exercise, carbs or fat. It's not about weight loss plans or measuring or counting.  This is about getting back to basics, about nutrition.

We decided to hold our food to the following standards:
1) Was this food once alive in the form of  a plant or animal?
2) Has anything been added or taking away from this food?

If we could answer "yes" to number one and "no" to number two, it would be a worthy option.  Nothing from a can, box, bag or jug unless we put it there.  The truth is, the only really bad thing for you is the processed stuff, anything that isn't found in nature, yet that was a huge part of what we ate and even though we didn't eat out every night or eat out of a box every night we were still consuming way too many things that aren't natural...salad dressings with preservatives, crackers made with MSG, milk doused in antibiotics. 

We kicked off this change of eating by beginning to juice our food and let me tell you why...because have you ever eaten chard?

Chard is a leafy vegetable rock star. It's rich in fiber, protein, vitamin C,  omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin B minerals and loads of other stuff.  It helps your heart, your blood pressure, it helps to re-build cells and do all kinds of miraculous things in your body.

But it also has the unfortunate characteristic of tasting like death.

So in order to get things into our bodies that we don't like- things like turnips and chard and celery and various cruciferous vegetables, we decided to juice them.  Because if done correctly, you can mask the taste of death by adding something like pineapple to the mix and suddenly the drink becomes palatable. 

We went out and got an awesome juicer, the kind of machine that can pulverize and squeeze the juice out of a rubber tire.  Turns out that juice is super easy to make and very delicious.  Even our kids were downing huge glasses full of these mixtures including things they wouldn't even look at before.  For real, if I had ever tried to feed my kids chlorella, blue green algae, broccoli, spinach, kale, etc...they would have fallen over and convulsed but put it in juice and they're all, "gimme more!"

We also ate lots of stuff that we love; apples, cucumbers, carrots, beets, all kinds of yummy fruits.  We combined that with some beans and nuts and seeds. We will do that for two weeks and then start adding in lean meats and complex whole grains.

And within 5 days of juicing and eating mostly raw foods, we noticed some serious changes.  We slept better, our skin was clearing up, we had more energy, the fog lifted, we lost weight but most of all, we just felt good...happier, lighter, healthier.

I'll keep you guys posted from time to time about what we are doing, what we are juicing, how much weight we've lost and the cravings...they are seriously intense!  Have any of you guys ever juiced or eaten mostly raw (organic) food?  We are just now going into our second week of mostly raw and juiced foods.

Thankfully, the detox symptoms are mostly gone by now...thank God because they were the stuff of nightmares!