JUICE IN REVIEW

I am doing a really terrible job at sticking to things.

Juicing went well! ...For a day and a bit. Friday I eased into juicing by eating easy to digest foods. I ate mostly brown rice (note: I do not enjoy rice) with steamed vegetables (note: I love steamed veg... too bad they are pretty much nutritionally void) and nooch. I started taking an ounce of unfiltered apple cider vinegar flushed with water five minutes before each meal. This used to be the norm for me, but I haven't been very good at keeping up with it as of late. The nutritional stats of apple cider vinegar are too good to pass up.

Saturday morning, I woke up ready to put my juice plan in action, only to discover that I needed to go grocery shopping. Oops. I managed to make it work for the first of the day, and headed out for groceries later. Here's what I made:

Morning - 1 cup berries, 2 slices pineapple, ½ lemon
Snack - parsley, kale, spinach, 3 stalks celery, 3 apples (without skin)
Lunch - 1 beet, 4 carrots, 1/2 oz ginger
Dinner - 4 cups spinach, 1 cucumber, 1 celery stalk, 4 carrots, 2 beets

Usually, my favorite juices are some combo of beets and carrots, but I was surprised that this time around I enjoyed the green juices much more. I had planned on consuming five to six juices over the course of the day, which did not happen. While I managed to separate all of the pulp from the fruit and veg, the process was incredibly time consuming. From chopping everything up, to blending, ringing it all through the cheesecloth and cleaning up, I had passed roughly a half hour making one glass of juice. Some easy math shows that I spent two hours making juice that day. I had next to nothing on my plate (ha!) that day, so it all worked out fairly well. However, I did choose to end things a little bit abruptly after Saturday. Sunday morning I made another juice (1 pear, 2 cups spinach, 1 celery stalk, 1 cucumber). Once home from work, I made the carrot soup from Fresh that I'd planned on having Monday night. For dinner, I made an omelette with some veggies.

I'm not gonna say that this (very) little juicing adventure was a failure. I'm chalking it up to laziness on my part. I certainly could have continued on with the extra full day of juicing, but I really didn't want to spend another 2+ hours dealing with the prep and clean-up. I would love to try multiple days of juicing again, but I will not be doing it with my Vitamix. In all likelihood, sometime late this year or next year I will bite the bullet and order a Blueprint Cleanse. No prep, no clean-up. Just easy.

The likelihood that my day of juicing did anything to detoxify my system? Very, very unlikely. I should also mention that I abstained from caffeine for two days, and it was pretty brutal. I KNOW it was only two days, but still. Of course, it started off with a headache, which lead to some blurred vision and me needing to take a nap. I never nap, not because I don't want to, but because I just can't. Nope. Not this time. I passed out cold and hoped that the extra Zzz's would help with the headache. Not a chance. Attempting to go to work during this period of caffeine withdrawal was most unpleasant. So I'm back on the beans. My first cup of coffee on Monday morning was delightful.

I lot of what I read about juicing said that since your body spends less time digesting, you have a heightened level of energy. This wasn't the case for me, and I am sure that it's due to a combination of the caffeine withdrawal and the very minimal amount of calories that I ingested. In total, my intake only sat at a little over 800kcal for the day, which is well under even what I manage to eat during a day. I imagine that the extra juices that I had planned (but was too lazy to make) would have helped. That being said, I didn't actually feel hungry. I drank a bit under 5L of water PLUS the juice, so hunger was definitely not an issue. Just the energy. 

So, juicing with a Vitamix. Would I do it again? No, not as an all day cleanse sort of thing. It was way too hands on. Juicing in general? Yes, yes yes. I would really like to try my first Blueprint Cleanse mid-way through this year. There ya go... At the beginning of this I swore off spending such an atrocious amount of money of juice, and now I am all for it. Did I accomplish what I set out to do? I think so, yeah. The point here wasn't a major detoxification. In that regard, I pretty much failed. No, I just needed a way to ease out of "holiday eating" (so much alcohol, holy crap) and get back into whole foods. I really (reallyreallyreally) want to gain some knowledge about raw food and holistic nutrition, and this has piqued my interest on a whole other level. 

Since attempting to do this thing, I've been drinking one juice a day, either a citrus combination or a green juice, solely to up my fruit/veg intake. One is manageable. 

Here's to eating closer to the earth.