Juicing adventure-Day 1

Eight little bottles of health: the adventure begins!

Today's menu: Celery Orange, Carrot Kale, Broccoli Kale and Apple Flush.  Four quite different juices, although both the celery and carrot have chrorella, a very green dried algae,  in them and the broccoli kale is not surprisingly already green--so the color green is a common denominator.

It took me and Jeremy about 1.5 hours to get my 8 bottles of juice ready.  I am juicing for two days at a time.  A lot of juicing experts hold that you can only store the juice for 24 hours at a time, others actually say you must consume the juice right after you make it.  I am quite sure all of these people are independently wealthy, perhaps due to their bestselling juicing books.  But it is beyond my ability to fathom how anyone would have time to juice fresh for every meal and still manage to do anything else like have a job or raise children.  I am sure some of the nutrients are lost from my 48 hour juicing, but I am pretty confident that they will still do my body good.

 My eight bottles of health are in the fridge waiting for me. I feel a little like I did when I was a little girl on the night before school would start.  My sister and I would usually sleep in her room and we would talk and giggle.  There was always great anticipation mixed with a healthy bit of nervousness.  I feel like I am on the cusp of something remarkable.

A new adventure...my ten day juicing fast

The very first juice: celery orange

First of all let me say that the word fast is a bit deceiving.  I know there has  been a lot of hype around the idea of juicing, fasting and detoxing owing, as of late, to Gweneth Paltrow's promotion of a certain detox regiment. I actually think hers sounds yummy, but it is more of a detox diet than a juicing fast.

There is a lot of evidence that juicing (meaning using a juicer to make fresh juices from a wide-variety of fruits and vegetables) can be a very excellent way to increase your vitamin intake and detoxify your body.  The idea behind juicing is to allow your body to absorb nutrients in their most simple and potent form, while not adding processed food to your body. It helps get all the ick out of your body that processed and refined food puts in.

My juicing fast will be 10 days and I am doing this under the direction of a nutritional counselor and Renaissance woman extraordinarie, Lisa Piper at Natural Living. There are a few others joining us in this experience because as with so many things community can make all the difference to success.  I will be posting a separate entry detailing the overall plan, but this is a juice fast that includes fat and protein in addition to a lot of superfoods--foods that are very high in phytonutrients.

But really for me all of these benefits are just gravy, pun sort of intended…  I am doing this because I need to take a stand.  Food controls me.  It is my Achilles heal and the one area in my life that beats me down. I am severely overweight and intelligent enough to know that if I don't do something to change my eating and exercise patterns I will not be here to be either a mama or a scholar. I am doing this juicing fast because I need to conquer something having to do with my diet.  I need a clean break and a way to walk away on the other side feeling victory and power instead of the desperation and depression I usually feel when I have had another bad food day.

I will be posting about the experience each day... and I appreciate the support of my virtual community as I undertake this step towards health.