Adventures in Juicing

Juice. Who doesn't like juice? The sweet nectar of manufacturing gods filled with enough sugar to kill a mouse. For years I thought the only way to drink juice was from a pre-packaged container with a sanitary seal. I have never been more wrong.

I took some time off work recently over the Holidays and did what most people do: cleaned my house real well and watched Netflix. It was here that I discovered a world of documentaries about our food crisis and obesity in America. To escape sounding preachy, I will only say that in a commercialized culture we run the risk of feeding our bodies poisonous foods under the false impressions sold to us through diet advertising. Can we really help it when we are all branded by age two? This means that by age two we know how to associate items with their brands, and this is only the beginning of how we fall into the greedy hands of advertisers. Why should they tell us the truth when the lie is so delicious, the lie is so pretty, the lie makes our bodies our enemies until we're weak, and then we become prey for the pharmaceutical companies. Why should they tell us the truth when they get so rich by making us believe the lies?


After watching the documentary "Hungry for Change," I changed my mind about a lot of things I put into my body. It doesn't matter what you believe happens to you after this life, the reality is that in this life we have this body, this vessel, and it carries us through until it can no longer function. I have been poisoning my body for many years. It's a difficult thing to imagine, I mean come on, Diet Soda must be good for you since it isn't full of sugar like regular soda. Wrong. Diet Soda is quite possibly the worst thing you could put into your body and studies show that in the long term it makes people more susceptible to gaining weight, not to mention all of the neuro-toxins associated with aspartame. No one wants to admit they've been duped - we all want to believe that if we buy low fat we are being kinder to our bodies. But it just isn't the case - processed food is processed food.

So my boyfriend and I decided that we would do a three day detox and cleanse our bodies of some of the toxins we've accumulated over the years. A very important element in this cleansing process is juicing fresh organic vegetables and fruit. The micronutrients your body absorbs from these juices can help your body repair itself, which is something it does naturally while we sleep, but we're so full of toxins that the healing isn't always successful.

Juicing allows us to gain nutrients that the typical American diet lacks. When is the last time you actually ate the nutritional standard serving of vegetables per day? It's a lot of vegetables! Juicing is a way to compact all of that into liquid form which is also easier on digestion. So I ordered a couple books on juicing and purchased a Breville Juice Fountain. The trip to the grocery store was rather comical as we made our purchases for the detox. I have never bought so many cucumbers in my entire life.

The detox was an interesting process filled with bad headaches, fatigue, welts on the skin and cravings for the food that I know to be poison. Three days is not a full detox, it's like a mini-detox to get you ready for pursuing a healthier lifestyle. Now that we are past the three-day mark we are back in the land of temptation trying to achieve a healthy balance in a world filled with such convenient poison. I may spend more money at the grocery store now and my refrigerator may look like a garden exploded inside of it, but I know that the investment in my health will pay off in the long run. If you've been on the fence about juicing, I encourage you to jump off the fence and add juicing to your life. Adding nutrients is never a bad thing.


Hungry For Change - Food Matters 3-Day Detox