21 Days Later: The End of Juicing

And so ends the juicing adventure. It was actually kind of fun - we tried new fruits and vegetables, tons of new juice recipes, made homemade almond milk, and really found some inspiration in this challenge.
I started this challenge with a two-day juice cleanse, which really turned into a 1.5 day juice cleanse and half a day of fasting. I probably should have eased into this whole juicing thing a bit more. :-P We realized after we'd started that it probably would have made a whole lot more sense to do the cleanse at the end of the 21 days after our palates were better adjusted. Oh, well; I tried and learned.  We leaned on The Juice Generation for guidance and nearly all of our recipes.

After those challenging 2 days, we substituted one meal a day with a juice. For me, this was 90% breakfast and the rest being lunch. For Francisco, this was probably the exact opposite. He does heavier workouts in the morning, so he really looks forward to a protein-heavy breakfast to power him through the morning.  We learned that a little fruit generally goes a long way. Fruit definitely enhances the flavor of your juice, because frankly, too many greens just taste like dirt. But fruit has a lot of sugar, so you want to make sure your drinks are fairly well-balanced between fruits and veggies. 

Overall, this was a huge reminder as to how many nutrients are likely missing from my diet on a regular basis. Juicing can make it so easy to get all those recommended daily servings of fruits and veggies into one cup in their prime form for the body to most easily absorb all of the nutrients. 

After the cleanse, I saw a decline in my weight of five pounds. Once I went back to eating normally with just a single juice a day, I did see the scale creep back up. And then back down again as I tried to adopt healthier habits. I weighed in this morning, and my cumulative weight loss from day 0 is 5.4 pounds. But since your weight can fluctuate so much, I also calculated the difference between my average YTD weight and my average weight the last three days of juicing, and this came to a loss of 3.1 pounds.  So, I'm happy to see some downward movement, and I hope this will inspire future healthy decisions. I have my 6-year anniversary in less than a month, so it would be great to feel better about myself by then!

Cheers!

Dragonfruit

We picked up a dragonfruit during our last trip to Jungle Jim's. Also known as a pitaya, this bright pink fruit is really easy to prepare to eat.

You cut it in half and scoop out the flesh, which separates really easily. You can even use the shell as a serving bowl after you chop up the pitaya interior.  The texture is very similar to kiwi with the small edible black seeds, and the taste is very mild.

For my last juicing breakfast, I actually made a Phase 3 smoothie recipe. It called for a whole coconut, but I used half a coconut (liquid and meat) since I've learned that a whole coconut makes a whole lot of smoothie. I blended that with half a cup of dragonfruit and half a banana.

Really tasty!  It comes to about 280 calories for the recipe I made (dragonfruit: 90, coconut half: 135, banana half: 53).

An Ode to Pomegranates

Just one day left of juicing! Tomorrow will be my last juice of the 21 days challenge.  But like I've said, I hope to keep juicing a regular part of my diet. :) Just this past week, I found a new appreciation for pomegranates.  We've purchased them once before, and they were a pain and annoying to eat. The seeds are still a pain to extract, but when you juice them, yummy!

We used the water extraction method to get all the seeds out.  It's not hard, just a little time-consuming. 

These bright seeds juice up really easily for a nutrient packed drink chock full of potent antioxidants.

I juiced some collard greens, swiss chard, kale, green apple, blueberries, and pomegranate seeds and blended that with some acai to make an Antioxidant All-Star drink. I was a little worried about all the greens going into this one, but it was well-balanced.  A little brown with the green and the purple combination but tastier than it looked. :)

We enjoyed the pomegranate juice so much, we even decided to use it as the star ingredient in some weekend cocktails. We made delicious pomegranate margaritas using fresh pomegranate juice. We'd gone out to Jungle Jim's and purchased about a half-dozen, and my sweet husband dedicated himself to de-seeding all of them so we would have plenty on hand for drinks.  These were by far the best homemade margaritas I have had thus far!

Our next adventure involved a mangosteen. This also took some work to get into because of the thick outer shell.  It kind of resembled a white orange with a sweeter taste. 

It's always fun to try new foods or new found appreciation for old ones!

Homemade Almond Milk

Phase 3 of The Juice Generation includes instructions on how to create your own homemade raw nut milk. I was really excited to give this a try because I don't really like dairy milk. I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian, so, yes, I do consume dairy products and I fricking love cheese...but not so much the cow milk.  I've found that cow's milk generally works best for recipes that call for milk, so we do buy it occasionally, but it can be a chore to try and finish that milk before it goes bad.

It actually turned out to be pretty simple to make our own almond milk. You start by soaking 1 cup of raw almonds in a bowl of water for 8-12 hours.

Drain nuts and toss the soaking water, then place the nuts in a blender with 5 cups of filtered water.  You can vary the ratio of nuts to water depending on your personal preferences.

Blend until you see the nuts pulverize and the liquid turn creamy white.

Place a nut milk bag over the sides of a bowl, and pour the liquid slowly in. Lift the bag up, pull the drawstrings tight, and twist and squeeze to extract all the milk. You can store this in a glass jar for for 3-4 days.

We took it a step further to make Vanilla Almond Milk, so we added in a vanilla bean and six dates and gave it another good blend.

With the work all completed, the first order of business was to heat up some fresh almond milk for a mug of hot chocolate!

Entering the Final Phase of Juicing

We are officially in the final phase of juicing!  And we have some fun stuff to play with. :) Some of the products we'll be trying this week include pomegranates, mangosteen, collard greens, and swiss chard. I'm pretty certain I've never purchased collard greens before, and I don't think I've ever even touched a mangosteen! 

I've been juicing for lunch lately because I've had some yogurt that was due to expire, so I figured I'd eat breakfast and then drink lunch for a few days. This Zesty Green Smoothie included collard greens, green apples, carrots, and gingerroot. There was also supposed to be cucumber, but I belatedly realized this. :-P And there was also supposed to be cilantro, but I thought we already had some, so I hadn't put it on the list for our grocery trip last night. Instead we had parsley, so I substituted with that. 

I think it was still a pretty healthy drink despite my edits. :-P That is way more fresh produce than I would consume on a "normal" day. 

I think juicing for lunch has actually been working out great.  I had a bigger breakfast than I normally would - a Banana Bread English Muffin with some Cinnamon Raisin Granola Mix peanut butter and a little bit of jelly along with the last cup of Yoplait Peppermint Bark yogurt. After finishing my juice, I felt completely satiated for a few hours really.  I just had a couple of cookies for a snack, but I'm not even feeling terribly hungry. 

Juice vs. Smoothies

In the past week, we played around with some new flavors, including Acai, Mangos, and Coconuts. It's next to impossible to find Acai fresh, so we picked up these unsweetened smoothie packs.

Phase 2 of The Juice Generation introduced a lot of new fresh produce smoothies, so it was kind of nice to give the juicer a break and bust out the blender. One of the first smoothies we tried was a Pacific Pineapple, which called for 1 freshly cracked young Thai coconut (water and meat), 1/4 cup pineapple, and 1/4 cup strawberries.  There is a ton of liquid in these coconuts! This ended up making 4 cups of smoothie, so Francisco and I were able to split this.

The smoothies definitely feel a lot more filling since there's added fat and some fiber. I found myself missing my morning juices on the few days I had breakfast smoothies. This Avocado Coconut juice really filled me up, but it just left me feeling a little heavier. So, I'd say it really depends on the person whether juicing or blending makes more sense for you. Half the time, I can be just fine with some Greek yogurt for breakfast, but if you need something heartier to power you through your day, a smoothie might work far better for you. It's been kind of fun to play around with new foods, and as long as I limit the kale to just a leaf per juice, I've been able to tolerate it just fine so far! ;-)

Keep On Juicin'

Still juicing strong!

Even gave kale another shot with this 'Get Ur Green On' juice. Kale, spinach, pineapple, apple, and a sprig of mint! There is definitely a more savory slant, but still some sweetness from the pineapple and a hint of tartness from the green apple.  The recipe called for a cup of kale, but I used a very loosely packed cup of single leaf to make sure I could get this whole juice down. :)

The husband weighed in with some comments this week, saying that he's found it surprisingly easy to replace lunch with juice. He's been regularly juicing for lunch, while I juice for breakfast.  He does have a pear or apple for a pre- or post-lunch snack, but he's doing really well. It can be a little psychologically challenging, but he hasn't found it too physically difficult to trade in his normal lunch for a juice. 

The End of Phase 1 of Juicing

Over the weekend, we re-stocked our produce supply. This is really just to get us through about half the week and wrap up Phase 1. For Phase 2, we will be moving into more 'green' territory. *Gulp.* I'm going to try to anyway. 

We experimented with a couple of different ingredients this week, nothing too exotic, but products I can say I've never purchased before. Yesterday's breakfast juice was Apple Zing with three apples, an inch of fresh gingerroot, and half a lemon. I've tried ginger before, but never fresh. It really did add a spice to the juice and brought more depth to a simple breakfast. 

This morning's new ingredient was fresh mint, mixed in with some pineapple, grapefruit, and orange.  The grapefruit and mint made for for a tart but tasty breakfast. 

Phase 1 has been quite a journey. I had a mini-fail on the second day of my juice cleanse, but I didn't let that hold me back from moving forward.  From day 0 to today, I'm down three pounds. And I think that juicing has been influencing me to make better decisions. I've done better workouts in the past two days than I've done in months. I've been keeping an eye on portion sizes and aiming to stop eating BEFORE I'm full to give my body time to process what I'm putting into my system.  I ended up not counting calorie intake like I had planned to do. There was information for some juiced produce out there, but it was turning into a bit of a hunt to find everything, so I'm just trying to eat reasonably. Honestly, calorie counting has always been the most successful method for me to control my weight, but I will see how this works out for me.

Weekend Juicery

During the weekends, I tend to have more indulgent breakfasts, but Saturday morning I had an Apple, Orange, Spinach juice and Sunday I had TropiKale (Pineapple and Kale). For me, the easiest meal to replace is breakfast, so I will probably stick with that throughout these three weeks.  I love spinach for adding some 'green' to your juice. It has such a mild flavor that you really can't even taste it. Kale, however, is not for the faint of heart. This was a hold-your-nose while you swallow kind of drink because to me, it smelled like dirt and B.O., which is not appetizing at all.  I read that kale is sometimes considered only for advanced juicers, and now I understand why! You really have to have a well-rounded palate for kale juice!

While I struggled to finish my TropiKale (I made it through the full cup!), my husband had his own issues. He was finishing up the leftover beets and celery, and the fruit he had added into his juice wasn't improving the flavor too much.  He's a trooper - much better than me, and he downed it pretty quickly though.

I have so far learned to avoid beets, celery (I don't like celery as a food, and it has a strong 'celery' flavor when added to juice), and kale. All fruits have been winners. And carrots are a winner, too, surprisingly. I don't like carrots as a food, but it has a much milder taste when incorporated with other fruits.

Saturday night we made some fresh juice and blended it with frozen strawberries and tequila to make some fresh margaritas. We toasted to my sweet kitty Zharo's third birthday. :) We also made cake in his honor, LOL. 

Juicing...Fail??

I wish I had a more inspirational message to share at the end of our 48-hour juice cleanse, but sadly, I barely succeeded. My breakfast juice was tasty enough yesterday, but I found that I just couldn't make it through lunch.  It was the exact same lunch I'd had the day before - Spinach, Parsley, Beet, Apples, Pear, and Carrots, but I just couldn't stomach it all of a sudden. I still had a nearly full glass at the end of lunch so I put it in the fridge...and had a couple sips an hour or so later...and then an hour or so after that.  But my palate had apparently had all it could take.  I never finished my second glass of juice for the day.

I'd juiced some beet then some greens then more beet, so it came out with cool layers. :)

In a way, I felt like a child that's told 'you can't have anything else to eat until you finish all the vegetables on your plate'. So, I just stopped eating. Which isn't good. And wasn't the point of this at all.

We decided we would eat dinner at 6:00 to put us roughly at the 48 hour mark.  So, Francisco picked up some grub from Loving Hut, which is one of the two vegan restaurants in town. I decided to have the Raw Taco Supreme, so it still meshed well with the raw diet I'd been on for the past two days.  This was an organic hemp and flax seed shell, filled with organic sun-dried tomato-pinenut-walnut-sunflower seed sauce, organic greens, avocado and veggies, topped with raw sour cream.  Everything I've had from this place has been super tasty - and they possibly have the best burger I've ever had in my life. 

So, I made it 48ish hours. There's a possibility I might have had a couple of cookies after 6:00 PM on Tuesday, but it was close enough. I'd barely consumed anything all day, so I really needed to eat something that night. The original intent was to complete the night and start the morning fresh, but eh, close enough, right? 

Well, the good part is I lost 4-5 pounds just in those two days. Again, not the point, and sure, the weight loss was an expected little perk, but I fully expected to be drinking more juice.

I started the morning with an Orange, Pineapple, Spinach juice. Very tasty. I'm thinking this part of the juicing experience will be much easier...well, maybe until we get to Phase 3. :-P

 

Juicing Complaints

Something weird happened last night. I couldn't even get through my last juice of the evening.  I mean, what doesn't sound delicious about a Carrot, Orange, Kale juice, right? It started off okay, but I was slowly sipping at it and then just gave up. We decided to turn in early for the night since juicing can take a lot out of you and it's recommended that you get a lot of rest. But I started to feel really sick, like kind of a bad hangover. I ended up taking a couple of Advil because I had a pretty rockin' headache by this point and I felt kind of nauseous. Oddly enough, I didn't really feel the least bit hungry.

Francisco and I have both failed to experience that surge of energy many people have when they commit to juicing.  He had commented yesterday that maybe we should have done the juicing cleanse at the end of the 21 days instead of the beginning. Yeah, that kinda makes a lot of sense. But it is what it is now.  Over 24 hours in, so definitely over halfway there.  But I've decided if I start to feel anywhere near as ill as I felt last night, I  may just wrap the cleanse up early.

Reading through some FAQs from Raw Food Life, this isn't unusual. Juicing can make you feel worse before you feel better, because your body has the opportunity to get rid of some toxins. As you discard these stored up toxins, you might have headaches, experience cold or flu symptoms, or just feel weak and exhausted. All these toxins in your bloodstream suddenly are like an attack of a virus or infection, and your immune system may react to them in the same way. You're body is going through a healing and cleansing process, and it's advised that you take some time to rest and look forward to improved health and energy ahead.  
 
Francisco messaged me this morning to complain about how hungry he was, and that he's down to just one more big juice for lunch. He commented that it's "nice to avoid that feeling of being stuffed and sluggish...but I think its been replaced with being hungry, headachy, and sluggish."  Honestly, I don't feel as hungry as I thought I would, but far more headachey than I expected.

But I'm still going to go 'strong' until I officially give up, so this morning began with an Orange, Apple, Spinach juice.  And I think I'm going to take today reallly easy if I have any chance of getting through the last day of this cleanse.

Juicing Cleanse, Day 1

For breakfast, I had a Watermelon, Pineapple, Lime Juice. Tasty but I was definitely feeling the hunger pangs come lunch time. I did a light Pilates workout in the morning and tried to take the day kind of slowly. 

My husband was working from home because the roads are pretty bad around town with the snowfall we had last night, so we got to experience the first day of juicing together.

Lunch was a little more ambitious, and we included more vegetables.  It still was tasty overall though. Not an hour past lunch, and I was already hurtin' for some more food though.

It wasn't too long after lunch before I decided it was time for a snack, so we had a Watermelon, Orange, Cucumber juice.  This juice ended up being kind of a light tan color - not as pretty as the other juices we've made so far. 

When I'm consuming the juice, I feel good. It's refreshing, not at all heavy, and you can really feel good about yourself. But that feeling fades away once your glass is empty, and you just want some pizza.  Francisco came out of the guest bedroom where he's set up his office for the day and announced that he thinks he's crashing. I think we're both feeling some caffeine withdrawal effects since we both generally start our day with a cup or two.  I have a dull ache in the back of my head, and I think he's feeling similarly.

As it neared dinner time and Francisco stopped working for the day, we made some Celery, Carrot, Spinach Juice. This had a very strong celery taste. Which could be good if you like celery. I don't like celery. I think I was sipping on this one for close to an hour. 

Finally, we whipped up one final Carrot, Orange, Kale juice for dinner. Definitely better than the pre-dinner juice. That single orange makes such a huge difference. 

The Juicing Rules

To begin with, we're going to do a two day juice cleanse. On Sunday, we went to our fave grocery store, Jungle Jim's, and stocked up on fresh produce. This is by far the most fresh food to ever be in my house at one time. We pulled a handful of recipes from The Juice Generation and ended up with a selection of juices derived from watermelon, pineapple, pears, apples, oranges, spinach, limes, cucumber, carrots, cilantro, celery, kale, and beets. Phew, I think that's everything! We have 5-6 recipes we'll be referencing for our juicy meals Wednesday and Thursday.

Starting Friday, we will replace a minimum of one meal with a juice. The Juice Generation breaks juicing down to three phases.  Phase 1 involves small and reasonable steps, encouraging simplicity and experimentation. The juices in phase 1 will have a 30 percent green factor, meaning at least some of them must contain greens.  In Phase 2, the goal is to make five drinks in a week containing at least 50 percent greens. This phase is more exploratory and broadens your tastes from sweeter to a little more savory. Finally, by Phase 3, you'll be making a green-filled drink every day. The book includes recipes for each phase.

Since we're newbies to the juicing world, we picked all of our recipes from Phase 1 to keep it more palatable. We'll sample more recipes from the first phase to round out the first week. During weeks 2 and 3, we'll focus on phases 2 and 3, respectively. 

I plan to keep a log of calories, assuming I'm able to find calorie counts for juiced produce.  I'm still in the middle of reading The Juice Generation, so I will incorporate relevant strategies as I come across them.  Tonight I have some yummy Mexican leftovers to eat for dinner, and that will be my last solid meal for the next 48(+!) hours. 

To Juice or Not to Juice?

The juicer that my brother got my husband and I for Christmas has surprisingly been getting a fair amount of use. I think I was a little intimidated by juicing at first, but the fact remains that I really need to make a point to get more nutrients in my regular diet. So, I think *deep breath* that I'm going to commit to doing a juice cleanse.

I've been reading The Juice Generation - it came in my January PopSugar Must Have box, and it couldn't have been better timing! This was the final element to make me finally decide "it is time". I checked out a few blogs to see how others have fared in their forays into juicing, and everything seems encouraging.  

There may be some withdrawal symptoms depending on how 'toxic' my normal diet is. Considering my normal diet, yeah, I fully expect a couple of headaches and irritability, but these effects are short-term, and the boost in energy and clear-headedness seems worth it.  I love the idea of providing my body with concentrated doses of nutrients that are light on the digestive system. The goal is improved health and well-being, not weight loss. Chances are most people will drop some weight while juicing, but this is just an added bonus.  So, let the juicing quest begin!