Juicing for Health: all links so far

juicing for health

• How to alkalize your body first thing in the morning

• Juicing for Better Health

• Juicing: It’s all about the preparation (upcoming)

• Juicing—some helpful tips (upcoming)

• The Lazy (or Busy) Person’s Guide to Juicing

   

The Lazy (or Busy) Person’s Guide to Juicing

The following, for purists, is probably going to sound like an abomination, but life is life and realistically some things just don’t happen exactly the way we always want them to.

For instance, take my love of juicing. Over the past few months I have had out-of-town guests, the holidays, a busy work schedule. This certainly doesn’t preclude doing all it takes to juice, but I did find myself a bit out of the habit. I had even almost let $20 worth of lovely produce spoil in my fridge. It was at that point I decided to take on a new way of juicing. Not one I will adopt long-term, but for now it’s the best I can do.

I decided in order to juice I would have to do something I hadn’t previously thought to do, but given the fact I wasn’t juicing at all, it seemed like a good alternative. I went to the store and purchased packaged veggies vs. the bulk variety. This meant spinach and kale, for the most part, but also packaged carrots and green beans, too. Buying the produce in packages meant not having to do the whole soaking procedure, since the prepackaged produce is already washed (and cut). It may sound lazy, which it is, but this also meant I would be able to juice immediately without all the fuss.

As I’ve said, going the lazy way isn’t the optimal way to get the most from your juice. But when I sip my juice and see all the wonderful ingredients that are getting into my body, prepackaged or not, I know I’m doing great things for my health.

Someday I will grow my own produce and that will make the most best-est and most nutritious juice drink available. For now, however, I will do my best to get bulk veggies, and when I can’t—yes, I will buy prepackaged produce, all in good health. 

For more information, see:

• Juicing for Better Health
• Doing The Next Best Thing
• How to alkalize your body first thing in the morning

whenever you can

How to alkalize your body first thing in the morning

As you may have read, I have once again become a proponent of juicing. If you are unsure what exactly juicing involves, read the above article that will tell you the basics of this health-producing activity.

Although I will explain in more detail in future articles, in brief you want your body to be slightly alkaline not acidic on the pH scale. Therefore starting your day by alkalizing your insides is a healthy thing to do—every day. With that said, my new, favorite morning routine looks like this :

• First, right after I wake up, I drink a glass of water with a lemon ice cube melted in it. I do this prior to doing anything, including walking my dog, Quincy Blu. This helps to alkalize my system right away. (Although it seems counterintuitive, lemon juice creates alkalinity not acidity in your body.)
• Second, after returning from our morning walk, I make myself a wonderful glassful of cantaloupe juice. Another easy way to alkalize my insides along with supplying essential nutrients. All before my morning cup of coffee (I only have the one). 

I usually use half a melon unless the cantaloupe is especially large. As with most fruits and vegetables when juicing, the entire rind of the cantaloupe is used as well as the fruit inside. At first this may sound strange, but almost all of the vitamin and mineral content is held in the rinds of fruits. So by drinking the entire cantaloupe, I am getting tremendous benefits, outweighing just eating the inside fruit alone.

Citrus fruits, in general, are the only produce where you don’t put the rinds through the juicer. If you do, it can cause indigestion. (Cantaloupe juice, by the way, isn’t quite as orange as in this photo. Because you are juicing the rind as well as the fruit inside, the juice has more of a greenish hue to it. Still yummy, no matter the color.)

Cantaloupe is one of the only instances where you do remove the seeds before juicing—or at least I do. If not, they will not be ground in the juicer (they are too flat) and you might find them scattered about since they kind of fly out of the juicer. If you don’t mind this, don’t remove them. Sometimes you can remove most of the seeds while leaving the netting they are held in, which is part of the cantaloupe and does have nutrient value. For me, the mess is not worth the small amount of juice I’ll get from the netting with seeds, so I just scoop all of that out of the middle of the melon.

Cantaloupes are high in vitamin C and provitamin A (beta carotene) and contain high quantities of digestive enzymes. They are also on the higher side of alkalinity, something imperative for healthy body mechanics. Cantaloupes are actually one of the most nutritious fruits available. Drinking this juice first thing in the morning is giving my body a good start each day. Because it’s a seasonal fruit, I usually juice cantaloupes in the warmer months. 

On a personal note: I adhere to several of the rules of food combining. One rule is never mix melons with any other food, including other fruits. So, although when I juice I usually combine several fruits and vegetables together to make one drink, I juice cantaloupe by itself. I drink it first thing in the morning then wait at least 30 minutes before eating or drinking anything else.

I have a routine when I get home from the store to get off as much of the pesticides and other residual “stuff” that might be clinging onto my produce. When you juice, you must not skip this step, otherwise you could be taking in chemicals and toxins that cancel out some of the benefits of the juice you are drinking.

Give cantaloupe juice a try for a first-thing-in-the-morning pickup me up. But be careful: you might get hooked!

For more information, see:

• Juicing for Better Health
• A Quick Tip to have fresh lemon juice at the ready—always
• Hot water and lemon to the rescue

Juicing for Better Health

Juicing is not to be confused with drinking juice. The two couldn’t be more different. Juicing involves taking whole fruits and vegetables (skin, rinds, and all) and putting them through a machine called a juicer. What comes out is the liquid version of whatever you put through the machine. Drinking juice, orange or apple or grape, for instance, usually involves ingesting a manufactured product that has other ingredients in it, not just the fruit juice. Juicing is a way of getting pure vitamins and minerals into your body very quickly and without any preservatives or other chemicals.

I was given a juicer years ago as a birthday present. This was a thoughtful gift, although I rarely used it. In fact, when I was moving to Chicago in 2002, I wasn’t sure if I should pack it up and bring it with me. Why should I? I hardly ever used it! I didn’t have any good books on juicing, and back then I wasn’t very clear on the hows and whys of juicing. So, like many things in life, I just forgot about it.

Then a friend of mine who was a big proponent of juicing helped get me started on the juicing path. It came at a time when I was in the throes of writing Skin Care A to Z (my second book) and had been neglecting my dietary needs; if I wasn’t skipping meals altogether, I was eating foods I don’t often eat—things that were not contributing to a healthy body. My friend’s enthusiasm about juicing spurred me on to develop my own enthusiastic pursuit of juicing for my health.

My Juiceman Jr. juicer

As you will read in an upcoming article, My quest for proper pH (diet-wise), my enthusiasm died down eventually and my poor juicer spend several years in the back of a kitchen cabinet. But recently it has made another (hopefully permanent) appearance, and it happily sits out on my kitchen counter.

There are many juicing machines available. I have a small, inexpensive Juiceman Junior model (under $100), that has a good motor. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a juicer, but you don’t have to. It depends on how much you are really going to use the juicer. If you haven’t done this before, you might want to go with a less expensive machine until you are sure juicing is something you are going to do regularly. I have recently seen juicers on Amazon.com for under $50. It may be a matter of you get what you pay for, but then again one of these less expensive machines may work well. I’ll use my inexpensive machine until it stops giving me daily green drinks.

There are several books on the market describing what juicing is and how to juice different fruits and vegetables. I have read several of these books, but found one to stand out above the rest. You may have seen Jay Kordich, aka The Juiceman®, on TV infomercials. At the beginning of my juicing adventure, it was his book, The Juiceman’s Power of Juicing, that I went to most often. I found the instructions about how to juice, what tools I would need, and even information on juicers to be the most straightforward and easy to understand. Whether you choose to read his book or another book on the subject, I hope you will add juicing to your diet. It is a wonderful way to get powerful nutrients easily and readily into your body—for your health!

I couldn’t end this article without telling you one more thing. I am sensitive to sugar. I also believe that sugar causes breakouts—not just in my skin, but in anyone who is skin-sensitive to sugar. With that said, when you start juicing be careful how much carrot juice you drink. I have found through trial and error that I am highly sensitive to the sugar in carrots and drinking carrot juice can make my skin break out. It tends to give me canker sores as well. I will add a few carrots to certain drinks, but I don’t drink straight carrot juice. So, in your quest to bring the power of juicing into your life, do watch how your skin may be reacting to high-sugar produce like carrots. You may not breakout, but if you are sensitive to sugar, you may.

For more information, see:

• How to alkalize your body first thing in the morning
• Canker Sores—ouch!
• I’m sensitive to sugar—are you?