So, I’ve been terrible at blogging lately. All I can say is, life happens sometimes! As much as I love blogging, my life and relationships are so important to me and that will always take priority. The last week has been a busy one with work and other obligations; the free time I’ve had has been spent with my hubby and fur babies. But now I’m back and I’m going to try to make a solid effort to be more consistent.
Juice!
Tomorrow I’ll do a re-cap post of all the outfits I’ve worn since my last post, but today I want to tell you about Justin and my latest adventure: juicing!
This all started with a friend recommending I watch the documentary “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” on Netflix. I just so happen to love food documentaries, so I watched right away. The movie really surprised me: it follows the journey of two men and their decision to do a 60-day juice fast to lose weight and get healthy. They end up dropping tons of pounds, going off medication, and becoming happier, healthier individuals. Both had really amazing transformations!
Now, Justin and I are relatively healthy people. In the fall I made a commitment to try to cook “cleaner” meals and we’ve stuck to that — we always choose whole grains and try to avoid refined, processed foods as much as possible. We eat fruits and veggies regularly and exercise several times a week. We don’t have tons of weight to lose or medications we want to get off of. So why juice?
Winter months tend to make me feel kind of “blah.” I can’t go outside as much ((especially because we just got ANOTHER snow storm)) and I feel my energy level dropping like crazy. After watching the documentary and talking to several friends about juicing, we decided to try it to see if it helped us feel more energized. We had no desire to do a juice fast, but we thought it’d be nice to incorporate juice into our meals.
We bought a juicer over the weekend and decided to get started right away! We checked out several recipes that appealed to us and hit up the grocery store to stock up on fruits and veggies. **Sidenote: There is KALE in my kitchen. K-a-l-e. I honestly didn’t even know what this stuff was up until a few months ago and never thought it would make it’s way into my kitchen. But it’s here! And so is something called bok choy. We’ll see how that one goes…
We decided to try a simple juice for our first try. Carrots, celery, apples, and ginger!
It. Was. HORRID.
That’s right. It was absolutely TERRIBLE. We each had one sip and had to dump the rest. We followed a recipe but the ginger was completely overwhelming — we used waaaaaay too much.
Not to be discouraged, we tried again today. We had a juice for breakfast this morning and then another one for lunch. Both were really yummy!
Justin was starving all day. He did not really feel fulfilled by the juice and was more than excited for a “real” meal for dinner. I didn’t feel overly hungry, but I did have a bit of a headache after lunch. This pretty much solidified our decision to not to an actual juice fast/cleanse. However, I do already feel more energy! At the gym today I ran two miles and spent an additional 15 minutes on the elliptical — I felt so good afterwards that I added strength training after all that cardio. It was awesome!
We’ve decided the best time for us to juice is in the morning. We want to start our day out right with lots of fruits and veggies, which will hopefully help us make better food choices throughout the day.
We are definitely looking forward to trying new recipes and I’ll be sure to share good ones with y’all!
***
Please be advised that I am not a dietician and you should consult your physician before attempting any diet or juice cleanse/fast.
simplify the chaos 