Juicing

We have this work horse of a juicer. When we first got it, we made juices every Sunday. A few months ago we decided to try out a 3-day juice cleanse. I compiled a bunch of juice recipes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and we tried them out... well, we tried many of them out.

For the most part, the juices from our cleanse tasted pretty good, but I must admit, it was overall a pretty horrible experience. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was manageable, but things went downhill around dinner time. During dinner the first night, I got a terrible migraine - presumably from cutting so many calories in just a short amount of time. As I laid listlessly in bed with a pounding headache, Sean recommended I eat just a bite of a cookie to get my sugar levels up and so I did. Having that one bite of cookie made me feel like a new woman. My headache was gone. I was energetic and ready to make the next day's juices. But on the second night, our fatigue and hunger overwhelmed us and we gave up and went to get 5 Guys. We didn't make it to the third day...

If you're contemplating a juice cleanse, here are my major takeaways:

• You're gonna miss chewing. It's amazing how much I missed masticating. I had the distinct urge to just chomp my teeth as I sipped on my juice. It was an interesting experience.
• Doing a juice cleanse at home takes a lot of time and effort. On top of buying all of the veggies, you have to wash and cut it up because the mouth of the juicer isn't that big. Once the juice is made you have to strain it to take out the bits of of pulp. It took over an hour each night for the two of us to prepare the juices for the next day's breakfast and lunch. When we juice for fun, we normally skip the straining.
• It's nice to customize the juices in your cleanse to fit your own tastes.
• There's no comparison to the deliciousness of fresh juice.

If you decide to purchase a 3-day cleanse, many of those takeaways are moot except for the masticating. I'm sure you would still miss chewing! After the experience, we didn't really touch the juicer for a while... until this past weekend!

On a lark, we bought these funky looking berries from Whole Foods; they're sweet golden berries. Neither of us really liked the taste of them - they're tart and earthy - and so I didn't know what I was gonna do with them until I remembered our little ol' juicer. 

I made a pretty delicious juice with them yesterday using some other fruit we had on hand. Our juice contained:

• Sweet golden berries
• Plum
• Elephant heart plum
• Peach
• Watermelon
• Carrot

Even though our initial juicing experience wasn't the best, we plan on doing another one - with modifications. Juicing for breakfast and lunch was doable so we'll keep that. On our second go-round, we're going to  eat a very light vegan dinner. I'll tell you how it goes!