The easiest way to make drinking juice hassle free is to buy it by the cup. That’s what I did when I lived in New York City, but now that I”m in Charlotte, NC it’s more convenient to make juice at home instead of driving 10 to 15 minutes to a fresh juice place. Here’s how I make juicing easier and eat healthy at home. *This is not medical advice and I am not a dietician.
Prepping is Everything
You’ll be more inclined to eat healthy if you do all of the prep work up front.
If you’re trying to juice more at home, it’s clear that you are taking control of your health and it’s a priority for you. We’re not going to be lazy and give up on juicing just because there is some work involved. Prepping also makes it easier to make a healthy green salad with a variety of ingredients.
I like to wash and store all of the fruit and veggies as soon as I get home from the grocery store. Trying not to shove everything in the crisper takes a bit of due diligence, but it’s necessary for our success in juicing.
Wash Your Fruit and Cut Your Veggies
Not all fruits need to be cut beforehand for juicing, but if you’re making a healthy salad you’ll want to prep your greens and leave your apples whole until you’re ready for them.
I wash and cut my lettuce, then take out any gross looking leaves so that it’s ready to grab and make a salad or to juice. This bit of prep work makes juicing easier for me later. Having prepared fruit and veggies in the fridge also helps me to eat healthy because it’s essentially “fast food.”
Once you prep your greens you’ll want to store them in an easily accessible container in your fridge.
Luxear BPA Free Storage Containers
Lemon Ginger Jolt Juice Recipe
Juicing Benefits
By now we should all have some understanding about the benefits of juicing. For one, you can get a significant amount of nutrients into your body by juicing. In many cases it would take all day and a ton of chewing until your jaw aches in order to get the same amount of nutrients you could consume in 1 glass of green juice.
Do you remember The Juice Man, Jay Kordich? I thought he was amazing in all of the infomercials I watched as a kid. He was like 80 years old and strong as an ox. He was sharp, quick witted, and very active for his age at the time. He credited juicing with saving his life and the key to his health and longevity. That’s where my interest in juicing began.
When I became an adult and moved out on my own, a juicer was one of the first appliances I ever bought. I began making my own recipes and trying different recipes I found online. Over time, and I mean within just a few weeks of juicing, I noticed that my eczema was beginning to clear up.
My skin was looking healthier and my energy was through the roof. I needed all of that energy to get through my stressful nights working in television news. I worked long hours and overnight for a long time, juicing helped me get through it all. Yes, I still developed a cancerous tumor on my right kidney from stress, but I believe my lifestyle and the juicing that started in my twenties is what helped me survive the OTHER things going on outside of my body.
My Kids Love Juice!
Benjamin (13) and Kairo (3) have no problem drinking my juice recipes. They grew up on it. In fact, the night I went into labor with Benjamin, I drank a full glass of carrot juice with ginger and went on to have the strength for a natural birth. That’s right, no pain meds, no epidural.
I’m not saying that juicing helped me have a pain free birth, but I am saying that I had plenty of energy and my baby got a healthy dose of nutrients before he entered the world. It was magical.
Kairo’s favorite recipe is called Green Hulk Juice. Here’s the recipe:
Green Hulk Juice Recipe
2 green apples
1 stalk celery
4 inch chunk of cucumber
Half lemon
half inch piece of ginger
He drinks it and pretends to transform into The Incredible Hulk. It’s so cute!
(Kairo if you read this and want me to delete this later in life I will respect your wishes.)
Buy Only Organic?
Organic fruit and vegetables can be quite expensive. Juicing in general is quite pricey for a family of 4, so I decide what I want to buy organic and what I will accept as standard. Especially when I’m preparing my salads.
My general rule is that if it doesn’t have a peel, then I want to buy organic. This means that all of my leafy greens must be organic. I buy organic kale, parsley, cucumber, celery, and apples because I like the skin. The skin of the apple contains many of the nutrients too.
What About Lemons?
I don’t mind the lemons being non-organic because I usually take the peel off before I juice them. That’s another thing that gets prepped and stored in containers. This stays fresh because I only cut off the lemon zest or the thick yellow peel, while leaving the white pith as a protective shield on the lemon. There are lots of nutrients in the pith so it’s a good idea to leave some if not most of that on the lemon.
If you like to use lemon zest for cooking, I would definitely buy organic lemons for that.
There’s a few lists online about which fruit and veggies contain the most pesticides and they’re called “The Dirty Dozen”.
Should You Juice Fruit?
The juice man always said that the apple is the most perfect fruit that pairs well with both vegetables and other fruit. So for me, I mostly use apples when I juice and then as a treat I may incorporate pineapples and on occasion oranges. I once juiced grapes and it was so sweet that I wasn’t able to consume it without cutting it with water.
Fruits are high in natural sugars but when you eat the whole fruit all of that sugar is not absorbed rapidly into your bloodstream because it is accompanied by the fruit’s fiber. This is why eating whole fruit is better than juicing it. When you juice fruit, it removes the fiber, making the high sugar content a bit more problematic for me.
Fresh juice is definitely better than pasteurized juice in stores because the nutrients are intact. If you’re that pressed for grape juice, or fresh orange juice then it makes sense to me to juice it at home for the freshest option.
*This is not medical advice and I am not a dietician.
I hope all of this information gets you really motivated to start juicing. DOn’t forget to set yourself up for success and make juicing easier by preparing and storing your fruit and veggies in a convenient and reliable container. Luxear BPA Storage containers work great!
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