To Juice or Not To Juice...

No, I don’t mean steroids. Although I’d love to have an even flatter chest and tiny beard… Just kiddin. I’ve been debating whether or not to jump on the juicing bandwagon, and of course I was inspired by Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. I’m not morbidly obese, but after seeing such drastic improvement in a person’s health, it does make you think about what we’re eating and the effects it has on our body. It’s hard to know whether it was the juice that helped the main subject of that movie, or just the sheer act of losing 100 pounds. Let’s be honest… it was probably just losing 100 pounds.

Everyone seems to be “juicing” these days, and I just can’t seem to get on board. I want to, I just have reservations. Instead of buying a juicer and THEN deciding if I like it, I decided to borrow a friend’s juicer for a week or two and see how it goes. Here are a few things that make me concerned, and I’ll tell you how it goes for the next couple of weeks. I’ll also be posting the recipes I’ve used, and any tips I have along the way. So here are some reservations I have:

- I actually enjoy eating real fruits and vegetables. While sometimes of course I’d rather have a bag of chips than an apple or berries or whatever, I genuinely do like to eat fresh fruits and veggies. So juicing essentially means I shouldn’t eat that many more servings of fruit throughout the day. Why? Ah, this leads me to my next point…

- Juices can be high calorie without the benefit of the whole fruit. When you juice, you lose the benefit of the whole fruit you’d normally be eating. This means you get the sugar and calories of the juice of your apple, without the fiber in the peel. The flip side to this is the argument that there’s really only SO MUCH FIBER you can absorb in a day. This is true, so if you’re eating well and high fiber throughout the rest of the day, maybe you don’t need every single gram of fiber in the apples or berries. Some argue that you absorb more nutrients from the juice because your GI system isn’t working so hard to digest the fiber. Not sure if I believe that…

- OMG. It’s so messy. Have you ever made juice? It can make kiiiiind of a big mess if you don’t get all your ducks in a row before you start. And if you don’t get a good routine going to quickly wash your juicer, you’re in trouble.

- You can’t really save the juice. Lots of juicing resources recommend drinking the juice immediately, or within 12 hours of making it. Harmful bacteria can grow quickly in the juice… apparently. This week, I’ll be trying juices fresh and frozen, meaning I froze a bunch of juices on Sunday afternoon and I’ll be pulling them out the night before I go to work and drinking it during the day.

At the end of the week I’ll tell share some recipes I used this week and I'll let you how I feel about it! I’ve been reading a good bit about juicing, but clearly I’m still undecided.

Do you guys juice? Do you replace meals with juice? Have you ever done a juice detox?

Tell me in the comments below!