Shock The System

Day 1 of the Veggie-Juice Cleanse

Last night I said farewell to some of my friends: meat, chocolate, sugar.... it may only be for a week (possibly more) but I knew that the next day, my brain and emotions would be crying for these so I had to indulge a little!

We spent the night out of town, so we didn't begin to juice first thing in the morning.  Instead, we munched on half a cucumber, 2 stalks of celery and a green apple.  Those are all ingredients that would be common in our Green Detox juices, so we figured eating them whole would be a good transition to our juice fast.

What is crazy, is the amount of time it takes to chew raw food!  It took me from the edge of Calgary to Nanton to just eat my cucumber and celery! (That's a good 85km drive!)  I'm glad we're going to be juicing our ingredients because we will be eating a much larger amount of veggies for each meal!

When we got home, I made the kids some cheese toast with ketchup and found myself salivating as I cut the cheddar cheese.  It's amazing how your body basically tells you "EAT THAT! Put it in your mouth now because you'll starve if you don't eat it!!!"  Obviously, I'm not about to starve.  In fact, I'm sure I'll eat some cheese in the not too distant future. However, the way humans had to forage and work so hard to cultivate food for many millennium has been radically altered in the past 100 years with industrialization.  We have so much food available, for so cheap, that anyone can become obese.  Fat is no longer a luxury.  Fat is commonplace.  But I think our bodies might still have those instincts of eating what is readily available because of how life used to be.  It really isn't normal for us to have so many calories within our reach.

Anyway, back to the juice cleanse.  We went shopping for a couple day's worth of veggies and fruits and filled the cart with green stuff.  I think we bought an amount of veggies and fruit that would normally take our family 2-3 weeks to eat (not a few days!).  Sorry, the color is off in this photo, but that is what our shopping cart looked like!

At home we washed and assembled all of the ingredients.  We are using what are supposedly the official recipes used by Joe Cross from the documentary "Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead".  Within moments, we had the juicer whizzing and buzzing and super green juice was pouring into a stainless steel bowl. 

Mean Green Juice #1

6 Kale Leaves
1 Cucumber
4 Celery Stalks
2 Green Apples
1/2 Lemon
1 piece of ginger

We dove right in, gulping down the unfamiliar mixture.  It tasted fresh, peppery, grassy, with a very slight apple flavor.  I have to admit that it was pretty hard to drink.  We doubled the recipe and it gave us each 24 ounces of juice.  I think next time we'll do the recipe just one and a half times the ingredients to give us about 16 ounces each.


Within moments, and I don't know if it was psychological, but my stomach began to feel really gassy and bloated.  For one thing, I was drinking a lot of liquid, but the other thing that probably was shocking my system was the intense amount of fresh nutrients and vitamins.  I almost felt like I might throw up, but I finished it off so we could lay down and have a nap during the kids' afternoon quiet-time.

We still need to drink a couple more juices today... mmm... dinner and bedtime snack!  I've noticed today that I feel okay, maybe a little tired and headachey, but still mostly normal.  We also weighed ourselves to get a starting point and see how this juice cleanse affects us.  Oh... and instead of coffee, I permitted myself a green tea this afternoon.  Going off caffeine cold-turkey is just too much!  At least this way, I am getting far less caffeine and, of course I'm not adding any cream to my green tea.