Adventures in Juicing

So I watched this documentary (love my Netflix!) called Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.  I highly recommend this to whomever hasn't yet seen it.  It basically follows an overweight Aussie who decides to spend 60 days touring America without eating anything - only drinking juice.  He mostly drinks this green juice made from apples,  kale, cucumber,  celery, ginger and lemon. Long story short, he loses a ton of weight, becomes kind of a hottie,  no longer needs all the medicine he was on and inspires others throughout the way (making way for an even better story).  It's good.  It made me want to juice!  Now I'm hooked on these nutrition vs.  medicine documentaries,  which i find very interesting since I'm not a big medicine person myself. Let me just say, I'm very aware that there is need for it and I'm not against medicine, but I very much like the ideas outlined in Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and Food Matters (both streaming on Netflix right now.)


So enough about all that - now is the fun part.  I first had to find a juicer.  A quick Facebook request is all it took and a friend of mine let me borrow his that he hadn't even used yet! I picked up the juicer the next day and even though it was nearly 9pm,  I couldn't wait to start! I got the boy involved and we made the mean green juice that Joe Cross drank in the film.


The juicer we used was very easy to use and the boy had fun with it! You can see below where the back bin fills with the juice and the front bin fills with the waste.  Tip for first timers - DO NOT leave the waste overnight in your garbage can! Take it right outside. The next morning the entire house smelled terrible just from that little canister of vegetable waste!

I'll say that the juice itself is very pretty and it even smells nice!
                    

 So here goes my little test subject!

thinking about it...

going for it...

wait a minute...

NOOOOOO!!! 

one more try!

too much! lol

I'm not so sure we will be making that one again.  I think it may have been heavy on the cucumber and lemon anyway. We both drank about a half a glass and that's all we could handle!  We did juice only apples the next day and that was really good.  I also tried this apple,  kale,  carrot and ginger recipe that wasn't nearly as pretty,  but i could actually finish a whole glass.

I love the idea of getting all these nutrients out of one glass of juice and I also found that the days I had the juice,  I could use it as sort of a meal replacement in that I wasn't as hungry after I drank it. After researching online I found out that the juicer I'm borrowing is a really good one (like $350!) and I'm not quite ready to invest just yet.  I've read that the quality of juicer is important and I don't know if I can go to something cheap after using the good one! I might just borrow for a little bit longer! :)