Happy Belated 1st Birthday to my Juicing Machine!

A couple of days ago marked the 1 year anniversary of me using my Juicer. Over that year it has helped me lose some weight and become overall healthier. I'm very happy with my purchase.

A juice full of vegetables and fruits

I haven't blogged recently about the juice's I've been drinking so I thought I would write out the list of ingredients in today's 2 juices.

Vegetable juice
Romain Lettuce (2 heads)
3 Carrots
4 Celery stalks
1 Parsnip
1 Green Pepper
2 cloves of Garlic
1 English Cucumber
1 Zucchini
1 Tomato
1 Jalapeno pepper
3 Green Onions
1 head of Broccoli
Handful of Parsley
Handful of Spinach
Handful of Cilantro
1 inch piece of Gingeroot

Fruit Juice
1 Apple
1 Pear
1 Orange
1 Peach
1 Plum
1 Mango
1 Kiwi

My vegetable juice made 2 liters, which I'm splitting between today and tomorrow, while my fruit juice made just under 1 liter. Both of them taste very good and I am enjoying them.

Overall, I'd say I'm getting my daily requirements for fruits and vegetables.

Cheater

Sat down last night to watch some TV with the wife and low and behold a big bag of Doritos fell into my lap. Naturally I ate the whole thing! Not good, especially after the past few days I've managed to only eat something solid at dinner time, while drinking vegetable/fruit juices and cleansing juice the rest of the time. Hopefully I managed to lose some weight over the past few days to counter the high amount of fat and calories I just inhaled.

Back on track

Weighed myself this morning and, to my surprise, I had lost another 4 lbs since the beginning of this month. I didn't have the time to take my blood pressure, but will over the weekend. So without doing anything special, other than drinking 2L of fresh juice almost everyday, I've managed to lose weight. I'm now down 10 lbs since I started drinking fresh juice. Very happy with that. Now to keep it up for the remaining of the month (and beyond).

Aches and Pains

I must be getting older because every day I seem to find a new ache or pain on my body. It could be because of the excess weight I am walking around with, but I won't be able to tell for sure until I lose it. All I know is that lately (within the past few months) my feet, knees and legs hurt more than they use to, and considering I'm doing less exercising, I'm confused as to why that would be.

On the juicing side, I did juice yesterday and had 2 good drinks, but today I don't have any because I was exhausted last night so I didn't get around to making any. I know, finding excuses is not a good thing and I fully plan on making some juice tonight.

Harsh

That is how I would explain today's vegetable juice. It contains Kale, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Vidalia Onion, parsley and garlic and I may have mixed up the quantities as all I can taste is the Kale with a hint of onion. For those who don't know, Kale has a very bitter taste to it, making it hard to swallow. I've made it through 3 mouthfuls and I am done. Thankfully I only have half a liter of this stuff to throw down the drain.

On the other hand, my fruit juice consists of Oranges, Carrots, Apples and Ginger, which I have tried before and know I will like.

Oh well, live and learn.

Update of my numbers

So I took my measurements on the weekend and I was quite surprised. Since I started drinking these juices each day (over 3 weeks ago), I've managed to lose 7 lbs. That is a little more than 2 lbs per week, which fits nicely within a healthy way of losing weight. You always hear about people who can drop 5-10lbs per week, the first couple of weeks they started dieting, but then gain it back shortly after stopping the diet. I really don't want to be one of those people, and it is not healthy to lose large amounts of weight all at once. It is better to let your body re-adjust to its new weight gradually so that your metabolism works with the weight you currently have. I really don't consider what I'm doing to be a diet, as I had some "bad" food for me this weekend, but I still drank my juices. I'm looking at this juicing as a way to control my hunger, add healthy nutrients to my body, and lose some weight without starving myself.

For my other measurements, I did lose 0.5 inches off my waist, I lowered my upper blood pressure number, but my lower number and heart rate were a little higher than usual. Not sure why, but I will continue to monitor it over the next couple of weeks.

On a side note, today's vegetable juice, called Red Devil, consists of Tomatoes, Radishes, Red Pepper, Beets, Parsley and Cayenne Pepper, while my fruit juice, called Creamy Pineapple, consists of Pineapples, Mangoes, Blueberries and Yogurt.

Cayenne Pepper

That is some HOT stuff. Now don't get me wrong, I love hot food, but when you put too much, it definitely takes away from the flavour. And that is where I am right now. Today's vegetable juice is called Spiced Carrot and consists of Broccoli, Carrots, Ginger, Cinnamon, and Cayenne Pepper. It was suppose to also include Spinach but I was out, so I didn't add it. The recipe called for 1/8 tsp of Cayenne pepper, but since I more than double my ingredients I decided to add 1/4 tsp and then another 1/8 tsp. Well, right now my mouth and throat are on fire! I like it, but my juice doesn't have any other taste to it and that I don't like that. I do have a hint of ginger, but the heat over powers that pretty quickly. So be careful when adding spicy herbs to a juice as they might just affect how you enjoy it.

Bottoms up.

Thyme, not on my side

No that is not a misspell of TIME, but the herb THYME. I have to say, why does anybody use it. It has been the cause of 2 of my juices tasting HORRIBLE. Last week's juice, which I thought was the tomatoes that was causing the horrible reaction turns out was too much THYME put into my juice. Again last night the recipe called for thyme and this time I put in less than asked for and today I'm having similar (not as strong though) feelings and effects from my juice. I'm almost half way through this juice and I SHOULD be able to finish it, but for future reference I will NOT be adding THYME to ANY of my drinks, or food for that matter. The stuff is strong tasting and really doesn't agree with me!!!

If you are wondering which ingredients are in my juices today, well, here they are:

Vegetable juice
==========
Tomatoes, Carrots, Celery, Garlic, Basic, Thyme, Parsley, Beet, Turmeric, Cumin, Dill, Cayenne Pepper.

Fruit Juice (which is more like a smoothie than a juice)
======================================
Oranges, Strawberries, Raspberries, Cranberries.

I've also drank a cleansing drink this morning to see if that helps remove some of the toxins from my body so that I may get healthier. It consisted of 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice, 2 tbsp organic molasses (made by my brother-in-law) and a dash of cayenne pepper mixed into 300ml of room temperature water (non-chlorinated). To my surprise it tasted great even though it wasn't cold.

Much better

Today's vegetable juice is much better. It consists of tomatoes, zucchini, garlic, basil, parsley, celery, beets, and I added coriander and cayenne pepper. Today's fruit juice, which I will drink later, consists of cherries, grapes and fennel bulb. I'm looking forward to it. Like I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday's was bad and it left my insides feeling funky into well after I ate my lunch. Because of that, and the heat we had yesterday, I didn't make it out for a jog at lunch. Today I have a work luncheon, so no jogging again. Hopefully tomorrow is nice enough to run, which would make it my first run this week. Not good.

Horrible

Today's vegetable juice is horrible. That is all I can say. I just tried to drink 1 L of it and after making it about 1/3 through, I almost brought it all back up. Not sure which vegetable is causing me to not like it, but I suspect it may be the tomatoes as they are the dominant taste in this mixture. Oh well, this will be a trial by error and when I get home I will make sure to make a note in the book that I don't like it.

In an hour I will drink my fruit juice, which I have already drank a bit of and liked it.

Doing it wrong

Just spent some time reading on juicefeasting.com and realized that I've been going about this juicing a little incorrectly. For the past 2 days I've been using my juices to control my hunger by drinking 8+oz every hour between my breakfast and my lunch. WRONG!

According the juicefeasting.com (point #8), I should be drinking 1 quart (1 litre for us metric people) as a complete meal, so in about 15mins, and then several hours later do it again. This *should* keep me full for several hours in between my 2 small meals.

This means that it is now time to drink my vegetable juice and then hopefully before I go for my jog at lunch time, I will drink my fruit juice. Should be interesting to see how I feel later today.

Feeling crappy

Woke up this morning and I felt like crap. Not sure why as when I went to bed last night I was feeling fine. I did lose about 30mins sleep last night as I went to bed a bit later than usual, but 30mins shouldn't affect me THAT much.

On another note (which may or may not be related), I drank over 2L of fresh juice yesterday. One liter was fruit and the other was vegetable. By the time I made it home for supper, I was starting to get hungry and a headache was forming. I will see how today goes to see if I need to increase my juice consumption in order to keep me full all day long. Keep in mind that the juice wasn't the only items consumed yesterday, as I had a small breakfast and lunch (they were much smaller than what I usually eat). My goal is to use the juice to limit my cravings throughout the day so that I my lose some weight while eating healthier. As for the juices, I do have to say that I'm liking the fruit juices much more than the vegetable juices, even though I'm using tested recipes (as oppose to just mixing a bunch of veggies).

For reference, today's fruit juice consists of pears, apples and fennel, while my vegetable juice consists of tomatoes, carrots, apples, parsley, thyme, turmeric and cayenne pepper. Yesterday's fruit juice consisted of pears, apples, grapes, ginger root and cinnamon, while the vegetable juice contained carrots, celery, apples, yellow pepper, cucumber and zucchini. I do have to say that I really like the taste and smell of coriander (even though it is not in these juices) and will be adding it to many of my vegetable juices to make them more palatable.

And now for a lyric quote.

"The time that we kill keeps us alive"
Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, Rise Against (Siren Songs of the Counter Culture)

Calmer?

So last night my 2 year old decided that he really wanted to sleep in our bed. Actually he decided that about 5 months ago and now the wife and I are getting tired of being kicked and hit while we sleep, so we are trying to break him of his habit. So shortly after 2am he stumbles into our room and tries to get into bed (we have managed to get him to fall asleep in his toddler bed, but at some point in the night he makes it over to our bed). My wife wants nothing to do with this so, through kicking and screaming, she puts him back into his room/bed. She then decides to sit there to make sure he gets back to sleep. Hey, whatever works. After 30mins of this she's had enough and comes back to bed. Well he follows along about 1 min after her and now it is my turn. He doesn't want anything to do with me, as he only wants his mommy. For the next 2 hours I am engaged in a battle to keep my son in his bed so he can spend the last few hours sleeping there. This is just great for me as once he does manage to fall asleep it's time for me to get up for work. Now if you are following along, I get up at 4:30am to go to work as I have a 1hr+ commute to my office every day. No big deal, I'm part of a carpool and we have fun on our way to work. Now getting back to this post. During the 2 hours I spent trying to get my son to stop crying/screaming I had a calm disposition going on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not an angry person, but after several hours of being tired and screamed at, people do tend to lose their patience, and I am no exception to that rule. This made me wonder if it's because of my recent change in diet, specifically juicing. I have read that getting the proper nutrients daily does tend to make you feel much better about things because of less toxins in your body. I'm not saying that juicing is why I'm calmer, but I do feel that it could very likely have that effect on me. I guess we will know more the next time (probably tonight) my son decides that his bed is not where he wants to be to sleep.

Sick or Detoxing?

I woke up a few days ago and felt kinda crappy. I made a comment to my wife that I felt like I was hungover, which was kind of funny since it had been over a week since my last drink of alcohol. My throat was sore and I was fully congested. I did have some body aches and pains, but as the day went on, things went back to normal. By the time our company had left after supper, I was ready for bed as all my symptoms had quickly come back. I did have a few beers (2) with my friends, but that wasn't the reason. I thought I had a cold coming on so I went to bed early (10pm) and slept until 9am the next morning. I did wake up around 7 but felt even worse and my wife told to go back to bed. God love her for being so nice to me. The rest of the morning was spent relaxing as my symptoms weren't getting better. I wasn't taking any meds as generally a cold last 7 days on meds and 1 week off meds. I did make a vitamin C loaded juice (2 Oranges, 1 Grapefruit and 1/2 Lime) and that seemed to help with my congestion. As the day went on, I felt better until, again, after supper I had no energy. I went to bed before 10pm this time and knew I wouldn't be making it into work the next day. When I finally woke up at 7am, I again felt horrible. Same thing, different day. This cold was not going away without a fight. As the day went on I did managed to feel better and by the time I went to bed last night, I felt I could go to work today. 6 hours later, I was regretting that decision. This time I decided to take some cold medication to hopefully help me get through the day. Unfortunately they are not working. As I write this, I feel the worst I've felt over the past couple of days.

Now to the interesting part of this post. Earlier today I have spent some time looking for "green juice" recipes on the web and a common theme has come up. Many "green juices" are detoxifying juices. BINGO! Over the past several days I've been loading my body up with many varieties of vegetable and fruit juices that have been putting my body through some form of detoxification. I wasn't planning it, but I knew when I started that juicing is a great way to rid your body of all the bad stuff in it.

Don't get me wrong, I could very well be sick, but from reading about detoxification and it's symptoms, you are suppose to feel pretty crappy during this stage and should begin to feel better once most of the toxins have been removed from your body. I guess I will know more in a few days/weeks when everything is finally out. In the meantime, it is really hard to focus on things when you can't breath and you have a headache. The joys of juicing!

Still juicing

It has been a couple of days now and I'm still enjoying my juicer. Can't say the same for my kids. My oldest daughter and youngest son are very picky eaters, so they haven't embraced the juicer yet. We even had them make a juice of all fruits (that they like) and only my middle daughter drank it. Actually she (the middle child) has liked most of the juices made, including some of the vegetable ones. Either way, daddy gets to finish them. Oh well, it works for me , as it was my idea to begin with. We did have 1 juice that my son liked, the 1st one, as did my oldest daughter until she found out there were carrots in it. The funny thing is that she likes carrots. Kids can be funny at times.

Over the weekend I tried 7 different juices and liked them all. The fruit ones are much easier to drink do to their sweetness, but the vegetable ones can be refreshing if you find the right combination. I started today off with a mixture of 2 fruit juices that were almost finished, but I did not bring any vegetable juice to work (I didn't have any made).

I'm finding it to be a bit of time and work to get the juice made, but the clean-up has been very quick. The machine we bought is very easy to clean and that makes it much easier to do. My plan this evening is to make at least 1 good size vegetable juice so that I may bring it to work and drink throughout the day. I will probably make a fruit juice for the kids and for my breakfast tomorrow morning. Just need to find one that everybody likes.

Juicer has arrived

I'm very excited. Our juicer has come in. Now to clean it, set it up and start juicing. In anticipation of getting the juicer, I picked up "The Juicing Bible" today. It is full of articles about the benefits of each fruit, vegetable and herb, and has over 300 recipes.

Well that is all I wanted to say. Now I'm heading to my kitchen to start juicing.

Making a Change

Before I get into my change, let me give you a little history as to how I got here. Warning, long post ahead.

Currently, and have been for years, I take 3 different medications to control my blood pressure. The pills work, my numbers were much higher before I started taking them. The problem is that I don't want to be on meds the rest of my life. So 4 years ago, I began jogging. At the time I was overweight and out of shape. I could tell because my then 3 year old would run circles around me. I know, most kids have more than enough energy to spare, but becoming winded after just playing for 5-10mins was not cool by my standards. So I started jogging. At the time one of my friends was doing a lot of running and actually training people for the various level of runners that belong to the Running Room. This made it easier to get advice so that I could make jogging enjoyable. Believe me when I say, I never really liked running in my younger years, so taking it up in your mid 30's is not always a fun tasks. I was excited to run and that I did. Unfortunately, injuries, mainly shin splints, followed. Between being determined to lose weight and some good sports medicine\therapy, 10 months later, my shins didn't hurt anymore. I also managed to lose 20 lbs, which helped. I then ran my first half-marathon successfully . It was not a fast run, but none the less I trained by myself and finished the event by myself. I felt awesome that about 1k before the finish line, I almost began to cry. I continued to run afterward and have since completed 3 more half-marathons and several 10k events. My goal has always been to run a full marathon, but with 3 kids, it is hard to devote 8-10 hrs of training each week for 18-20 weeks, especially when almost 1/3 of that training time is done on the weekends. Eventually I will complete one, just not anytime soon.

Now back to my health issues. About 18 months ago, I began a 7 month parental leave. It was great as my wife was also off for part of it, so both of us were home to handle the 3 kids (on the days that my oldest wasn't in school). With the extra help, plenty of time off, and after watching Dr. Oz on Oprah one day (hey, what else is there to watch during the day), I became motivated to read his "You on a Diet" book. It was an eye opener, and so began my 7 month journey of making proper food choices and before going back to work, found myself 30 lbs lighter. I felt great, was beginning to look better and my running time was becoming faster, to the point I was hoping to set a PB on my next scheduled half-marathon later that year. My wife also mentioned that with the weight off, I rarely snored, which meant she was getting better sleep each night. Happy wife, happy life. Then I went back to work. I didn't think it would make a huge impact on me, but slowly my food choices were no longer the right ones, I was finding it hard to get my training in, as now there was work and/or meetings to get to during my lunch time. Finally over 1 year later (today), I've gained all the lost weight and more. During this time, about 3 weeks before I was planning on running another half-marathon, I went on a business trip. I didn't run on this trip and pretty much lost most of my interest to run. I wasn't happy about it and felt that I wouldn't be able to complete the event, so I didn't go. From that point on, factoring in the extra weight I was gaining each week, my runs started to become more and more difficult. I was getting the shin splints often to the point where I just wouldn't run for weeks at a time. Also, my snoring is now keeping my wife up every now and then, making her less happy with me.

That brings me to within the past few weeks. I've been feeling unhealthy to say the least. I'm feeling tired more and more each day, and generally don't like the way my body looks and feels. I've been trying for the past month to make better food choices, but I don't seem to be losing any weight. My exercise has consisted of running for 30mins about once a week, and maybe rollerblading for about 30mins once a week. I'm not consistent, so in all honesty, I'm not helping myself with this poor training. Then a few days ago, I met with my physician who told me that my cholesterol levels were above normal. He said I should start paying attention to what I eat or he will be prescribing meds to control it. Great, more pills each day. I don't want that!

Now comes the point of this post.

About a week ago, a fellow employee came back to work after being of for parental leave. He came back over 50 lbs lighter. He wasn't even a big guy, but now he looks great. I'm envious of him, as I want to be able to do that too. His secret, juice feasting. Now, I've been reading about it and it is some extreme stuff and I honestly don't think I can feast for 92 days (my co-worker did 52 days), but if I can incorporate many of the concepts into my daily diet, then maybe I can start losing some weight and become healthier. So I've talked to my wife and she is partially on board. I say partially as she has no intentions on giving up food to do the 92 day detox program found on the juice feasting website. Actually she doesn't even want to go 1 day without food. I on the other hand, haven't totally dismissed it yet, time will tell if I take the plunge into the raw only world. She is interested in trying many of the juice drinks (mostly fruit, but some vegetables ones too) and incorporating them into her daily food intake. Because of this, we have purchased a decent juicer by Breville and anxiously wait for it to arrive. Our goal is to start making fresh fruit and vegetable juices daily and have our kids enjoy them with us so that they too can live a healthier lifestyle.

We have also purchased the Wii Active and I have been trying to do 20 minute workouts every other day. Eventually I plan on doing the 30 day challenge so that I can tone up and get into a better shape. If you haven't had the chance to try the Wii Active, give it a go. For me a 20 minute work out leaves me drenched in sweat and I am truly enjoying the exercises. Along with the Wii , I plan to get back into running. I think I will wait until I can lose a few more pounds in hopes that my shin splints act up less due to the lower weight.

So I'm looking forward to the journey ahead and feel that I am focused on succeeding. Time will tell. This weekend, in anticipation of the juicer arriving and me beginning to use it dialy, I will try to take all my measurements so that I have a baseline to work from. I may, or may not, post them here, depending on how good/bad they are.

In parting, I will leave you with a quote from a song I like.

"life's a gift and not a given right"
If today was your last day, Nickelback (Darkhorse)