One of the biggest highlights of 2020 was that I bought a juicer! Yay!
As soon as I read, “blending feeds, juicing heals”, I knew I was ready for a juicer. Plus, my body wanted very light food during quarantine - I didn’t want anything heavy (even pasta - and I’m Italian so that says a lot! :)
So yes, I’ve had a blender for several years and love smoothies (and they are still a great way to get in a lot more greens than simply eating a lot of veggies), but with juicing, you by pass digestion because there is no pulp (but even with the best juicer, you will need to pour your juice through a strainer), which means the nutrients can immediately be used by your body.
Remember, the biggest energy output the body does is digestion. More than sleeping, reading, working out, s_x, or laughing, the biggest output of energy is digestion. When you do a juice cleanse or fast (eliminate solid food for 1 or more days), you are giving the body a chance to heal and repair. This is why you always, always, always want to strain your juice - any bit of pulp will activate your digestion.
However, just adding a juice to your morning or using it to replace a meal (and not doing a juice cleanse), is still beneficial and a lot of beautiful and easily absorbed nutrients for your body. :)
Juicing made my body feel alive and energized! I also learned that juicing enables you to access the purest and most energized water on the planet!
What do you mean?
All these fruits and veggies are soaking up that sun energy. They are also out in nature - not in concrete buildings, and, unlike our water, which is treated, filtered and kicked back and forth through miles and miles of pipes, the water in fruits and veggies is so, so pure. And clean! And colorful! And, as I said before, energizing (yes, I keep using that word :)!
Podcast with My Naturopath on Juicing
I was so inspired and energized by juicing, I wanted to know more so I asked my naturopath, Dr. Jen Stanley, to record a podcast on juicing.
She explained why she does a 5 day juice cleanse every November (and why not 3 days or 10 days), why you always need to strain your juice, and which items support the kidneys, liver and the best ones that bind to heavy metals, but I wanted to share a blog post with some of the most important things to know about juicing… and some yummy recipes that go beyond the typical “green juice”!
Lifting the Veil podcast is available wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Can You Juice That?
* Buy organic - Buy organic fruits, veggies and roots like turmeric and ginger when you can since you are going to use all of it when you juicing (there’s no pealing the ginger, carrots or even pineapple when juicing – the only item to peal is citrus fruit. You can leave the white pith, but juicing with the rind on will be very, very bitter).
* Juicing the skin, seeds, rind and core - Since you can juice the whole fruit or veggie, this also means you can juice the seeds. Apple seeds do have cyanide in them, but it’s a very small amount. As always, it’s your personal preference.
I find it hard to wash a pineapple, so even though I buy organic, I still remove the outer layer. However, Dr. Jen mentions in the podcast that you definitely want to juice the core of the pineapple as that’s where the bromelain is!)
Dr. Jen also mentions that you can juice the rind of a watermelon! Like most fruits and veggies, the rind or skin is where most of the nutrients are so be sure to buy organic as much as you can and to juice the skin… and rind!
* You can juice any fruit or veggie except a banana and an avocado - My juicer, the Green Star Elite, says not to juice strawberries (must be something with the way the machine is built) and to use firmer apples like Gala and Honeycrisp. Otherwise, you can juice bok choy, fennel, cabbage, all the roots including burdock root, and yes, even sweet potatoes! I have a great recipe below for sweet potatoes + pineapple + carrots + apple.
* Apples are a great staple - I have found that apples are an easy fruit to add to any juice to help balance it out (meaning, if it’s all veggies and I don’t want it to taste like I’m eating grass, I add 2-3 apples). Because of this, it’s much less expensive to buy bagged apples.
Another tip I got from Dr. Jen is to opt for green apples over red since green apples are more alkaline. However, if you prefer the taste of red apples, that’s great! Juicing is an amazing tool to add to your health regime so whatever you juice is better than nothing :)
Choosing Your Juicer
As with any purchase – a pair of shoes, a crockpot, a trench coat or a juicer, it’s important to decide what you want to use it for. (Some style clients only want a trench coat to walk their dog so it must be waterproof and have a hood, while for others, they want to wear it in the spring to the office.)
So if you know you want to juice a lot of citrus, then a powered citrus juicer would be best. For me, I liked the idea that the Green Star Elite was called Green Star so as to remind me that while fruit juices are great, try to keep your juices green!
However, I didn’t pick my juicer just because of the name :) – I picked it because it is the only juicer that does three things – crushes, twists and then presses in order to get the juice out. This means, it produces a higher yield vs. other juicers and the pulp is very, very dry.
The pulp is extremely dry because it’s gone through 3 stages to get out as much juice as possible. In fact, if I just juice one green juice, I sometimes have no pulp that comes out of the machine! Juice, yes, but it’s still twisting and pushing the pulp inside by the time my glass has filled up. It’s only until I start to make a second juice right after the first one that pulp finally comes out!
Masticating or Centrifugal Juicer
It was also extremely important to me to get a slow masticating juicer instead of a centrifugal juicer.
A masticating juicer means the items are not spun at a fast speed, which can heat them up and destroy nutrients. A slow juicer also means it’s not as loud as other juicers and helps to preserve the juice. You also tend to get a higher yield and smoother juice, but this means they are also usually more expensive and can be a bit more labor intensive to clean than a centrifugal juicer.
Also, my favorite juices have always been carrots, beets and apples. These are all “harder” items and the Green Star Elite does extremely well with these! It likes denser items and it breaks up celery like a dream (I don’t have to cut it into pieces).
Another amazing thing about the Green Star is that the twin gears (it’s the only twin gear juicer out there – most just have one gear to tear apart the fruits and veggies), is the twin gears have “exclusive magnetic and bioceramic technology that allows it to extract juice of higher nutritional content.
The magnets create a focused magnetic field that rearranges clusters of water so that it can latch on to more of the valuable vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients and extract it into your juice. The bioceramic material inside the twin fears utilize the kinetic energy of the turning gears to emit far-infrared - the wavelength at which water oscilates. This has a stabilizing effect on your juice by delaying oxidation and allows your extracted juice to remain fresher longer.” - quoted from Green Star Elite Amazon page
This is important because if you don’t drink your juice right away, the nutrients start to oxidize since they have been removed from their original source and are now exposed to oxygen. However, with the Green Star Elite, studies show that the technology inside the dual gears helps to maintain the nutrients in the juice for up to 72 hours.
This is a huge benefit because this means you can make several juices at a time and not have to set up your juicer daily. High yield, dry pulp, energized nutrients and the longest warranty for any juicer (12 year warranty), showed me how much Tribest stands behind their juicer.
Pssst - I took the advice from my naturopath and bought a juicer on Facebook Market Place. There were soooooo many juicers to choose from! It took about 2 weeks for me to manifest the juicer I wanted - the Green Star Elite, but it had only been used 3 times and even had the clear sticker over the name on the side :)
Cleaning
Definitely clean your juicer right away. It will be hard to clean once the pulp dries (and can really stain your juicer). Also, be sure to use whatever brush they give you! It will be the best item for cleaning the parts of your juicer versus your hands or regular dishwashing brush.
Cleaning the juicer doesn’t bother me, but some people say this is a chore to clean. While the Green Star Elite has more parts to clean then my mom’s Breville juicer, to me, it’s what comes with juicing. What I mean is juicing isn’t something you can whip up in moments notice! It does take time to clean your produce and cut it up.
With the Green Star, you do have to cut things pretty thin. While you can keep stalks of celery as one long piece (single gear/auger juicers usually require you to cut up celery into smaller pieces so the stringy bits don’t wrap around the gear), the feed shoot is narrow so you have to cut up apples into edible pieces while with my mom’s Breville juicer, she can put in half of an apple.
Please note, with my juicer, I do have to press pretty hard when juicing carrots, sweet potato or beets so if someone wants less work or has trouble using their arms, then this would not be the best juicer for them.
Lastly, the “trick” to cleaning the screen is like anything in life – you need to brush or get at it from the inside.
Just scrubbing the outside won’t loosen the pulp enough, however, once you brush the inside, the pulp easily comes out. It’s always about the inner work, no?! :)
Recipes
Grapefruit + Fennel (and apple)
Fennel is great for digestion and citrus is so refreshing. Both ingredients are pretty mild so you can’t mess up this juice combo :)
2 grapefruits, peeled with some of the white pith left on
1 fennel bulb, stems & fronds
2 apples (optional)
Cut the rind off of the grapefruit, but leave on some of the white part or pith. Juice with fennel bulb and fennel stems (all parts of the fennel). As with any juice, you can add some lemon, ginger or any other root such as turmeric, burdock etc. The apples help it taste a little less citrus-y if grapefruit is too strong of a flavor for you.
Pineapple + Sweet Potato + Carrots + Apple
Who knew you could juice a sweet potato? Was is the same person who figured out you could juice carrots? Seriously?! Both are hard and wouldn’t seem to have much water, but they are great for juices!
½ of one pineapple and ½ of the core
1 medium sweet potato (remove any eyes from the potato)
4 carrots
2-3 apples
Pineapple + Collard Greens/Rainbow Char/Dandelion Greens + Spinach + Apple
I also learned with pineapple, that you can “disguise” any of the stronger or bitter greens like dandelion or collard greens. So, if I’m buying a pineapple to juice, I’m also buying one of those bitter greens to juice with it – collard, rainbow char or dandelion greens. I always have bagged apples to juice and spinach is mild and an easy add.
½ of one pineapple and ½ of the core
3-4 collard greens or rainbow char – for dandelion greens, they can be strong so 1 big bunch is good
3 cups of spinach
2-3 apples
1 inch knob of ginger, ½ lemon, parsley, cilantro (all of these are optional, but are excellent to juice and full of nutrients for your beautiful body)
Again, these may not be items we consume or eat a lot, but with juicing, you get to use a lot of them and soak up those beneficial nutrients. I hope you will try this recipe!
Red Cabbage + Apple + Lemon
It may sound weird to juice cabbage, but again, it’s a mild flavor, produces a lot of juice, and the color is phenomenal! You just want to drink it! The lemon can be optional, but helps brighten it up. Add a 1 inch knob of ginger for a kick.
½ medium red cabbage
2-3 apples
½ lemon
Unexpected Benefits of Juicing
Lastly, there have been some wonderful, unexpected benefits to juicing! The first thing I notice is that it’s a lot fresher, smoother and I get a much darker green drink than I do with a juice from the store. It’s just so alive and juiced right in the moment :)
I also noticed my hunger started to shrink. I started replacing one of my meals with a juice because the juice was so energizing and fresh that I didn’t want solid food as much.
I also think this helped with my menstrual cycles as I noticed they got a little less intense. I think juicing has helped because I’m consuming less solid food, ie less toxins (even “organic food” can have some toxic residue even if cleaned really well), and less mucus forming foods.
The only “mucus less” food on this planet is fruit, so unless I’m eating just fruit, I am creating some acidic ash in my system, but with juicing, I’m bypassing digestion, eating less, feeling lighter and still absorbing a ton of nutrients.
Another surprising change was I found myself craving celery in my meals. While I’ve eaten celery before, I didn’t use it in a lot of a recipes so it’s not something I buy often, but with juicing, I’m adding it to every green drink.
So yes, I was getting a lot of the nutrients by drinking it, but now my body wanted it in solid form. This was a beautiful benefit as it made me want other veggies I didn’t really eat before! Plus, I can’t go more than 2 days without making a juice! My body loves them and my skin glows :)
What are some of your favorite juice recipes? Have you been thinking of getting a juicer? I will make a video showing how mine works, cutting up produce and storing and straining juices, but let me know your comments and questions below!