Juice Cleanse

Okay so Nabil and I have been focusing on working out quite a bit over the last two months. We realized at the end of 2011, that we were being a little lazy. I tore my ACL last January, and spent most of last year trying to recover. While we may be kicking ass and taking names with working out, we have not been eating very well. In fact, we have been countering our new sweat drive with more yummy treats. No more! Enter juice cleanse.

Nabil and I actually do eat pretty healthy from day to day, but the chips and cheese was getting a little too much and too often. Our Euro-Trip is about four months away, which means we have for months to get into summer shape. We needed a fresh start. We based our juice cleanse off Dr. Oz's 48 hour cleanse. If Oprah gives it her stamp of approval, it has to be good right?

My dad got us this awesome juicer for Christmas, so making our own juice was super easy. We just shoved the ingredients down the hatch, and viola. Note, some fruits and veggies do have to be peeled or skinned first (i.e. citrus, pinapple, etc).

We started with a fairly common recipe. We found it on a few different sites, including Dr. Oz's. We did exclude the ginger though because ginger is gross, and it makes things taste totally awful. Here are the ingredients.
- 2 apples (more apples will make the juice sweeter)
- 1 cucumber
- 6 kale leaves
- 4 stalks celery
- I also added one pear

This made enough for me to eat and be mostly full for breakfast and lunch, but I did add a breakfast Odwalla juice that was much sweeter. Nabil had to use some of the Odwalla drink as well and also added a tomato juice that he made up a recipe for. I didn't take a picture of it because it looked terrible and had a taste to match.

Below was my breakfast/lunch on Tuesday. I'm not going to lie, the green juices were not very appetising. I had to convince myself to chug them and just get it over with. Later that night however, I did come up with a few more blends that tasted much better.

I think that this blend was the best tasting. I used almost the whole pineapple, a huge handful (or two) of kale, and a stem full of grapes. Naturally adding more fruit helps to make the juice taste better, but you can't add too much fruit because fruit is mostly comprised of sugar, and eating too much sugar in one day kinda defeats the point of a cleanse. I did use almost the whole pineapple with this juice, but I added A LOT of kale to make up for it.

I also made a strawberry-kiwi-spinach juice blend. Again, I used enough strawberry and kiwi to help the taste, but used a whole bunch of spinach.

After research and looking over all the recipes on-line to start the cleanse, the consensus was that the juice needs to be green from the veggies. As long as the juice is green, it is still "cleansing". Most recipes also recommended 2-3 days on the juice cleanse. I think that we will probably do two days with just juice and then the third day we will do only fruits and veggies. Yesterday Nabil said "my teeth are bored". LOL. It really is amazing how much taste and texture drive food cravings. Damn the person who brought chocolate truffles to work today. My mouth has been watering all day! Once we are done with the cleanse, we will make it a point to keep eating healthy. In other words, no more chips! Kale chips are acceptable though. :)

Until next time...