I had been thinking about juicing on and off for the past year but was afraid I would have to spend a fortune every day to do it.  Not really, at least not with the juicer we bought which puts out a pretty good amount of juice.

Why did I decide to start juicing? For starters, I could stand to lose 15 pounds. To be my “ideal” weight, I need to get rid of about twenty-five pounds. How did it get that way? — Well, let’s see: Mexican food twice a week (or more), drive-thru fast food, potatoes and “comfort” food, and a LOT of Coke (the drink, that is).

An example of what I’ve had this week is a smoothie for breakfast that contains: banana, strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, Granny Smith apple, and spinach.

Then, I move on to juicing. When Roy and I went grocery shopping and bought the 25 pound bag of organic juicing carrots, the girl at the checkout asked, “do you have a horse?” I guess it wasn’t conceivable that humans would eat that many carrots.  And it DID say “juicing” carrots on the bag! Anyway, this week’s juices have been a combo of: kale, cucumber, spinach, parsley, carrots, apple, orange, and ginger root. Earlier in the week we did use celery in the mix a couple of times and today I’ve shaken things up by including a bunch of asparagus.

For snacks during the day I have celery and carrot sticks along with homemade hummus. By using the water in the chickpea can ( I know, I need to cook my own chickpeas) it eliminates the need for all of that olive oil.

At night, it is steamed vegetables. Once this week, on election night, we DID go by our normal Mexican restaurant. But instead of my usual burrito, enchilada (both covered with cheese), rice and beans – I had re-fried beans and an authentic chalupa (not like you find at Taco Bell). This Chalupa was basically an open-faced salad with beans, lettuce, tomato and guacamole over a thin tostada. Incidentally, I discovered that I now like guacamole, which I’ve always hated before. Maybe I had just tasted the “cheap stuff” in the past.

By juicing I have been able to supercharge my system with more vegetables than I could possibly hope to chew and eat in a single day.  This infusion of nutrients has caused my need for an afternoon nap to disappear and so far I’ve lost three pounds.

Planning on choosing several days (maybe a three to four day juice fast) when I do nothing but juice but haven’t really picked out an exact time to do that yet. I do know that I haven’t had a single Coke all week (replaced with water, splash of lemon juice) and I have only eaten meat twice. Even then, it was in a healthy, organic chili and the beef was grass-fed.

The juicer we bought was the Dash Juicer, found at Target for $99.00.  Without ever having experienced juicing, we really didn’t want to spend $300-$400 on a super-duper model.  Besides, it is doing a great job so far and with the two-year extended warranty added on for only $7.00 it was a great deal.

Are juicers easy to clean? Well, it isn’t that they are difficult to clean – it just takes a little more time than making a smoothie in the blender, mainly because there are so many different components to wash.  However, the compost bin is loving all the vegetable pulp that is caught in the juicing bin. And all the extra washing is worth it, considering how I feel.