Benefits of Juice

Eating raw foods is a way to give your body some of the nutrition it desperately needs. Many of us are at least slightly overweight, and even the morbidly obese are starving for essential proteins and amino acids. All the processed, cooked foods we eat give us only a small percentage of what we need. Consequently, we eat and eat and yet we’re still not nourished. Psychologists try to tell us we’re eating to make up for an emptiness in our souls. Wrong! Our bodies our empty and trying to tell us so.

Eating raw foods is good for us on so many levels. It’s satisfying to eat them. They take more time to chew and swallow, so we don’t eat as fast. And we’re getting so much more in the way of nutrition by consuming fruits, vegetables, nuts and sprouts.

It can take time to prepare raw foods, however. Which is why a juicer is an important addition to your kitchen once your start to be serious about raw foods. A good juicer can process an entire apple – seeds, stems, peel, pulp and all – and turn all that into a healthy, nutritious juice.

Buying apple juice is NOT the same thing!!! Don’t even look at apple juices or even ciders in the grocery store. Put that $2 or $3 aside and save up for a juicer. Buy bags of apples, orange, bananas, carrots and make your own juices to get everything from the fruit that you’d get by eating it raw. Now you’re getting juice that’s as fresh as the fruit or vegetable you made it from. No preservatives, no processing that strips most of the energy from the fruit. And think of all the delicious combinations you can make with the many tropical fruits that are available now in most grocery stores. You can customize your fruits and add non-typical ingredients like pumpkin to an orange juice. Now that’s a powerhouse of a juice!

Although it is difficult for some of you to transform your diet completely, you do not have to go 100% raw. You can incorporate natural alternatives to the foods you were eating (such as organic raw peanut butter and not regular peter pan). You can also purchase all organic, stay away from cow milk, incorporate plenty of fresh fruits and veggies and only drink water and you have dramatically changed your life already!

Changing over to 100% raw foods right away may be hard for some people due to their personal preferences. Also, by changing over to raw food, the body will begin to detox on its own within a few days. Changing over and doing so gradually would be wise so the body will not have to go through detox so hard at the beginning.

One method used was six days on, one day off which seemed to work as the body could compare food tastes. After awhile, the body would choose what was healthy over the unhealthy, allowing the detox to continue on its own. The feeling of well-being that was felt on the six days was still desired on the seventh day. Contrasts between food types and their tastes were noted, and personal preferences could win for that one-day. But eventually, the non-cooked food won out.

A second method used was to eat raw food “cold turkey” for two weeks straight. On the end of the two-week period, a list was made to see what was enjoyed most … the processed food or the raw vegetables. At first, the desire for processed food was still there but over time, it lost its appeal. By the end of the month, the feeling of “well-being” due to eating raw foods won over the taste of cooked and processed foods.

Keep in mind that you do not have to incorporate a full 100% raw food diet forever! You can eat raw foods 80% of the time, for instance, perhaps up until dinnertime, then go cooked for dinner. Just eating more fruits and veggies alone will change your health drastically.