Recently, I joined Good Life Fitness and arranged to get some personal training. I was so lucky to be matched with a trainer named Sonita who is awesome. Turns out we know each other from a long time ago when Lennie and I used to work at the London Blues Fest and she was in charge of Belemire Farms pub - small world.
Anyways, she has got us pretty pumped about changing our eating habits and told us to watch a documentary entitled Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/ about a guy who was overweight and needing to make a big change in his life. It focuses on eating habits and the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables - something not too popular in our house - at least not a balance of them. We do have a great vegetable garden each year but really it's just tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, peppers, celery, and jalapenos - not totally balanced.
So, Sonita encouraged us to buy a juicer. Since they are a tad expensive we ordered one through Air Miles account and got it for free - including shipping. It arrived this week and we are eager to try it out as a way to incorporate more fruits and vegetables.
Last night Lennie and I hosted 8 people for drinks, appetizers and games. When I was cleaning up and telling people to take home the stuff they brought our friend Scotty said, "Why don't you keep it and juice this stuff." in a mocking tone, but really it was brilliant, and that is exactly what I will do.So, I got up this morning after Lennie left for hockey, opened the juicer, read the manual, cleaned it, set it up, and got to work on making my first juice. I had no idea how easy, fun, and the amount of pulp that fruits and vegetables generate - more on pulpapalooza later.
I literally threw all the leftover stuff in the juicer; broccoli, celery, cauliflower, apple, pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon, grapes, carrots, limes. I did get hit in the head with a flying apple and a rogue broccoli floret but I needed to learn to get the presser thing on the stuff fast or it comes flying out of the throat part. I was thrilled when juice actually started to come out the bottom.
Wow, imagine if we drink this, the amount of healthy vitamins and minerals we will be getting.
Normally, most of this stuff would have gone to waste - except the watermelon as that is my favourite thing in the whole world. But the broccoli might have made it to a soup, the carrots would have shivered up and been tossed and the cantaloupe, well, who likes cantaloupe.
All that stuff turned into a little over a litre of juice - amazing really. So, tried it and I love it, it tastes delicious and it is so filling. I realize that it has a lot of fruit in it so it is pretty sweet but I can totally see myself being able to throw spinach, kale and other yucky stuff in there and not even tasting it.
But the best part is the pulp that we got in the collector part. I ran to the back yard (in the pouring rain) and dumped the stuff in my garden - imagine the mulch we are going to get and be able to use - it is coming full circle now. 
Clean up was not too bad - if you have ever used a food processor it is about the same amount of work so I would make sure I make a big batch of juice to save time.
The funny part was when came back in from the garden after dumping the pulp I took the machine apart and found a TON more pulp all in the machine - literally twice as much. So I learned to take the machine apart and scrap the pulp into the collector - nothing will go to waste.So, the big question is....did Lennie drink the juice and like it when he got home from hockey? He has said that he wants to get his weight down and eat better. Will juicing help? Will he get off his Diet Coke, peanut butter, and ketchup diet?
We took some before pictures of ourselves in workout clothes but they are so extremely embarrassing they will never see the light of day.
Do you juice? Have you seen this documentary? Do you have a personal trainer that rocks?
