The documentary that changed my life.

This week. Oh my! This one actually flew by for me. I would like to give a standing ovation to all the work-at-home moms out there. And I thought being a stay-at-home mom was challenging enough! (Can we just agree that being a parent is hard, period? Thanks.) You know what’s hard as a work-at-home mom? BOUNDARIES. I’m still learning about this.  

Moving on, though. Is it weird that I consider my biggest accomplishment this week to be that I have consumed a very large amount of kale? Actually, I think my biggest feat was getting Liam to eat some. At any rate, my mother-in-law gave me a juicer she won during a Dirty Santa game, and she swore she’d never use it. So I was like, Oooh, gimme. A possibly pretentious activity, I know. But y’all! I can put GINORMOUS pieces of fruit and WHOLE vegetables into the machine, and it COMPLETELY PULVERIZES them! It’s so much fun. And, drinking kale and cucumber is not nearly as dry-heave-inducing as I thought it would be. Even Liam guzzled a juice this morning with apple, carrot, celery, lime, pear, cucumber, and loads of kale. But, being the novice juicer that I am, I turned to a more experienced friend of mine for some resources, and he pointed me toward this guy. His story is changing my life! 

Joe Cross was overweight and living a very unhealthy lifestyle when he was diagnosed with a terrible autoimmune disease at a not-much-older age than me. He was spending a fortune on prescription drugs that enabled him to get through each day, until one day he had an epiphany: 

If the human body is capable of healing itself on the outside, (whenever we get a cut or scratch), then surely it is capable of healing itself on the inside, given the right tools. 

So he made a drastic decision. And 60 days later, he was off his medicine, at a much healthier weight, and his disease was in remission. He had basically none of the symptoms he was experiencing on a daily basis!

You can watch his unbelievable documentary here, and let me tell you, it’s well worth it! His story is incredible, really. And the big kick in the pants for me is that it makes SO MUCH SENSE. Why WOULDN’T we feed ourselves the very foods that were created to maintain every part of our bodies? Seriously, every single fruit and vegetable was designed to meet a specific need that our bodies have.

So it got me thinking about my own health and my goal to be good to my body this year. What kind of a difference would it make for my own health if I focused more on feeding my body the micronutrients it was designed to run on instead of junk food that slows it down?

Quitting sweets or junk food cold turkey has never worked for me, and if I feel like I’m depriving myself or restricting my diet, I’ll last half a day and then bake something with chocolate. Instead of my focus being on what I can’t eat, my husband and I both just been more purposeful on what we add to our diets, more fruits and vegetables. And not just blueberry muffins or vegetables that have been cooked to death, but fresh fruits and vegetables in salads or homemade smoothies or juice.

Now, I’ll just put this out there: juicing is messy. And it takes a lot of work. You have to scrub the produce and cut it up in pieces that will fit through the shoot. Afterwards, you end up with a TON of pulp that is as hard to clean up as glitter. The juicer has several separate pieces that I typically wash by hand with a toothbrush. It can get expensive to buy all the produce. And, I get a little nervous when the juice turns orange on green on brown with particles in the bottom, and I just imagine that it’s going to taste like freshly cut grass. But I have yet to gag when I drink any of the recipes I’ve made; they’re actually quite good! (It helps if the glass isn’t see-through.)

Even with its darker side, after this week, I can tell I have more energy. I’ve cut my caffeine intake by half and still have the energy I would if I’d sustained my regular coffee habit. I feel better all around, which makes me excited to see the long-term benefits.

At first, juicing seemed like a waste to me. All that work, all that money, all that food, and you get that little bit of juice? And isn’t the actually food much better than just the juice? But after watching Joe’s documentary, I learned that juicing still retains the soluble fiber of the food (as opposed to the insoluble fiber, which cleans you out but also takes some of the valuable nutrients with it), which helps your body absorb more of the nutrients. And a little goes a long way. It’s quality over quantity. It’s the best way to get the nutrients in a whole apple, a whole pear, two celery stalks and two carrots, half a cucumber, half a lime, and a whole bunch of kale, without actually having to eat all of that in one sitting (because who would, honestly?). And I thought I’d be so hungry just drinking juice, but the juice I had at breakfast held me until lunchtime.

And when we think about it, how much money do we spend on items that dress our outside, or on heavy meals at a restaurant, or on junk food that fills our cabinets and our stomachs but does nothing for our health? Why wouldn’t we invest in the one thing that we need to last us our entire lives, our bodies? I guess you could say I have been seriously convicted about what I put into my body.

So, my plan for now is to have a homemade juice or smoothie several days a week and a salad containing spinach or kale every day. That fits our budget right now, and it’s a realistic place to start, I think. You know, baby steps.

Have you ever tried juicing?