Day Two

This morning I woke up and wanted to partake of my morning habit:  Mighty Leaf Vanilla Bean tea steeped in ginger root and stevia + (non-organic) Ghiradelli chocolate chips  (which is a big 'no no', I realize since chocolate is considered to have the most contaminants when it's non organic, let alone this lamentable ritual is not even a typical staple for those on a Standard American Diet!)  I won't lie and say I rationalized for a few moments that a few chocolate morsels might not hurt but then I vividly recalled my last failed attempt on a cleanse, whereby it all went down hill after just one 'harmless' allowance. Food was my gateway drug let's just say.  Anyhey, I knew then that I'd only be doing myself a disservice by indulging in this kind of decadence because then that craving and unfortunate habit would follow me for 8 more days and that would be torture. Also,  if I don't stand up for my health, who will?  if I didn't put my foot down this morning on it and say, "no way, margaret -yer not going to put up with this chocolate habit anymore, because you're just bastard chocolate.!" then I might have caved in again.  So I went upstairs back into my bad, sipped some tea and 'bit my pillow' a la Mr. Corky St. Clair from my favorite film ever, Waiting for Guffman.

If you're reading you've gotta see this. It's less than a minute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De6AkndwRpM

So back to my story. Even though I'm not 'supposed to drink caffeinated tea' I figured, like Erin with the Kombucha, it's best to pick the better of two evils on a  cleanse like this where I have to marathon it out for 10 days. Plus, who says Kombucha can't be imbibed on this 10 day cleanse--is it yeasted? So what did I do? Aside from making a truly harmless exception,  I watched mindless crap like 'the Hills' (I just love that sunshine and 20 something drama) that affectively managed my perpetual awareness that this was indeed only 'day 2',  the hardest day next to "day 1". So I hear.  When me and myself was finally confronted with my Breville Juicer, I decided that for the first time in 2 years, I am going to get ready (look out??!- branch out again and change the recipe for my morning green drink. I was so motivated by Natasha's videos in terms of thinking of this as something to play around and have fun with and boy did I! (nothing beats changing one's 2 year long stint with the exact same green drink like this..)

Where I happily disagree with Natasha St. Michael's video is her suggestion that if you don't like a certain fruit or vegetable, you likely won't like it's juice either. I think she's probably right on that most of the time but I was so happy to find that there are exceptions to that alleged juicing rule.  Case in point: I find baked or raw beets to rank deplorable as I would liver but in a juice? They are to DIE for. Same goes for celery. I do not "stalk" celery as a celery lover might, let's just put it that way, and that was a joke I stole from the juicefeasting guys I found only semi-funny but I have found raw foodists love their puns and jokes but again, I have succeeded again at wandering off. Back to this lengthy saga of 'day 2", it was SO delicious in my juice this morning and  the celery-I-don't-like-plain- used it as a base tasted like heaven. Last, I loathe parsley and even juices in the past that have had too much have made me make one of those mortified sour faces I'll try to capture soon on film (hint: it would involve inviting John to a seemingly innocuous taste of my 'divine' pineapple, mango and coconut juice only to find that 'surprise! I put about 5 inches of ginger in there! The face is priceless- I shall try to 'punk him' again soon. [To balance the score I make John a ton of fresh juices he wouldn't otherwise have so ...].

Here is the juice (that looks like all the other green juices I realize) next to the pineapple juice I had first:

And here are the recipes: The benefits of these beverages are listed in my mango juice blog (only there's no mango here, duh..) and the benefits of the spinach juice are mentioned in my "quickie green juice" recipe, so I should probably list the benefits. I was going to list them out but I need to get going, this is getting long and there are too many so here they are for now: http://www.naturally-healthy-eating.com/benefits-of-spinach.html


Pineapple 'Punch':
1 small pineapple
3 inches aloe
3 inches ginger root (the 'punch' part) haha get it?? do ya? huh? did yagetit?

Updated Version of Green Juice (this time instead of lettuce hearts forming the base, I used celery; and instead of collard greens, I used spinach)

Superbly Spinach 
3/4 lb of organic spinach
1 organic lemon
1/2 bag of organic celery (a great source of natural sodium)
3 inches ginger root
2 organic fuji apples
1 organic granny smith apple
3 leaves of parsley

To my utter amazement, this juice far trumped the 'green lemonade' juice I've been taking in daily for two years. So lesson learned: things I don't love by themselves can taste amazing when mixed with other ingredients in juice and that I need to try new juices.

BTW-I also chose to have my fruit juice first (before my alkaline rich green juice) for a variety of reasons. 1) When it comes to detoxing, you wanna leave your body with an alkaline ash, not a disease causing acidic one; 2) Fruit should be consumed isolated and alone on a totally empty stomach. The reason for this is that it takes about 2 hours to exit the body and mixing it with a vegetable juice (even though I added apples to it) would  more likely create a situation where the fruit sits a LOT longer and festers. I want to return to this part later because I think it deserves more time.

Ok so back to my day before I take off for my discipleship group, from 11-1pm I had no idea I was juice fasting, I mean "feasting" because I was at the lovely DMV. Nothing quite distracts like the DMV and I'll just leave it at that for now. Then I picked up 3 cases of Coconuts because I simply cannot live without them and drove back to work. I had started this blog this morning so since I'm at work I shall bid you adieu and return to this later on tonight. and Erin? if you're reading, I freaking love you!!!