I mean juicing fruits and vegetables if you didn’t quite get that. Forgive the double entendre in the title but I just couldn’t resist!
I did a ton of research before actually deciding on my body regimen. Same as I did when I was researching my hair regimen at the beginning. Unfortunately with diets, there are thousands upon thousands of them. Most of them do actually cause weight loss and you don’t have to look very far to find success stories for each one. So I actually dismissed the idea of giving much weight (forgive the pun) to reader success stories from the outset.
I was more interested in finding an author who had struggled with overweight or obesity and had managed to solve the issue and kept the weight off. Most importantly, I was looking for a programme that would also give me heath along with weight loss.
I’ve heard the idea before that we here in the western world are overfed but undernourished. I never gave much credence to this idea until I came across a study showing how much vitamins and minerals have decreased in our fresh food supply since the 1900’s.
For the life of me I can’t find the link to that study now but there are many mentions of this fact around the web including this article on ScientificAmerican showing how our modern agricultural methods have depleted the soil. This quote below floored me:
Yet another study concluded that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.
Shocking huh? It certainly gives a bit of credibility to the idea that the reason why so many of us are becoming overweight these days, along with living in a toxic food environment, we are very much overfed in calories but undernourished in vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals.
According to Jason Vale, the juicemaster the obvious solution is to eat mostly fruit and vegetables. But not just eat them, consume them in their simplest most easily digested form. Juice.
Like I said, I have wasted too much time through the years and now I have very little patience for diets in which their inventors or their loud mouthed enthusiasts haven’t managed to maintain their weight over time. This was a very big reason why I abandoned any idea of restarting a low carb Atkins type diet. There are way too many overweight long term low carbers and it just doesn’t sit right with me.
Health for me has become even more of a priority and there are very few diets out there that fit the bill. Jason Vale himself was overweight years ago until he began his juicy lifestyle at which point his weight problem along with severe psoriasis resolved.
With majority of diets there is a common theme of eat more fruits and vegetables. This of course is something that most of us instinctively know; common sense if you will. Still it’s a huge leap from eat more fruits and vegetables as part of your diet, to eating mostly fruits and vegetables which forms the basis of Jason Vale’s books.
I have read Jason Vales 7lb in 7 days book along with Turbo charge your life in 14 days. I’m no stranger to green smoothies having drank them daily for a few months back in 2011 and more sporadically in 2012 but I’ve never done a ‘juice cleanse’ which is the premise of this book.
I came across the 7lb one a while ago but dismissed it because of the word ‘Diet’ in it. But having read the book, I noticed that he actually goes into the whole idea of why diets don’t work and that his programme is not a diet etc etc. He only put the word diet on the cover of the book because of pressure from his publisher to attract overweight people like me who are more likely to search for ‘diets’.
Still I think that juicing has many merits and has the potential for causing an overall lifestyle change for me. And truthfully, after reading the book, it doesn’t really come across as a diet per se. There are no entire food groups that are eliminated and there is also no calorie counting or portion control.
Further Jason Vale constantly lets you know about what happens and how to live after the inital 7 day cleanse for continued weight loss. He is also a lot about mind preparation because he understands unlike many other authors that teaching overweight people about hormones and other such bodily processes does nothing to help us lose weight. Preparing the mind and spirit for permanent change is the only thing that works.
All you have to do, after the initial 7 day period is to do the 14 day turbo charge routine which brings up your metabolism slowly so that there is no rebound weight gain and after that, it’s a matter of ingesting 60-70 % of your daily diet as raw fresh fruit and vegetables. Actually even if one decided not to do the 7 day juice cleanse, the idea of getting majority calories from fruits and vegetables is great advice in my book.
This is not a low fat or low carb programme but it’s definitely low on processed food like salt, sugar and oils but that’s common sense anyway.
I will update with pictures of my juicy meal replacements and exercise during the week. And so my juicy lifestyle begins . . .
