Wow. Talk about willpower. Australian Joe Cross travels across American with a juicer, stopping along the way to buy fresh produce and tell others about his challenge, as well as ask them about their own health habits and get them to try some fresh juice.
Now, I consider myself to be a relatively healthy person. I'm extremely health-conscious, at least. I try my hardest to avoid white flour, refined sugar, junk food, and fried food. Of course, when I run out of healthy stuff in the house and can't get to the supermarket, I will eat something that's not in my usual list of choices, or I'll order takeout from somewhere that supplies some healthier options (whole wheat wrap, light-on-the-cheese, etc.) Or if I'm going out to eat with a friend and can't necessarily get everything health-ified, I make do with what's available.
But after watching something like this, all I can say is DAMN. I am healthy, but I could be SO much healthier.
I've been keeping up with juicing as a health trend for a couple of years now. I'm always interested in doing it. The problem is that I have tried it a couple of times, and the core juice of most of these programs, the "green juice," makes me absolutely sick. I'm just not a vegetable fan.
Well, okay. I like a couple of vegetables. Potatoes would be number one. Real surprising for an American, I know.
I love lettuce and celery. I guess you could say I love peppers; I don't necessarily eat them often but I'm a huge fan of buffalo sauce and I do mix powdered cayenne pepper and crushed red pepper into my oil + vinegar when I'm making a salad.
I just don't really know if I would like the JUICE of those things. The thought of it makes me a little nauseous. This doesn't LOOK so bad:
I just know for a fact that I already don't like the flavors of many of those things.
This, on the other hand, looks AMAZING:
I love fruit. Not ALL fruit, but a lot of it. There are definitely some fruits that I don't like, especially citrus fruits. But I know I would be perfectly okay with juicing fruits.
That's the basic problem here. Majority of juice programs require significantly more vegetable juice than fruit juice. For example, the program that resulted from Joe Cross's experience, the Reboot Program, requires you to drink 80% vegetable juice and 20% fruit juice.
For someone who doesn't like vegetables, that's a HUGE split, and will inevitably make attempts at a juice fast very difficult.
I still may try it out. We'll see.
On another note, after finishing "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead," I attempted to watch "Food, Inc.," because I've actually never seen it before. But the kitten that I'm currently fostering/may-possibly-keep started going nuts and meowing like crazy so I had to cut it short. I'll probably finish it sometime over the next few days, as well as a couple of other food documentaries on Netflix that look interesting.
If you'd like, let me know in the comments if you've ever tried a juice fast and succeeded/failed miserably and why.
