Chewing Your Juice: What it Can Do for Your Health and Beauty
I have been 100 percent raw since 1997. I have tried many practices in my health journey, enjoyed many successes along the way, tripped over a few failures, and achieved some remarkable results. But if you ask me what has been the single most beneficial constant throughout my health journey, there’d be exactly one answer: juicing.
Why Juice?
The practice of juicing is health promoting, will give you the best complexion you’ve ever seen in the mirror, and is the best single anti-aging practice going. Whether you want to lose weight, detox, correct certain nutritional deficiencies, to feel light and energy-charged in your physical workout, or to simply experience more focus and clarity in your mind, look no further than juicing vegetables.
I don’t buy juices. Certainly not the kind you’ll find in a can, bottle, jar, or cardboard container at the supermarket. I don’t care whether the label says pure fruit goodness…100% Florida grapefruit…natural…organic or anything else. I make it myself.
Read to Get Motivated to Juice
The benefits of freshly juiced vegetables and fruits are many… There’s a lot of information out there on juicing—on websites, in books and health magazines, Blogs, and online testimonies about “juice cures” from former sufferers of all sorts of ills. Do read as much as you can. Reading is important for self-motivation and as an intellectual base for your juicing practice. But ultimately, it will be your consistent personal acquaintance with the process of juice extraction and “eating” juice that will make you a convert to the power of fresh juicing to change your health for the better.
Some argue that juicing is not natural since it removes fiber. Consider…the human body is itself the very prototype of a juicer. We are the ultimate juicing machines. Just as chewing food causes the release of the plant's cell content to be digested and assimilated while letting fiber pass through, in a similar manner the juicer extracts the precious liquid part of plants, separating it from the pulp. Freshly squeezed juices deliver easily absorbable and highly concentrated nutrients, and at the same time provide significant digestive relief. But what about fiber?—that precious stuff that cleanses us so well as it passes through our bodies. On the raw food diet, you will get plenty of it. Lack of fiber will never be an issue.
How to Make Juicing Even More Beneficial
Want to maximize your juicing’s effectiveness? Simple…Don’t gulp it down. Just because there’s hardly anything there for our teeth to sink into, don’t shoot your juice down the pipe right after you sip.
Crushing food is one function of your mouth, but there is another, equally important, and that is saturating each bite of food with saliva. Juice is a concentrated food, and, like any food, needs to meet with saliva in a very intimate way at the start of its digestive journey. Saliva contains the enzyme ptyalin (aka salivary amylase), which initiates the digestion of carbohydrates right in the mouth. Saturating each bite or sip with saliva is like imprinting the vital information that the body will be responding to for the rest of the digestive process.
Benefits of Chewing Your Juice
While you are chewing, your body is figuring out how many enzymes and what kind it will need to produce in order to digest this bite. It is also allowing the temperature of food to match its own, as well as absorbing the sugars from the carbohydrate digestion directly into the bloodstream before you even swallow. So it only makes sense to drink a fresh juice slowly, mindfully, holding each sip in the mouth for a short while before swallowing. Remember—it's ultimately all about how much of the good stuff the body will be able to absorb and make its own. This practice will ensure the best assimilation of the juice you took effort and time to extract.
Targeted Juicing
Where the range of store-bought juices is limited, your range as a juicing enthusiast is wide open. You can target your juicing recipes to your particular health needs—an invaluable tool if you are trying to avoid using pharmaceuticals and supplements.
Juicing is a big piece of the anti-aging puzzle, with the potential to slow and even reverse the effects of aging by flooding your body with antioxidants, resetting your biological clock over and over again towards a younger feeling and looking you.
The alert, bright, positive feeling that only concentrated plant nutrition can invoke, as well as a glowing reflection in the mirror, will keep bringing you back to the juicer and a glass of the precious liquid gift given to us by plants.
How to Start Juicing?
My article, How to Juice at Home, is a great place to start learning the basics of good juicing practice. For more information on juicing, as well as my personal experience of recovery check out my books Your Right to Be Beautiful and Quantum Eating , now in its 2nd Edition.
Your Right to Be Beautiful
The Miracle of Raw Foods
Juicing is the way to go. In time—even a relatively short time—your own improved health and looks will prove it!
Quantum Eating
The Ultimate Elixir of Youth!