Juice fasting is fun and expensive
I started a 2 week juice fast. It seemed like a neat thing to do for a few weeks before I have to travel again … I'll be in Switzerland where the UCI will tell me how to be a better Director from October 31-Nov 5. When I'm there I'm sure I won't be able to just eat, emmm drink, fresh juice. I'll probably be eating rosti, papet vaudois, muesli and fondue. Oh, and beer, I will drink a lot of beer.
Anyhow, I've kind of been easing into this juice fast thing. I haven't eaten much other than juice, smoothies and homemade soup for about 10 days. This week I went all-in, only juice and smoothies, only raw fresh food. Soup is cooked, and has a ton of legumes in it. I feel great, my taste buds are changing, I've haven't been drinking beer, eating junk, etc. I do want to do some juice fast myth busting though.
Juice fasting is not cheap, it is crazy expensive.
I'm mostly using organic fruit and veggies, but we have a coop where that produce really isn't more expensive than normal grocery store produce… but, in Ottawa anyway, produce is expensive. Especially when you use this much.
It is hard to store the amount of produce you need to have on hand. For example, this is how much I needed for my breakfast juice:
- 4 cups of red grapes
- 4 green apples
- a bit of ginger root
- 6 carrots
- 4 oranges
- a handful of swiss chard
- about 5 handfuls of Kale
For a more savoury lunch or dinner juice I might do this (its kind of like a home made V8 juice):
- 4-5 carrots
- 3-4 large tomatoes
- Kale
- Parsley
- clove of garlic
- a quarter red onion
- 1-2 beats
- 5-6 pieces of celery
- 1 apple
- a quarter red cabbage
- some lettuce
- Salt and pepper, maybe some tabasco sauce to taste
The whole lot takes up way more space than you would ever have in a normal fridge's crisper drawers. On hand I try to have:
- 6 cucumbers
- 24 apples
- 24 oranges
- 12 grapefruits
- 12 lemons
- 4 big bunches of kale
- 4-6 other bunches of leafy greans (lettuce, brocoli leaf, parsley, chard etc)
- 1lb of baby spinach
- 2 bags of carrots
- 1 bag of beats
- 12 tomatoes + 2 mini boxes of cherry tomatoes
- 2 bags of celery
- a few melons of some kind
- 4-6 Mangos
- 2 bunches of bananas
It makes an enormous amount of compost. It only seems to last for 3 days – or less for some things you want to use all the timeq2. I'm going to try to make V8 juice from scratch. Other than the hassle of paying for it, and storing it somewhere, it isn't too hard to do. The prep, juicing and clean up time are easy and fun – believe it or not. For clean up if you just do it immediately only rinsing with water is needed. I've lost 7 pounds – about 1lb a day – and I'm not really doing much exercise. Although I wanted to, and I should be running daily – one step at a time.
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