"Green" Cocktails

At the risk of boring you about my new favorite subject which is "juicing", I feel I must for the sake of good communication. It all started when I saw an old high school friend on Oprah. Kris Carr is her name and cancer has changed her life.  She decided that since there was no cure for her rare form of vascular sarcoma, the only power she had in her healing process would be to control everything she put into her body. She spent years researching everything under the sun and landed soundly into the world of raw foods, wheatgrass and juicing!  

While this encompasses an entire lifestyle change, which can be quite expensive and challenging with children, I am very interested in the whole juicing thing.  It's fun, it's green and it's super healthy.  I figure that if I can kick-start my day with a healthy dose of chlorophyll, live enzymes, vitamins and minerals, then I may offset some of the other junk that I take in which can damage my body. (i.e. brownies, cookies, wine, cheese, etc.) The pleasant surprise is that the more I juice, the better I feel, which makes my cravings for the "bad stuff" decrease.

The girls actually like the juice depending on what I put into it and the baby especially enjoys sipping from the green straw.  

Fact: "The only place you will find the "helpers" you need to detoxify and restore your cells from the toxic poisons of synthetic, processed and indigestible foods (mostly meat and dairy) is in uncooked plant foods and their juices." (Natalia Rose, Phd, author of The Raw Food Detox Diet)

Why juice instead of just eating the veggies, you ask? Well.....if you could see how much stuff I throw into the juicer to end up with 8 ounces of juice, you would have half of the answer.  You couldn't possibly eat for breakfast the heaping mound of kale, celery, cucumber, romaine, broccoli, apple and lemon that goes into one drink. (nor would you want to) The juicing process allows you to ingest all the benefits without expending any digestive engery.  There are also enzymes deep in the  fibers of fresh veggies which don't get absorbed through normal digestion but are released by a juicer.   

"You with your juicing, mom", they say to me. But ahhh, they're right there in line fighting over who gets to throw the next veggie down the juice shoot!