If you are trying to obtain a goal, but you consciously or subconsciously do not want to obtain that goal, then you won’t have any success. For instance, if you want to get a promotion at work, but your subconscious mind knows that you hate your job and getting a promotion will only make it worse, then you won’t do the things you need to in order to get the promotion. The same rules apply if you don’t believe that the strategies that you’re using will be effective. If I am trying to lose weight and think that juicing is not healthy, then juicing won’t be an effective weight loss method for me.

Part of my struggle is my belief that the fiber in the fruits and vegetables is an essential part of a healthy diet. The fiber, especially in green leafy vegetables, helps fill you up while eating less calories.  Filling up with less calories helps you lose weight. And losing weight is a high priority right now since our youngest is only two months! With juicing you don’t get that fiber – or you don’t if you have a really good juicer.

The other thing that is holding me up is a doubt that juice fasting is a healthy practice. I knew from reading Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease by Dr. Joel Fuhrman that you actually damage your body if you consume any calories while you’re fasting.  If you don’t take in any calories while fasting (i.e. a water fast) your body quickly begins to use your stored fat for fuel. However, if you keep eating or drinking a minimal number of calories your body will burn your muscle (including your brain and heart) for fuel. That’s not good! It seemed to me that juice fasting would equal a minimal calorie input, and would thus not be a good choice for my body.

For now, that leaves us with the option of adding juices on top of our normal diets or replacing a daily meal with an equivalent caloric amount of juice. We’ve experimented with both, but I still don’t feel like I’m fully behind either option. I’m going to do some more reading on all of this and see if I can figure out exactly what I want to do for my 30 day trial.

1. Wash all fruits and vegetables before juicing: This one is easy to forget since you can put most fruits and vegetables into the juicer without any prep work. But washing your produce will help prevent dangerous bacteria and chemicals from getting nto your body.

2. Remove all stems: This seems to contradict the infomercial in which they feed entire bunches of grapes into the Power Juicer without removing the grapes from the step. Perhaps that is an exception. I think that it is probably wise to remove the stems in order to prolong the life of the blades and motor.

3. Do not try to juice bananas or avocadoes. Bananas and avocadoes do not have any juice – they will just clog up the machine. If you want to make a smoothie, add the banana to the fruit juices in a blender. Other “no-nos” include coconut, eggplant, leek, rhubarb and winter squash.

4. Put a plastic grocery sack in the pulp collector. The pulp collector is much easier to clean if you can just remove the bag and throw the pulp away. I like to tie the bag up before I put it in the trash can so that animals and insects are not attracted to it.  However, if you’re planning on using the pulp in other recipes, I would skip the bag or use a zip-top bag so that you can be sure that the pulp is clean.

5. When using leafy greens, roll the leaves into a ball before juicing. Greens do not contain a ton of juice, so getting them into a compact form before they go into the Power Juicer improves the efficiency of the process.

6. Alternate soft and hard produce. For the best results, always follow a soft item, like peaches or mangos, with hard produce like a carrot. The soft produce tends to create a thick juice and it sometimes needs the harder produce (and the resulting thin juice) to help it come out of the machine.

7. Peel citrus fruits before juicing. Citrus fruit peels are very bitter. You don’t want that stuff in your juice. You do not,however, have to remove the thin, white membrane that separates the individual segments of fruit. That membrane is called the pith and it is perfectly okay to eat/drink.

The Eat to Live concept makes more sense to me – dietary fiber can’t be a bad thing, can it? I was recently scanning through Eat to Live and wanted to share what Dr. Fuhrman has to say about fruit and vegetable juice vs. whole fruits and vegetables.

“Oranges make the most nutritious juice, but even orange juice can’t compare with the original orange. In citrus fruits, most of the anti-cancer compounds are present in the membranes and pulp, which are removed in processing juice.”

“Fresh-squeezed orange juice and other fresh fruit and vegetable juices are relatively healthy foods that contain the majority of the original vitamins and minerals. But the sweet fruit juices and even carrot juice should still be used only moderately, as they still contain a high concentration of sugar calories and no fiber. . . I often use these juices as part of salad dressings and other dishes rather than alone as a drink.”

The marketers for the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer seem to have anticipated this argument against juicing. The recipe book that comes with the Power Juicer contains many recipes that use the pulp of the fruits and vegetables. There are also several recipes for salad dressings that I’m looking forward to trying. I’m hoping that the fruit juice will provide so much flavor that I won’t miss the fat that is not allowed at all during the first six weeks of the Eat to Live diet.

When I juiced this morning, I did check to see how wet the pulp is.  If the juicer extracts all of the juice from the pulp, then there doesn’t seem to be much sense in adding the pulp to other foods, except to increase the fiber content. The pulp was indeed wet, so I imagine that it will impart some extra flavor to baked goods, without adding to much liquid which would affect the consistenty of the recipe.  However, the wetness of the pulp did surprise me. The pulp from our first juicer was as dry as sawdust! But then again, that juicer quit working after a month.

First I juiced six oranges. If you’ve never juiced an orange then you must try it. The juice is so fresh and creamy, ten times more delicious than freshly-squeezed orange juice.  You do have to peel the orange before juicing, but that takes no time if you just peel the skin off with your fingers. The six oranges produced around 16 oz of juice. That would have been enough to accompany our breakfast, but then I noticed two apples in the fruit bowl.

As I’ve mentioned before, small apples will fit into the Power Juicer without any prep work. It’s so easy to just pop them into the machine, so I added the two apples to my orange juice.

Around that time, our 3 year old wandered into the kitchen and discovered a mango in the refrigerator. I took it from him as he was about to eat it skin and all and noticed that it needed to be used quickly. Into the juicer it went. Now for the mango, you do have to removed the central pit, which requires some slicing, but I did not peel it. I was surprised to find that only about 2 Tbsp. of thick juice came out when I put it in the juicer.

I thought that the juice might be a little two sweet, so I pulled a couple of stalks of celery out of the fridge and added them. If you’ve never juiced celery, then you probably don’t realize (we didn’t) that it’s very spicy – much like black pepper. It also contains a good bit of sodium which helps balance the sweetness of all of the fruit juices.

While in the fridge, I noticed that we also had some romaine lettuce that needed to be used, and a lot of carrots. I cut the core of the lettuce and added it all to the juicer at once. The deep green juice is so pretty!  When I ran the carrots through the juicer, I noticed that more mango juice was finally coming out of the machine. I had read that it’s best to alternate hard and soft produce in the juicer as the hard produce helps the soft produce work through the centrifuge. It seemed like a small point, but it was impressive to see in action. I even juiced a few more carrots just to get the remaining mango out of the machine.

The final produce was delicious. My first experiment with the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer was a success! I drank around 16 oz. and my husband and son each had about 8.  I never got around to eating any other breakfast and the juice kept me satisfied until noon. Here’s the recipe if you would like to try it.

Mary’s Morning Juice
6 oranges (peeled)
2 small apples
3 c. Romaine lettuce
2 celery stalks
1 mango, pitted
4 carrots

Now that we have our juicer and have used it several times, I sat down to watch the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer infomercial when I found it on tv last night.  Here are a few of the claims that are made in the infomercial and my take on them.

1.  Apples can be juiced whole. During the infomercial, Jack and his wife Elaine, use apples in several of the juice that they make. Every time, they insert an entire green apple into the juicer at once. They are able to juice it without any problem.

The first fruit that we tried to juice was a Gala apple. We had heard that you could put an entire apple into the juicer chute, so we were eager to try it. But no luck! Our gala apples were way too big to fit in whole, though we could fit them when they were sliced in halves or thirds. We later bought a bag of small apples and they fit the juicer perfectly. The strange this is that the apples in the infomercial do not appear to be small. They probably are, but it’s not something that you notice.

2. The Power Juicer is easy to clean in your dishwasher. The infomercial also says that the power juicer is very quick to clean, and that it can even go in your dishwasher. I cleaned our Power Juicer today (that and the juicing is usually my husband’s job) and while it is relatively easy to clean, it’s not as easy as the infomercial makes it seem.

During the infomercial there is a small snippet that shows an unattached arm putting the Power Juicer into the dishwasher. What I didn’t realize until this morning is that the arm only put the pulp bucket and the produce pusher into the dishwasher. There are 3 other parts of the Power Juicer that weren’t shown, and let me tell you that they do indeed need to be washed by hand! The Power Juicer even comes with a scrub brush for just that purpose!

That being said, the juicer was not difficult to clean. However, it did take several minutes. (I did wash all of the pieces by hand since I didn’t want to waste a lot of space in my dishwasher with parts that are easy to clean.) You can save on clean up time by lining the pulp bucket with a plastic grocery shopping bag.

3. You can juice straight into a tall glass or pitcher. When we first tried our juicer we were disappointed to find that the juice spout is so low that only our juice glasses will fit under it.  I love juice, and I want to drink a large glassful!  When I watched the infomercial I noticed that they were juicing into tall glasses and pitchers. How can this be?!?

After careful observation, I noticed that all of the Power Juicers in the commercial were sitting on top of a thick cutting board or some other surface that elevated the juice spout. I think this is slightly misleading. Since I’m not about to give up my butcher block, we’ll just have to use small glasses to collect our juice.

4. Kids will eat juiced vegetables more readily than whole vegetables. The infomercial contains a testimonial from a kindergarten teacher that has been making juice for her students. The kids are so excited about the juice, and the teacher loves that they are getting their fruit and vegetable servings.

Now, our son is 3 years old and while he’s not a picky eater I sometimes wonder if he’s getting all of the vegetables and fruit that he needs. He’s been on a bread and soymilk kick lately and tries his best to fill up on those at mealtimes. But he loves the juicer! He begs us to make juice for him in the mornings and drinks it right down, even though we usually add greens to the mix.  I don’t know many kids that would drink green or brown juice, so this is pretty impressive.

Luckily we had some apples on hand, so we started juicing immediately. The first thing that we noticed was how quiet the machine is. Our previous juicer was so loud that you couldn’t hold a conversation while it was on. The Power Juicer, however, can barely be heard. This is a definite plus since our 3 year old loves juice, but hates loud noices!

The next thing that we noticed is how low the juice spout is. The only glasses that would fit underneath it were our juice glasses. I guess that’s fitting, but the juice is so good that I really do want a tall glass of it. We ended us putting the small juice glass under the spout, and then emptying that into a pitcher when it got full.

Speaking of juice spouts, I should point out that the spout on the Pro Juicer has a neat on/off feature.  When the spout is in the down position, juice comes of the spout while you juice. However, if your cup is almost full and you need to stop the flow, simply flip the juice spout up.  The juice is then held inside the machine until you are ready for it to go into the glass again.

John had done some research on the Power Juicer before our purchase and new that Jack Lalanne claims that you can put entire apples into the juicer without any prep work. We were eager to try this, and found to our disappointment that only the very small apples would fit. Nevertheless, we only had to halve our larger apples to get them to go in.

And the apple juice that day? Well, it was incredible! If you’ve never had freshly made apple juice, you won’t believe it until you try it. It tastes nothing like what you buy in the stores!  I can’t even describe it – it’s something that you have to experience yourself.  The next day we bought an entire bag of small apples and juiced the whole bag in one session. It was magnificent!