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.

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.