Last month we finally subscribed to Netflix. With it came a list of great documentaries about food, environment, chemicals, health and happiness. All very interesting  stuff, some was eye opening, other things we already knew. One of the movies – “Sick, Fat and Nearly Dead” inspired us to go on a juice fast. The guys in the documentary did it for 60 days (with miraculous results) but we decided to try for a week. This wasn’t our first fast, we’ve done them before several times, usually just before spring to cleanse and detox the body. This year was the first time for us to do juice fasting. The kids didn’t fast with us but surprisingly they did like drinking the juices we made. We went through tens of pounds of fresh, organic veggies. Here is a sample of our supplies from just one weekend…

First we started with some juicing recipes from books and internet but soon making our own combinations seemed like way more fun. Carrots and apples were usually the base for everything else. Sometimes the results had awesome taste and bright colors, other times they were mostly brownish-green and tasted like grass… But we kept up drinking the juices because we really felt good. Here are two juices I created that could easily win the best color award. 🙂

If you’ve never  done fasting you may be thinking that it’s impossible to last that long without food. I thought so, too. Sometimes I get anxious and even angry when I’m hungry. But each time I would feel a little bit of hunger I would drink more juice and it satisfied me for a few hours. There are no limits how much you can drink. As with any detox, the second and third day might be the most challenging. I did have a little headache, but I knew that these were just the toxins being released from my body. I just kept drinking and after a day it was all gone. I also had lots of energy, my skin got clearer, a few pounds were easily shed and I could almost feel all the goodness and positive change that those high amounts of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, enzymes and other micronutrients were doing in my body.

With juicing comes A LOT of leftover pulp. Way too much to do something with all of it (besides composting of course) but we did try to re-use some pulp. I googled to find some ideas online and came up with quite a few pulp crackers recipes. We tried making them twice. The first time they tasted great but got burned too much. The second time I photographed all the steps thinking that I would share the recipe here, however honestly the taste of this second batch had a lot to be desired. You can still see the photos of the entire process below, though. 🙂 It probably depends a lot on what combination of veggies you are juicing and the spices you add to the pulp and my mix just wasn’t the best. The crackers did taste good as a base for tiny sandwiches with some homemade hummus, sprouts, Greek olives, tomatoes etc. The whole process was quite time consuming though so I’m not sure if we’ll give it another try…

We did manage to juice fast for 7 days and one of the many benefits of the whole experience was that I got hooked on juicing. I still make one big batch of fresh juice everyday and hopefully it will become a part of our everyday diet.  If you have fasted before please share your experience and favorite recipes in the comments below, your  ideas and support are welcome. If you haven’t but are thinking about it, feel free to ask questions . . . Thanks for reading! To your health!

come visit my website

say hello on Facebook

contact me