J is for Juice

Hello! Today is the beginning of Week 8 of the ABC's of 2012. "Bring it on, Week 8," is what I said as I picked a new letter this morning. Now that most of the hard letters are out of the draw I'm feeling  fearless and confident and ready to put last week's mistakes behind me. I picked the letter 'J' today, which stands for juice. This is a pretty easy one: just drink more juice! When I say juice I don't mean that I'm going to be chugging down the Tropicana all day long. While store-bought juice is a better alternative to soda or Yoohoo it usually has a lot of added sugars and doesn't pack the same nutrient punch as the homemade kind. There has been book upon book written about the health benefits of fresh, homemade juice. It's a great way to instantly feed your cells awesome vitamins and minerals since your body doesn't have to break down the fiber first. Juice is also highly alkaline and helps keep your pH in check (check out my post last Sunday for a little more info on the importance of eating alkaline foods). Meet my juicer:

This little fella has been gathering dust recently, but that's all about to change. To start, I'm going to try to juice at least three times a week, and hopefully build from that later on. I figure that three is a pretty manageable number and won't affect my grocery bill too much. For me the hardest part about juicing is having to clean out the juicer afterwards. It ends up to be quite a time commitment and I fall off the juicing wagon pretty easily because of it. If only I had a little juicer cleaning fairy to swoop in after me then I would really have it made- I'll try Craigslist.