Baby Steps to a Plant-Based Diet Week One.

If you are a hard core carnivore, or if you just want to add some plants to your diet, this should be your starting point. Baby step numero uno – eat a salad. You can have it for breakfast, lunch or dinner, the choice is yours, but your goal should be to eat one large, green, raw salad daily.  Make a large salad using your favorite greens as a base. I like baby spinach and romaine lettuce. I also add whatever raw vegetables/fruits I happen to have.  Some of my favorites are tomato, onion and avocado. I tend to not use dressing when I use avocado in my salad- just a little sea salt and pepper, if I don’t have any avocado on hand I use a olive oil and balsamic dressing, but use whatever you like for now.

I buy triple washed organic baby spinach. It is convenient, delicious and readily available. There are many reasons that you should choose spinach for your daily salad. Spinach is high in flavanoids- a phytonutrient with anti-cancer properties. Spinach has been shown to have protection against prostate, stomach and skin cancer. The vitamin K in spinach is great for both brain function and a healthy nervous system. Spinach also contains vitamin C and E, as well as beta-carotene, manganese, zinc and selenium, which are all anti-oxidants that can prevent osteoporosis and high blood pressure. Spinach as well as most dark green leafy vegetables are a good source of iron.

Adding just one cup of organic romaine lettuce to your daily salad provides your body with 82% of the RDV of vitamin A, 60% of vitamin K, 19% of vitamin C and 16% of folic acid. All of those vitamins for only 10, yes ten, calories! Vitamin C is needed to prevent the oxidation of cholesterol which reduces risk of stroke. The high fiber content of romaine lettuce makes you feel full longer, preventing over-eating. Grab a head, wash it with cold water, chop it up and you are ready to go.

Onions may make you cry, but they really are good for you! They are high in vitamin C, and B6 as well as chromium, calcium, folic acid, D1 and K. Quercetin, a potent antioxidant flavanoid that is shown to lower cholesterol, thin blood and fight asthma is present in onion. You don’t need to eat a ton of onion to experience all the benefits. Just one medium onion (cooked or raw) daily is enough for your to reap all the rewards. Get ready to cry people!

Tomato is a fruit, it’s true, but they are a great addition to your daily salad. Tomatoes are high in lycopene, an antioxidant that can flush free radicals out of your body and help prevent cancer cell formation. Lycopene is what gives tomatoes their rich red color, and tomatoes contain more lycopene than any other fruit or vegetable. A one cup serving of chopped tomato also provides 25 grams of vitamin C, which is an important part of the immune system. It is simple, eat a tomato, stay healthy.

I love avocados. I will just spoon some onto my salad, or make a guacamole and put a blob of that on in place of dressing. Avocados are the highest fruit source of vitamin E, which is great for overall heart health. Avocados are also helpful in aiding the absorption of certain nutrients. One study shows people eating a salad containing avocados absorbed 5x the lycopene and beta-carotene than those who ate salad without avocado. Eat up buttercup.

As you can see, adding a large raw salad to your daily routine is a great way to add vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and phytonutrients to your diet. The vegetables and fruits listed above are just a small sample of what you can do with your daily salad. Have fun, get creative and make your salad a daily experience!

Annie’s Famous Guacamole

1 ripe avocado mushed up
1 clove minced garlic
1 tsp. chopped fresh or dried cilantro
1 tsp. fresh lime or lemon juice
.5 tsp cumin
salt and pepper to taste

stir and serve.

Chew on This

oh, food is so good. i’m feeling much better after a few days of combined juice and healthy vegan meals. i have been having a juice for breakfast, a salad, a smoothie, and dinner. so far it has been working for me. i have my energy back, i’m not feeling deprived and i haven’t had any white sugar or bread or pasta yet (or a margarita)! i have had a few snacks like peanut butter and raisins on an organic brown rice cake, but i feel good about that. for examples sake, yesterday i consumed:  a 16 oz spinach, kale, cucumber, pineapple and ginger juice; a large salad with romaine, spinach, tomato, carrot, celery, chickpeas and a small amount of salad dressing; a 16 oz. smoothie with banana, strawberry, blueberry, kale and chia; brown rice cake with peanut butter and raisins; and a little bit of mashed potato and steamed broccoli for dinner. so that is 5 approximately 300-400 calorie meals, which is more than i was consuming with juice only, but still far less than i was consuming in my junk food vegan past. i have gained back 1.5 lbs since ending the fast, but i was expecting that, and i’m not letting it deter me from my journey to health.   

i’m feeling really good about everything actually, and i plan to go for my first run of the season tomorrow morning (providing it isn’t stormy in which case i will do a turbo fire dvd in my bedroom!) i’m really excited about getting running again. it has been 3 whole months since i have run, and at least a month since i have done much of anything in the way of exercise. i am definitely ready to lace up and hit the streets! i am going to start slow and build up, of course. i’ll probably try to get 3 miles done tomorrow and go from there! 

p.s. my breakfast juice today is pretty good. 5 big hand-fulls of baby spinach, 3 stalks of celery, 1 head romaine lettuce, 1 inch piece of ginger and about a third of a pineapple.  we shall call it the clean green!

Days FIve and Six 3/14 & 15

blahhhh! my first day with no weight loss! still exactly 129 lbs. oh well, maybe it was all that cortisol from my stress-full evening yesterday?  i’m feeling pretty good. i might go so far as to say that i’m sleeping better. it is also strange no notice how much of my life actually revolves around food! i mean, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, grocery shopping, cooking, dishes, eating. it’s never ending. especially, i suppose, when there are kids around…

i want to take a sec and reiterate the fact that i only use organic fruits and veggies for my juice, with the exception of citrus which i peel. also, that i am not a photographer, so don’t judge me from my photos!

i have been sticking with the same breakfast juice, because it is super tasty, and i have everything i need to make it. it is for 2 servings, 1 head romaine lettuce, 2 big hand fulls of baby spinach, 1 cucumber, 4 stalks celery, 2 apples, 4 clementines.

it’s my first day back at work, so i have to make 2 juices to travel. for convenience sake they will be the same. i will call it rainbow juice, but i haven’t tasted it yet, sooooo… 1 head romaine, 5 hand fulls of baby spinach, 6 carrots,1 cucumber, 1 large tomato, 4 stalks celery, 1 lemon, 1 apple. i’ll let you know how it tastes later!

i drank 2 of them, they were pretty tasty! either that, or my taste buds are adjusting.or it could be my grocery store hasn’t had any organic kale, and i’m too lazy to go to 3 different stores searching for it, so i just have been substituting spinach. on monday i’ll track down some kale! today i had a watermelon, cucumber, lemon drink at dinnertime and i also had a cup of ‘bedtime’ tea with 1 tsp of raw honey for desert.

i have to admit, that this whole process does seem to be making me a more emotional than usual. i’m thinking about stuff i haven’t thought of in years, reacting to situations a little more dramatically than i normally would and just plain being more sensitive. not my favorite side effect of juicing!

my first day back at work was pretty good. i made it through fine, and i wasn’t too tired after. i thought i might be because my 10 days off work to recover from surgery combined with juice fasting means i haven’t been very active lately.

day 6- 127.4 lbs. yipee. that means i have lost 8.2 lbs. going into my 6th day on this fast. it’s only 7:20, and dehlia and i just got up, so i haven’t made any juice yet, but my plan is to do the same as yesterday, but i will do it in a different order… i have been feeling good physically, it’s the emotional side of  ‘ breaking the sugar addiction’ along with just not eating that makes it difficult beyond the first few days… i’ll report back in a few days

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Day Three and Four 3/12 & 3/13

i am feeling better today! the morning of my third day of juice fasting. it has been a slow, achy couple days, and i’m so glad to be feeling good and more like myself. my head is out of the detox cloud (at least at the moment) and my head ache seems to be gone for now as well. i don’t have a ton of energy, but i’m pretty lazy generally anyway. 

day 3 8:30 am-i stepped on the scale, and it was down to 130.2 lbs!  breakfast juice for 2, 4 clementines, 1/2 pkg. baby spinach, 1 cucumber, 4 stalks of celery, 2 green apples. this is by far the sweetest and best juice yet. i will definitely make it again. normally the juices take me about half hour to drink, but this one was gone super fast!

day 3 afternoon- dehlia and i went to the grocery store to get some more juicing supplies today. we got more of the basics, and we got a watermelon and some ginger to try some new recipes. when i got home i made my juice for the rest of the day, and thank goodness i did, because, my son asher, had an accident at school and i was unexpectedly out of the house all afternoon. i was able to just grab a juice and go, and not give in to car snack temptation 😉 i made 3 servings of v8 style juice-tomato, red pepper, cucumber, celery, a whole bunch of parsely, a head of romaine lettuce and a lemon. i also made a ‘snack time’ juice of 1/4 watermelon, 2 lemons and a cucumber (2 servings) which i think is delish! so all in all a good juice day.

day 3 8:30 pm –  i drank a v8 juice for both lunch and dinner, and had a watermelon drink for a snack before lunch. i also drank a cup of ginger/lemon tea with 1 tsp honey in the afternoon before dinner  and a cup  chamomile tea before bed. today was probably the highest calorie consumption day so far. but also the day i felt the best. no headache, more energy, better mood.

day 4 10:30 am – stepped on the scale first thing and it read 129 lbs. woo hoo! that is 6.6 lbs down in 3 days of juicing. from what i’ve read, i will probably start losing a lb. a day now. i hope that is the case. i’m still drinking plenty of water, and i’m feeling almost normal today, so that is even better! we repeated the breakfast drink from yesterday. cucumber, spinach, celery, clementine, apple. its light and sweet. delish.

For lunch and dinner i had spinach, celery, carrot, cucumber and apple. i had a stressful evening, which made me really, really crave food. nothing specific, just food! i didn’t though, which is good. i chugged water instead…

overall, so far, i am pleased with my weight loss and progress. it is difficult for sure, but i think when it’s over, it will hav  been worth it.

getting to know you, getting to know all about you.

today i pulled down the breville juice fountain that my almost husband got five years ago for christmas from it’s home on top of the fridge. it has been sitting up there since we moved here, and has never been used. poor, neglected juicer. today will be its and my maiden voyage into juicing. (i’m actually sipping on my first juice as i write this). since i am so new to juice, i am going to try to have one or two a day, leading up to my juice fast which will start officially on friday, march 14. i chose this date because my wedding cake tasting at hippie chick bakery, in NH is scheduled for the 13th, and i can’t bear to skip it, obviously i love sugar. 

ok, so keeping in mind, that i am not a photographer, and that i’m taking photos from my phone, here is my juicer. 

 

 

i scrubbed that baby up, dusted it off, and googled the instructions. it is fairly easy to use, once you understand how to take it apart and put it back together. cleaning and assembling will be the most annoying part of the juicing experience, i am sure. once i cleaned the juicer and set it up on the counter top it was time to select and prep my veggies and fruits. i always buy organic. i believe that no matter the cost of organic versus conventional, it is worth it. chemical pesticides and genetically modified foods are not healthy,  they are dangerous and make me very nervous. organic, gmo free food is always less expensive than disease and the medical care and medicines that illness requires. so for my very first juice i chose; 1 large cucumber, 2 stalks of celery, 1/2 a pkg. of olivias baby kale, and 2 granny smith apples. (i meant to add 1/2 a lemon, but forgot). i plugged the juicer in, washed and cut the veggies and fruit into chunks, and got to work. i started with half the cucumber-tons of juice, then and apple-tons more juice, celery-more juice, a handful of kale-the tiniest bit of really dark green juice, and the rest of each. all in all i think it made just about 20 oz. of juice, more than enough for one, probably enough for two! here is a photo of the ingredients for my first green juice!

 

of course i shared with my beautiful little girl! she was so excited to try the awesome looking green juice, and unfortunately very disappointed. she literally made spitting sounds and wiped her tongue off with her hand after her first (and only) sip! thankfully, although i am not braver than her, my taste buds are ‘more mature’, and i didn’t mind it. i am not saying it was the best thing i’ve ever had, but it was drinkable. all i could taste was the cucumber and the celery, so i don’t think the apples made too much of a difference. i may try to leave them out next time. i couldn’t taste the kale at all, which i was a worried about because one of my girl friends said that it was so gross that she gagged. all in all it took me less than 10 minutes to get everything ready and juiced, so not too time consuming at all, compared to cooking an actual meal. this is a picture of the finished product.

 

very, very green juice. i don’t know what exactly i was expecting. i think i might actually be able to feel the juice going to work on my bod. i feel a little tingly. yum. 

please feel free to comment me your juicing experiences and your favorite juice recipes!