Is Juicing the Solution?

My diet sucks. There, I’ve said it. I start out each day in a good way – toast, peanut butter and a hard boiled egg plus two cups of coffee. It goes downhill from there. Somewhere around 2 or 3 PM I realize I’m hungry. Because I’m still working, I will eat at my desk so whatever food I grab must be handy and fast. The reality is that because I work while I eat, I’m seldom paying attention to what goes into my mouth. The end of my day is signaled by a lovely glass of dry white wine. Dinner? Well, somewhere around 8 PM I’ll be a bit peckish and, again, something handy and fast is the go to choice.

I’ve never been great about planning meals in advance and the concept of grocery shopping once a week is quite foreign to me. I probably go to the grocery store four or five times each week. When my children lived at home, I cooked most days and leftovers filled in the gaps. I have a great kitchen with all the bells and whistles and I love cooking in it when I have someone to cook for. Now that my kids are grown and gone cooking for one is a challenge that I haven’t conquered.

I know the typical solutions. Cook for four people, eat one portion and freeze the rest. The conversation in my head goes something like this: “If I cook once then I won’t have to cook for the next three days.” Consequently, the portions that sanity would say should end up in the freezer don’t. Instead I eat the same thing day after day until it’s gone. Then I’m sick of it and don’t cook whatever it was for months.

Summer is always great with the bbq just outside the kitchen door. I lived on turkey burgers this summer. The odd steak was thrown in just to be different but sitting on the deck with my glass of wine, reading a book while the turkey burger cooked on the bbq became such a pleasant habit. The good news is that I read five books this summer which is something of a record for me. As we head for winter and I approach another birthday, I have turned my attention to many of the articles published on The Oldish about the importance of nutrition and I’m looking for solutions. I may have found it.

Juicing. I’ve been reading a lot about juicing and, while I may be behind the curve on this, it has finally sunk in that I need to find a way to get far more vitamins and nutrients than I have been consuming and juicing may well be the solution. While I realize that there can be a lot of good left behind in the pulp, my reality is that I’ve never been a big veggie eater so there are tradeoffs in everything. Juicing may prove to be the way to get my daily dose along with adding in veggies that I wouldn’t normally eat. Besides, the pulp can be frozen for adding to soups and pasta sauces later.

I have purchased a few bottles of healthy juices at the grocery store and coffee shops to see if I would enjoy it before jumping off the cliff. I’ve discovered that I don’t love the taste of heavily green vegetable juices. There needs to be enough sweetness to overcome the strong taste of kale juice, which seems to be very popular. I know it’s as healthy as all get out but I’m reminded of the kale chips I made for my kids that they wouldn’t touch. Although I championed them at the time, the truth is that they were dreadful. Balancing kale with other vegetables is good and adding in those sweet fruits is even better. Seven servings of fruits and veggies each day is the goal and truthfully, I have never managed that. The extra added bonus is that there will never be another vegetable left to wither in my refrigerator.

The reading that I’ve done has me leaning toward a masticating juicer so that I can get the full benefit of both fruits and vegetables. I’ve put it on my Christmas list. We have a rule in my family that once an item is on the Christmas list, no shopping is allowed, so I’ll have to see if my children think I’m nuts or if they’re willing to put another piece of equipment into my kitchen. The real test will be whether or not a juicer will finally persuade me to eat beets.