Getting Your Daily Greens?
Let’s face it. Even those of us with the best of intentions occasionally have a day where we might be a little lacking on the greener side of things. Let me clarify. By “green” I don’t mean necessarily that exact color. What I mean is your fruits and veggies. The foods that give you nothing but pure, unrefined nutrition and allow you to “eat your water” with their high water content and hydrating abilities.
Oh yeah, and their weight loss and health benefits! But I digress. You know we’ve all had those days when maybe we’re traveling, or it’s the holidays, or something prevents us from having a fruit or vegetable with each and every meal – which is how we should be eating every single day.
For those lacking days, I’ve come up with a solution for myself personally. I make sure that I drink my daily greens in a powder form, mixed with some fruit juice or vegetable juice. There are plenty of green powders that mix up things like barley, wheat grass, and other very green grasses and nutrients chock full of nutrients like chrlophyll, vitamins and minerals.
Some of these green powders even contain fiber or added probiotics to help keep you flushed out and everything “moving right along” – just like veggies do. However, they still don’t work as well as real, whole fruits and veggies do in that regard – take it from a person who knows.
I sometimes will mix the powder up with a sugar free based drink, or maybe with some orange juice. It goes down much easier when it is paired with something very sweet that covers up its rather bitter “green” flavor.
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The Juicing Diet
Consuming more fruits and vegetables is definitely beneficial to your overall health. Most of us don’t eat enough of this food group proportionately to the rest of our diet. These two facts are well established and well publicized in many health articles.
Fruit and vegetable smoothies increase our intake of this food group in a quick and palatable manner and that is a wonderful thing. Juicing your fruits and vegetables, according to television and internet advertisements, makes the body better absorb larger amounts of the nutrients.
They state that you will get more beneficial enzymes, better immune boosting, more antioxidants and even boost your metabolism by juicing your fruits and vegetables.
Smoothies and juices made from fresh fruits and vegetables are certainly a healthy drink. The juicer enthusiasts state that juices are healthier than the solid form of these foods. According to a newspaper article written by Michael Rozein, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D., juicing your fruits and vegetables actually reduces the fiber of these foods and boosts the sugar content.
The doctors’ article states that juicing traps the pulpy fiber that is so beneficial to us when the juice is extracted. They recommend just eating your fruits and vegetables whole, as a solid food.
The sugar content of these healthy fruits and vegetables is increased by the juicing process, according to their article. This would be a concern for anyone on a carbohydrate restricted diet for weight loss. More importantly, for a diabetic, who has to really modify their sugar intake or they will have serious health consequences, juicing their fruits and vegetables is not the way to eat them.
This doctors’ article refutes the claim that juicing fruits and vegetables gives them any special powers to absorb more readily in your digestive system or boosts their nutritional value in any way.
They recommend enjoying a good smoothie in moderation. For the majority of the time, they recommend eating these same foods whole to get the optimal benefit for your health. This way, you get all the fiber and the filling nature of the entire fruit itself, without the heavy calories that can sometimes come with smoothies.
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What is the Paleo Diet?
I have to admit, when I saw the name, I thought of a plant based diet, or vegetarian. I guess because the name sort of sounds like the word plant. But when I really thought about it, that was silly, because they were really naming this diet out of a period of time where humans ate certain foods in the hunting and gathering age of man.
This was the time when men and women did not have access to such processed and unhealthy foods as we do today. Foods were simple, stripped down. Even the way they cooked their foods was minimal because they only had one way to do it – with fire. They probably didn’t salt the heck out of their meats, they probably ate it right from the animal, barely cooked.
They also ate a lot of their veggies and fruits raw. They basically consumed a very minimally processed diet, whereas today we consume a ton of processed, over cooked foods that have a lot of the nutrients cooked out or processed right out of them.
The meats that are focused upon in the paleo diet are leaner meats, not the fatty variety or processed variety like sausages and bacon. They are lean cuts of beef, chicken, venison (deer meat, which is actually pretty healthy for you), and fish (which is always excellent for you).
The other foods that you should eat are fruits and vegetables, minimally processed of course. Notice how they do not want you to totally shun carbs. They instead focus on unprocessed, whole foods that are naturally low in fat and which give natural, all day energy.
The low carb diet on the other hand, can leave people feeling groggy, depressed and with a total lack of energy because there are no raw foods with high carb content and fiber content that gives them that full satisfied feeling as well as quick body fuel for the day.
This is kind of the way my husband and I eat, so I thought that was amusing, because we do find that we feel our best when we eat this way. It may not be the best way to strip off the weight very quickly, but it’s a great way to slowly lose weight as well as to make sure you have a lean physique over the long term.
It’s way easier to stick to than a traditional low carb diet too, because you still get those carbs in there, they’re just natural and fiber filled.
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