Green Bag

One of my friends (I can't for the life of me remember who it was but I have a sneaking suspicion it's SJ) mentioned something that really stuck in my brain.

All of our social gatherings are surrounded by food and we eat as a social activity.

Huh.

I hadn't really thought about it but it's totally true. You meet up with one of your good friends for a mani/pedi and it turns into lunch. You go to a movie with your sister and it's dinner-before-a-movie. You go shopping with more of your girlfriends and there's the need for a coffee or Jamba juice halfway through your adventure, followed by lunch or dinner when you're flushed with shopping victory.

Everything is totally focused around food.

Which makes "dieting" healthfully really, really hard. 

No one is on the same diet, so to speak. When I'm talking about a diet, I'm talking about the food we, as humans, consume in order to survive. Not South Beach or Atkins or Weight Watchers. Add into the mix the fact that most of our food is being consumed outside of the home. So, we've got foods that don't mesh with our diets and we've got highly-processed, highly-refined, and filled with more sodium than we should be consuming in a week.

Great.

I'll be in my bedroom, making no noise at all and pretending I don't exist. {Thank you, Harry Potter, I use that quote all the time!}

No freakin' way. But I don't want to abandon my friends. That's what it would feel like, isn't it? Maybe I should just brown-bag it everywhere I go. That's what my sister does for LJ. But then again, LJ is only one and doesn't really need to be eating a gyro. 

Even if she really, really wants to.

I hate it when reason wins out.

*sigh*

I'll just have to make sure I explain to friends and family that I'm trying to change my spots and make a healthy stand on my food. Juicing is a great way to consume your daily vegetables and fruits, including my vitamins and minerals. Jason Vale, the best selling author of 7 lbs in 7 Days, founder of "Juice Master," and an addiction specialist, had the following to say about juicing: 

Juicing is important for two main reasons. People often say to me, well, why don’t, you know, why don’t we just eat it? That’s a good question, first of all. Why don’t we just eat it? We don’t. So that’s the first thing to address. The point is that most people don’t consume enough raw fruits and vegetables in a spectrum of colors. So that’s the number one. Secondly, most people are overfed and they are undernourished. And so their digestive system is beaten up over years and years and years of trying to digest, extract the nutrients, and dispose of the waste of the wrong kind of foods. Juicing is important as well because it’s easy to absorb. It’s the ultimate fast food. People say I want a fast food diet. Get juicing. Because, you know, if you think the average dinner will take anything from four to 16 hours to leave the stomach and the body try and digest it, freshly extracted juice is a 15-minute nutrient express to health. That’s what it is. It goes into your stomach, goes 15 minutes into your cells, and also, let’s be fair, you will consume far more raw, fresh vegetables, the kind of vegetables you wouldn't normally eat.

So can you imagine, you remove refined sugars, refined fats, junky-type foods, all the wheat, the breads, the man-made foods going into your body, and all of a sudden overnight you replace it with high water content – that’s what it is – pure high-water content organic rich mineral vitamin-rich fuel, going into every single cell of your body in the most easy-to-digest and absorb form and with a spectrum of colors, with everything the body requires, what do you think they body is going to do? It’s not going to reject this at all. It’s going to look and say, "No, I’m on board. Now you’re good to me? Let me shine for you."

It's said in such a nice accent, too. I'm a sucker for accents that aren't American. . . Anywho! That quote was given on the movie Hungry for a Change (about 57 minutes or so into it). It's brilliant. Go watch it on Netflix. 

My friends will support me, I'm sure. They'll giggle quite madly when I pull out my juicer in the back of my car, plug it in, and start going to town. But they'll pat me on the head and say, "good job. Way to Green-Bag it." Hopefully I'll someday be able to juice two glasses, one for them and one for me. 

Cheers!
LC