Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, how it changed my mind upside down!

As part of my transition into healthy living, I started hearing about juicing. Obviously juicing as a health kick has been around for years and years now, I remember juice bars being open in the shopping centres in Liverpool when I would go shopping as a teenager. They would sell wheatgrass shots and various other green concoctions which I never bought and frankly thought looked hideous. 

But, as you will know if you've started your own health journey, opening one door onto healthy living means you move into a place where there are so many doors, and they are all open just a tiny bit, allowing you to have a peek at what is inside and what is on offer. 

Those half open doors are full of so much more information, and the more you look, the more you see. It's those half open doors that lead me to clean eating, gluten free, Paleo diet, essential oils, juicing and so much more. 

The truth is that although we all know what we should eat to be healthy; lots of fruit and vegetables; protein from meat and eggs; carbohydrates in various forms depending on our own bodies and what they can handle, the world of food has changed so much that it is unrecognisable from the world our parents inhabited.

Convenience food is everywhere. It is in convenient packages and it lasts forever. You can keep it in the cupboard and it's always there when you need it. It lives in your freezer, ready to the chucked into the microwave when you get home from work.

So the foods that would be a treat, because they were time consuming to make, or the ingredients were expensive, are so much easier to get hold of now. I wonder how much bread we'd all eat if you had to make it yourself. Mix it, knead it, let it rise and then bake it.... that's a lot of work for a loaf of bread, but that's what used to have to happen before you could have bread.

Juicing seemed like a weird concept. Drinking cabbage and carrots and lettuce. It seems like some random, new age, hippie type experiment that has no basis in reality and isn't going to make that much difference. Well, it shows how much I knew.

Gary was trying to convince me to try the juice that he was making, and I refused. I didn't want to drink unsweetened blended cabbage and kale and broccoli. I thought I ate loads of fruit and vegetables, and so I didn't really need it.

Until I watched Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. It was a light bulb moment to me, because it was demonstrated so simply, and explained so neatly, that it was impossible to ignore the message. Our bodies need nutrients, more than they ever have, because of all the pollution around us and all of the times when it's impossible to stay on the clean eating wagon.

It made me realise that juicing is pretty much the only way to get all of the micronutrients into your body so that your body can work properly. In a modern world, when we are all racing from one thing to another, sitting down and eating plate after plate of vegetables just isn't feasible, or appealing.

And so we juice. It's not fancy, we don't create elaborate concoctions that taste divine. We make green juice, that is packed as full of all the best vegetables as it is possible to be. We avoid fruit because of the natural sugars (we have our juice at night) and so we're not winning any prizes for the complexity of the taste or the subtle layers. We drink it fast and ice cold.

I feel the difference. My body feels stronger, and better able to cope with the demands I place upon it. I feel like I get sick less, and that it balances my body. It is not rocket science, I'm giving my body what it needs for it to function properly. And it's about time I really paid attention to what my body needs, rather than what my brain wants.

For those of you who are interested in juicing, but actually want it to taste great, I really recommend this book, The Funky Fresh Juice Book by Jason Vale:

If I could make watching this video compulsory, I would. I think it's one of the most informative and impressive videos I've ever seen for making you really see the world that we live in, and the challenges we face in being healthy, and staying healthy.

So, task for the day, watch it, and really watch it. See what it's saying, and see how explosive this information really can be.