TeamRAW

Good morning Sweet Ones

How is your day?  For those of us in the Bay Area, we are experiencing high temperatures and blue, cloudless skies…yesterday was a sweltering day in the city.  Did you hydrate enough?  Did you replace the electrolytes you inevitably lose through perspiration in such heat?  Did you find yourself at times feeling light headed and a little foggy?  You may be dehydrated.  I know we hear about drinking 8 glasses of water a day but don’t do it.  For me, my body will tell me when I am dehydrated.  Often this will manifest as great thirst in the evening if I have taken insufficient liquids during the day, or tiredness and fogginess occur mid to late afternoon.  Over the past several years I have become much better at properly dehydrating, I no longer drink any caffeinated beverages other than ocassional raw cacoa in smoothies (which is full of antioxidants).  Did you know that one of the main symptoms of dehydration is a feeling of hunger?  When we feel this we eat but the hunger remains.  Another fact to remember is that by the time you are thirsty, you are dehydrated.

Our body is a sponge of more than a trillion cells, each of which needs sufficient water to function optimally.  And isn’t that the kind of function we should want from our body, one of Optimal Health rather than just getting by.  One of my yoga teachers always said “thriving and surviving are not the same”.  I don’t know about you but I want to THRIVE not merely survive.  Water plays a key role in our effort to thrive.  Without the correct amount of water in our bodies we cannot function at an optimal level.  Toxins cannot be removed and our blood becomes “sticky” as the heart works harder to pump it around.  Water is one of the main strategies to help us stop the “Dis-ease Train”.  When we take in more than sufficient water our bodies are abe to function at a higher level and this is tangible in the way we feel about ourself and the decisions we make in our lives.  Vibrant health leads to a vibrant life.

So, taking in the amount of water that is correct for our individual bodies and needs is a daily need that has to be taken care of.  And whilst our water quota cannot be satisfied by drinking coffee and sugary (or perhaps even worse “diet” soda – aspartame is a deadly ingredient, even the FDA knows this, yet it is still legal!) drinks, we can get water from our consumption of leafy greens and fresh fruits.  Better yet, we can take those same fruits and vegetables and juice them.  By juicing we not only rehydrate our body but we also cleanse, rebuild and alkalize the body.  And, when we do it correctly, using a broad range of vegetables and fruits, we can obtain all the macronutrients we need to lead a vibrant and energetic, clear thinking life…all whilst we are juicing.

Yep, those leafy greens contain much more than the water required to rehydrate, they also contain all the macronutrients we need, including fat.  Yesterday I was asked in Rainbow how we get our fats when we are doing a Juice Feast (minimum of 4 quarts of juice a day up to 6 or more).  And the answer is that leafy greens contain 7-10% fat…really!  Beyond all the fad and Hollywood diets, research has shown that an optimal diet is 70-80% carbohydrates, 10-20% protein and 10-20% fat.  Natural Health Institutes healing the range of dis-ease from diabetes, to fatigue to cancer and heart disease use this as a general protocol.  Indeed their research has shown that a prevalence of protein in the diet actually turns on the trigger to disease…bad news for the meat and dairy industry who would like us to believe we need their fat and protein but good news for the vegetable and the organic farmer who brings them to our table without the use of pesticides, herbicides and as David Wolfe puts it “suicides”.

What about all the hype that carbs are bad for you?  Well, that depends where you are getting your carbs from.  White rice, pasta and bread are often used for carb intake but they supply little else and are simple carbs.  Not the kind of food our bodies were designed to function on.  And then there are all the cereals and maufactured foods which fill 85% of our supermarkets.  The food industry invents 17,000 new products a year to tempt us and spend over $35million a year advertising them to us to let us know that we need these products.  Meanwhile, over in the produce department, 95% of which is grown with the use of GMO, pesticides and man’s laboratory print all over them, the poor organic vehegable gets little shelf space.  That’s why we love the Farmers Market…it is our supermarket.

I could go on and on, there is so much to say.  I will leave you on this note (we need to get out into the sunshine and G just collected his juice so I am closing for today but will expand more in another entry), don’t believe everything you read, even my words, but rather start your own research, feel how your body reacts to certain things, play around with your diet and see how it feels to you.  We are each different and our bodies hold different histories, so we need to find out for ourselves what works for us.  Use what you read and experience to spark your own to your Optimal Health.  Our bodies and health are the most sacred thing we hold, they deserve for you to be informed and to question “health news” that is fed to us by the media and supported by large industries that stand to make a buck out of our ignorance.  Never stop questioning, never stop reading and learning and know that we are each born to lead to vibrant and fulfilled lives.  Start with small steps, you are here reading this so you are already on teh journey of finding out more, every thousand mile journey starts with the first step and remember, every step we take towards health is one further from dis-ease.

May your day be filled with the vibrancy you deserve, enjoy the sun, top up your vitamin D and en-joy and be in joy.  I will write to you again soon.  If you have comments or suggestions please leave them in the comments box, we are always happy to hear from you.  And if the idea of Juice Feasting appeals to you, please check out David and Katrina Rainoshek’s site Juice Feasting. Watch the video “Hero’s Journey” because when you take your health into your own hands you are walking the Hero’s Journey…welcome to the path. En-joy and be in-joy.

Make it a RAWsome day
Shivie and Cemaaj

Good morning Sweet Ones

And how is your morning?  The sky is blue (at least in SF!) and we are looking forward to another warm day, a great day to juice!  My juicing is done and Cemaaj is still juicing away.  As I said yesterday we have 3 gallons of juice to make (12 quarts), each quart contains 2.5lbs of green leafy veggies.  We have a system, I do the carrot, apple and ginger juice through the Green Star juicer, we each have 16oz of this juice per day, you want to be careful how much carrot juice you consume as they are high on the glycemic index.  However when you are drinking only juice, 3 quarts of which are pure green you need a little extra sweetness and energy.  We then have a second 16oz sweet juice and today we have watermelon, yesterday was strawberry and tomorrow will be pineapple.  Another important factor when juicing is to get variety to make sure you get a good cross range of nutrients.  So, my watermelon and carrot juices are all ready to deliver to G, and ours are in the fridge.

Meanwhile, JuiceMan extraordinaire, Cemaaj, is continuing to make his quota of 9 quarts fo green juice.  Some of you have asked what we put into the green juice.  We use one head of celery each (for the organic sodium, a nutrient we are often lacking – it must be organic sodium – which helps digestion, and lack of which can lead to ulcers and the like), cucumber, lettuce (as long as we not talking iceberg lettuce, lettuce has incredible nutrients, and we use three or four varieties from the Farmers Market), lemon, parsley, ginger and a few dark leaves (think collards, kale and some broccoli, it is a balancing act not make the juice too hard, so we add just a few…and voila, you have green juice, packed full of nutrients and tasty (and if you don’t like it at first the body adapts to liking it and wanting it.

When we wake up we drink up to a quart of water with fresh lemon juice, this helps flush the pyloric valve to aid in eliminating…there is no cleanse without the elimination and we want to help that as much as possible (of course we also use enemas (we will “get into” this volatile subject in another post) and dry skin brushing to help with that).  After our lemon water we take powdered MSM with an Emergen C – the citrus helps the absorbtion of the MSM, it’s all about synergy.  Then we start juicing and drinking our first quart of the day.  I am again sipping on my juice as I type this to you.

Once we are done juicing we don’t have to think abut food preparation for the remainder of the day.  It is still amazing to me how much we think and talk about food, let alone how much we eat.  When you are focused on drinking your juice for the day, it becomes apparent how much the rest of the Western world eats.  And yet, within all that food there are so few nutrients to fuel our body and allow it to do internal healing and housekeeping.

Well, it is time for me to dry my hair and get ready to cross the city to deliver G’s juice – he is out on a 20 mile bike ride and is excited to see how the juice fuels him.  We also have a request to drop a green juice into Stable Cafe, so we will do that on our way out.  We are disappointed there is no Farmers Market at Civic Center and despite the fact that we spent $80 on greens on Wednesday we will need to go and more produce today and Monday to get us through to Tuesday evening when g finishes his 5 day Juice Feast.  We will continue juicing daily.

That is my snapshot so far of our morning and I am happy I got to sit down and share a little of with you.  And if we are getting your juices flowing talking about the juice, consider joining us for our next round of cleansing as summer slides into fall.

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, make it a RAWsome and juicy day.

In gratitude

Shivie and Cemaaj

Good morning Sweet Ones

As I sit typing today I am sipping on my green juice…celery, lettuces, cucumber, collard, ginger and lemon. We have three quarts of green juice each and another 16oz of carrot, apple and ginger and 16oz of aqua fresa…the latter two give us a break from green and a few more calories. So we drink 4 quarts of juice a day…yep one whole gallon of green juice per person per day. We are in week 3 of guiding a client through the cleanse.

Week 1 was omitting dairy, caffeine and alcohol. Week 2 was completely raw and week 3 is the Juice Feast. We will break the feast gently and come back out raw then vegan and then back to wherever we feel we now fit in the diet spectrum.

Juice Feasting is interesting on many levels. It is amazing how many juiced greens it takes to fill one quart jar, probably more than most people eat in a week (about 2.5lbs of greens) and that is only a 1/4 of the day’s totals, so by the end of 5 days or longer (you can do the Juice Feast for 92 days and beyond…intense!), you have “consumed” more veggies than you might in 6 months.

We did our last Juice Feast in March but at that time I was still very ill with my kidney stone. I remember standing in the kitchen at the Green Star whilst Cemaaj was using the VitaMix and I had a heating blanket tied around my back and plugged into the wall. That was a tough time and I made 3 full days before being sick and deciding that my body just couldn’t handle it at that time.

Today I am strong and feel great, though I have to admit it took me a while to get over throwing up 3 days of a gallon a juice a day, so I am happy to be sitting here with my juice by my side. I do not find juicing easy to do, I am finnicky about how many hard greens are in there and I think alot of that is that I am new to the whole juice concept but I am getting better. Even small things like putting the juice in 16oz jars rather than 32oz helps me, I feel less intimidated even though I drink the same amount. Just imagine a crystal geyser gallon bottle filled with potent green juice, your food for the day!

Our kitchen smells like juice!!! It is always a challenge to fit all the produce into the 2 refrigerators we have, but as we are juicing about 30-35lbs a morning it goes down pretty quick too. That is one of the joys of juicing….you get up in the morning and blast out 4 quarts of juice each and clean up. For the remainder of the day all you have to think about is grabbing a juice and drinking it…at first this is quite the job to do. You have to keep sipping the juice and start early because you need to drink it before you get hungry and look for something else. Sometimes the sheer volume of liquid can be challenging…but you keep sipping away.

We made our client, let’s call him G, a juice to pick up last night so he could start sipping asap this morning. He has never undertaken this kind of challenge before, and he tentatively tried the juice contained in the quart jar and I think it tasted to him as green as it looked. I sent him a text this morning to see how the first juice is going and his response “Better than expected, keep them flowing” (the daily support is very important when undertaking a task like this, it allows G to ask questions or address what is coming up for him, it really is quite a learning experience on so many levels).

Most of this stuff is all about being mentally and well as physically motivated and prepared. With G we decided to start weening him off the caffeine and dairy a couple of weeks before the 5 day Juice Feast to really get his mind into embracing health, even if that means having some “detox” symptoms along the way. Though the advantage to splitting up the cleanse into such weeks is that you have the first detox from the dairy and caffeine and then rest gets easier, those are the two things people find the hardest to let go of, and often they have the most severe detox symptoms.  I wish I could say I was one of those that just loves green juice and can’t wait to get it – I am not, not yet anyway. But I do know it is good for me, and I have tasted worse!!! So I do it every quarter or so at least for 5 days to give my body a break. I no longer drink caffeine, dairy or alcohol but wherever we are in the Diet Spectrum toxins build up and need releasing before they manifest into a deeper problem.

Well we really must go and deliver our 4 quarts of juice to G and see how he is doing. We are all three doing this together through Tuesday evening. It is so much fun to hear the changes that occur in such short periods of time.  Within the first week of taking out dairy and caffeine G lost a couple of pounds, his skin looked better and he felt good. It seems he feels better and better the deeper into the month of cleansing we get.

That’s 16oz down for me, another 7 to go!!!! I hope to check back in later, as we have no food to prepare for 5 days we end up with a good deal of “extra” time, it is interesting to see how much of our time is taken up with food, what to eat, where to eat, what to buy, what to cook…the Juice Feast takes care of all that, make it all in the morning, put in separate jars in the refrigerator and keep sipping on one every 2 hours or so…minimal washing up…fancy trying it???? We will be doing another at the end of summer if you are thinking about it!

Going downtown to deliver to G now. Have a juicy and RAWsome day.
Shivie and Cemaaj