Verdict: Green Juice Works

Purple is the new green (purple kale with purple juice)

Every New Year, someone I know will make a public commitment to start making smoothies every morning. Every time, I would do a facepalm. I always tell people that smoothies are too messy, expensive, and time-consuming to make a Resolution we can keep. Also, the main reason people seem to choose smoothies is that they think drinking juice has magical weight loss powers. Like every other possible habit, juicing works in certain contexts and fails in others. For my purposes, I can now say that green juice does work.

We eat a lot of vegetables in my household. While my husband and I have both always had admirably low cholesterol, we have also had trouble getting the "good" cholesterol known as HDL, or high density lipoproteins, high enough. I just had a standard lipid panel done, and my HDL had gone from 38 mg/dL (too low) to 50 (medium). What changed? The addition of several servings of green juice every week.

I only need one good reason to do something, just as I only need one good reason to quit doing something. I wanted to increase my HDL, and I started drinking green juice, and my HDL went up. Perfection. Now, I just need to get it up to 60.

Does juicing help with weight loss? I think the majority of the time, it definitely does not. The reason for that is that most people do not have any nutritional knowledge, which is not our fault, and thus we don't know how to evaluate our food intake as a whole. By the month or year rather than by the meal or individual item. We tend to believe that adding or subtracting a specific food or category of food is the answer, based on trends and product marketing, when there is no single food that has magical dietary or nutritional powers. Adding more calories to an excess weight issue is going to compound that issue. It's pretty easy to drink hundreds of calories in just a few minutes.

When juicing aids weight loss, it's because the juice replaces an entire meal.

My husband and I did a juicing program for a week, and we did lose weight. That's because we drank juice for breakfast and lunch, and ate only soup or salad or steamed vegetables for dinner. Sure, yes, following a strict meal replacement program like this will induce weight loss. Going back to a Standard American Diet afterward will inevitably lead to regaining that weight.

People think that "diets don't work" due to pop culture. Diets absolutely do work. What doesn't work is the idea that we can eat "normally" the rest of the time. What has to happen is that we have to fundamentally change everything we eat, permanently. We have to reevaluate what we think is normal. There are so many unhealthy, obesogenic aspects to American food culture that any one element is enough to cause steady weight gain all by itself.

Excessively large portions.
Snacking between meals.
High-fructose corn syrup.
Added sugars (glucose, sucrose, fructose, sugars, syrups).
Drinking our calories.
Excess sodium.
Catastrophically low proportions of dietary fiber.
Chronic malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency.
Eating for entertainment, identity, autonomy, and temporary mood repair.*
...and I think a certain portion of the blame goes directly to cheese.

What I've learned through my own weight loss journey is that adding more power vegetables, increasing my micronutrient intake, drinking significantly more water, and getting more sleep have all worked together to reduce my food cravings. Often, foods I used to crave taste bad to me now, especially salty foods like popcorn and corn chips.

How much more water? In my case, like triple. I almost never drank water before.

How much more sleep? In my case, about 50% more. I used to sleep 5-6 hours a night, and now I sleep 8-9.

How many more vegetables? In my case, about quadruple. Now we eat 2-4 cups of power vegetables with dinner every night, in addition to the green juice.

What do I mean by power vegetables? Mostly cruciferous vegetables. That specifically means broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, kale, and collard greens. We also eat a lot of chard, which is not cruciferous but is high in potassium.

Anything else, I refer to as "sprinkles" or "decorations." Lettuce, tomato, carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, peas, green beans, spinach, asparagus, artichokes, bell peppers... that stuff we just eat for fun. It doesn't "count." Corn is candy.

One of the things about juicing that works for some people is that it can help to disguise the taste and texture of power vegetables. If you gag on certain foods, it's going to be hard work to retrain yourself around flavor and mouthfeel, but it can be done. (I never hear people say that they love eating certain foods like ice cream or chocolate because "it's the texture;" it only comes up as an excuse to avoid eating foods that contain fiber and micronutrients). Anecdotally, all the picky eaters in my acquaintance weigh more than they want to weigh, and I think this is because they lean toward and away from predictable categories of foods. Toward soda, desserts, starches, fried foods, and dairy; away from fruits, vegetables, and all high-fiber whole foods that require real chewing. This hypothesis of mine is objectively testable.

Juicer or blender? We got a Vitamix blender because everything we put in it goes into the juice. That includes the kale stems, apple peels, flax seeds, or whatever else we want to throw in. Juicing spits the pulp out of the back, wasting most of the dietary fiber, creating less volume of juice, costing money, and making a ginormous, hideous mess. Cleaning a juicer is ten times harder than cleaning a blender, especially an expensive blender like the Vitamix that doesn't have a bunch of removable parts.

What goes in our juice?

Five leaves of kale
Two bananas
One apple
One pear
Two cups of ice cubes
1/2" chunk of ginger root, including peel
2 cups pre-made juice, either green or purple juice

We drink 32 ounces each most afternoons, splitting the pitcher between us. On weekends, that's what we have for lunch. Note that we don't try to fuss with it in the mornings. Too noisy, too messy, too time-consuming, too complicated. Instead it goes into a time slot when we are wide awake as well as hungry.

We'll keep making green juice, as we have done for the last several months, because it's not inconvenient and we've made it into a routine. The Vitamix sits on the counter because it's too tall for any of our kitchen cupboards. We go to the grocery store 2-3 days a week, because we don't have a car, and that makes it easy to keep buying fresh fruit and kale. Making the juice takes less than five minutes, including washing the produce. We can afford it. We like the taste. It has turned out to be a faster way to get an extra serving of a cruciferous vegetable than making a complicated lunch or doubling up at dinner. The fact that green juice has helped to increase our micronutrients and increase our HDL is now automatic to our daily routine. It's not a Resolution anymore, but a habit we can keep.

* I know exactly what I mean by this, but I realize it probably sounds esoteric and merits its own post

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