Juicing Book

Several months ago I received a juicer as a gift. I went out and bought tons of organic fruits and vegetables. The second day of juicing I juiced a whole beet and a carrot. I got very ill for a short time. After a few hours, I looked up juicing beets online. I found that one should NEVER juice a whole raw beet, and juice no more than a quarter of a beet at a time. I stopped juicing.

Now, several months later, I want to juice again. I bought my load of organic fruits and vegetables. I want to juice kale, spinach and celery but I just saw on your site not to have more than 1/4 cup of kale. Is that correct?

So I am Asking Jesse!

Please advise.

Can you tell me the best way to get knowledgeable about juicing?

What you have done is very typical and I will tell you why.

People have been told and influenced by infomercials, many books and fanatical juicers to believe that juicing is a miracle cure — that juicing will cure all that ails you.

Then, when one combines this thought process with the fact that people think It's vegetables, it must be good for me. So I will have lots and do my body good.

Then people, like you, realize that they don't feel so good and they wonder why?

There is a lot of hype out there about juicing and usually it has to do with a sales quota. People have to hype juicing to sell something. But I have no quota and thus I like to remove the hype and bring juicing back down to earth.

When a person juices based on the hype about juicing they have heard, it often leads to what I call this reckless juicing. But I promote something I call Responsible Juicing — yes, such a boring term but it's responsible juicing that will actually help create the long term health that so many desire.

The major premise for responsible juicing is that the difference between poison and medicine is always in the dose.

While juice is made from whole vegetables, it is both a concentrated and processed source of vegetables. Thus, not only are you getting more vegetable nutrition into your body in a higher dose, but because juice is processed, it means the body does not have to digest or extract the nutrition from the vegetables. Thus the nutrition is readily and immediately available.

When you eat a vegetable, your body must digest it, which takes time. During the digestive process, your body slowly receives the nutrition. Eating a carrot would be like driving 1000 miles by car. It's a relatively slow journey.

But juicing is like being launched in the space shuttle. Before you know it, the nutrition your body has is out of this world. You raise the nutrition level and you raise it fast because juicing has done the extraction of the nutrients for your body.

So, when we juice, we must juice responsibly.

Juicing should never be your lifestyle, but rather juicing should compliment your lifestyle.

Expectations will always create disappointment and many people begin juicing with the expectation of great health — a miracle health producer. But when that doesn't happen or when they get sick, literally from juicing, they get turned off. This is too bad. If a person were to just juice responsibly with a calm realization that juicing isn't a miracle and that there is not one single silver bullet for good health, but rather it is your entire lifestyle that creates good health, then people would juice in a way that actually benefits them.

When we juice, we want to juice with a calm excitement. We want to love the whole process of juicing, but we want to be mellow. We need to realize that health won't be achieved overnight and that no two people have the same needs especially when it comes to health.

For some people, juicing really has been a miracle for their health problems. But this does not mean it will be this way for everyone. Everyone has individual needs and so health must always be individualized to the person. For one, juicing may be a miracle but for another, it does nothing other than help keep the body healthy or healthier.

When it comes to juicing, we must always remember that juicing is putting more nutrition into your body. This is a form of herbal medicine. Actually, whenever you eat, you are giving your body medicone. Nutrition is medicine!

As Hippocrates said Let your food be your medicine and your medicine be your food. However, what Hippocrates didn't say was Don't let your food be your poison and your poison be your food. Certain foods are obviously unhealthy and have a detrimental affect on your health such as junk foods, cigarettes, etc. But when you juice in an extreme way, you can also begin to poison in your body, not necessarily in the toxic poison way, but rather you overstimulate your body.

When you take herbal medicine, many people think that the herbs have medicinal values to them. Well, that's true, they do. But what the herbs have more than anything else is nutrition. It is the nutrition in the herbs that helps to heal the body.

It's just that in herbal medicine, we are often using herbs that we don't normally eat such as roots or flowers. But when it comes to juicing, it's just a carrot... or it's just a beet. We don't see them as a herbal remedy because we eat them all the time, but they are a herbal remedy. We don't see the carrot, the beet or other vegetables as a herbal remedy because we have never eaten them in a high enough dose to stimulate the body's healing ability. But once you juice your vegetables, you are increasing the dose and making the nutrition more readily available thus really awakening the healing or herbal powers of the vegetables. This is also why, juicing can and does have a healing affect on the body — but only when done right.

A sick person may need more and may be able to handle a higher dose of vegetables in their juice because their body needs the nutrition. But for the average person, they need less — a responsible amount of juice. This is where most people make their mistake. They juice as if they are sick and thus juice too much and too fast. But even if sick, if you juice in a way that your body does not like, then you can make things worse.

Some will say that it is good to experience a detox effect where you feel ill. But I personally believe that a person can detoxify in a way where they feel good. One doesn't need to feel horrible to detoxify. A person can detoxify in a way that doesn't put stress on their kidneys, as an example.

The reality is that your body is in a constant state of detoxification. If your body was not constantly detoxifying, then you would die. Thus, every time you exhale, you are detoxifying. Every time you urinate or have a bowel movement, you are detoxifying. Your body is always detoxifying and all we want to do is help the body detoxify in an effective and efficient manner. We can achieve this by minimizing the toxins that enter our body and by helping to maximize the toxins leaving.

Now, back to herbal remedies... they work by providing the body nutrition.

So when you juice in a reckless way, you over stimulate the body.

This is why, all you need to do is juice in a calm way and drink no more than 1 cup of juice per day.

The guides in my book are just that, guides. But they are there to help people not experience the uncomfortables negatives of juicing but rather the gentle benefits.

Simplicity creates consistency and consistency is what creates results. So juicing once does nothing. But juicing on a regular and continuous basis, in a responsible way, has a long term benefit to your health.

So you just need to learn to juice like you are driving a car and not like a rocket ship pilot.

Have you been wanting to do hatha yoga (stretching) but have found it either too difficult or you are not that flexible? If yes, and even if no, watch Jesse do some pure hatha yoga routines.

Unlike flow yoga, each pose in pure or traditional hatha yoga is held for a few minutes. While holding the pose, you focus the mind on the stretch. When you focus the mind, that's when you find silence.

Jesse is not flexible — never has been and probably never will be flexible like others. But it doesn't matter. In pure hatha yoga, how flexible you are makes no difference. It's all about loving the pose and focussing the mind on the stretch.

If you want to learn pure hatha yoga, now you can by following Jesse on a series of hatha yoga routines.

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