How to Make Your Juice INVINCIBLE!

Today we have our friend Danielle from It's a Love/Love Thing sharing her journey with juicing!  Do you juice?  Do you want to start?  It sounds addicting!

Hello, Oh Lardy! fans, I'm so honored to be here with you today. I'd love to fill you in on my most recent juicing experience. I'd call it life-changing! It all started not long ago…

…when I started getting a hankering for some fresh juice. You know, it's the New Year, and like most of you, I want to be healthier. So I washed some apples, a few carrots, and a small-ish beet, and tossed them into the juicer. In a few seconds I had this beautiful, deep red fresh juice, just waiting to be guzzled by yours truly. I love juicing, don't you? It's so healthy for you. Let's pause the story and talk a minute about what juicing can do for you. When you consume fresh juice, you're actually drinking many more veggies and fruits than you would normally eat, and you're taking out the fiber. This streamlines the nutrients from your produce and makes them easily assimilable for your body.

For starters, juicing can:

• boost your immune system
• provide levels of vitamins and antioxidants you wouldn't easily get from your regular diet
• increase your digestion and ease the burden on your body by providing enzymes

Here's something that's crucial to successful juicing: Your body needs fat to digest the nutrients in the juice! I learned this from my favorite cookbook, Nourishing Traditions:

“Cream added to carrot juice helps the body to convert carotene efficiently into Vitamin A (retinol). This remedy is used with success in European clinics for the treatment of cancer, psoriasis and many other diseases…” – NT p. 609

Super. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to add some healthy saturated fat to help my body absorb these juicy nutrients. But there's a problem. Our family can't do dairy! So adding cream to the juice is out. Hmm… Then it hits me: coconut oil! My favorite fat! Why is it my favorite fat, you ask?

Because, for starters, coconut oil:

• is made of medium-chain-triglycerides (MCTs) which go straight to be used for energy
• has a high lauric acid content, which makes it antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, and antimicrobial
• just plain tastes delicious

Back to my story. I squint my eyes and envision solidified coconut oil bobbing around my fresh juice… and to tell you the truth, it doesn't seem that appetizing. But wait. I have fresh juice. I have coconut oil. And I have a high-speed blender. Dun-dun-dunnnnn. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? It's experiment time! The juice I had just extracted came out to about 1 cup. I poured it in my high-speed blender, and added two tablespoons of that precious fat, coconut oil. The oil wasn't even liquid, it was solid, and truthfully, I wasn't sure how it was going to work. Throwing caution to the wind (my blender often makes me feel this way), I turned on the blender, slowly increased the speed, and gave her all she had for about 30 seconds. The result? Divine. Heaven. Bliss, ecstasy, all that stuff. I'm not kidding. Just wait and see!

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Invincible Juice

1. Add 1 cup fresh juice to blender.
2. Add up to two tablespoons coconut oil. (Can be solid or melted.) (buy quality oil here)
3. Blend on high for 30 seconds. Don't go any longer, especially in a high-speed blender, or you will start to warm up the juice. You don't want this to happen, because you want all those beneficial enzymes left unharmed.
4. Enjoy. Fresh juice is best taken immediately, when those valuable enzymes and nutrients are at their peak, and best taken on an empty stomach.

Tips:

• Works best with room temperature juice.
• I have not tried this with an unsweetened juice, like celery or tomato, only with sweet juices that contain apples, carrots, and beet. But you could always try a less sweet juice and let me know how it goes!
• Coconut oil is a powerful food – if you are not used to taking larger amounts daily, start off slowly, like with 1/2 tablespoon. It will still taste great.

Remember, you are combining healthy fat with your juice, so you are maximizing vitamin and nutrient absorption. Yay for you! Enjoy your Invincible Juice. I'm ruined, honestly – I don't think I can ever have juice any other way. 🙂 Danielle Baethge is the blogger behind It's a Love/Love Thing. She is a Jesus-lover, wife to her best friend, and a mother of four precious children. Stop on by her blog for inspiration for a simpler, love-filled life. Facebook | Pinterest