Cover me in hemp, feed me some wheatgrass and call me a hippie.

No! Seriously, I’m not even sure who I am anymore!

A little over a year ago, I never thought I’d be dedicating so much of my blogging time to healthy eating and eating real food. But here I am, about to blog another post about my learnings on eating a clean, real food diet.

Between that and all my annoying running updates, I’m pretty sure some of you must be so bored of me right now but I can’t help myself. I am so excited about all the changes I’ve noticed in my own body since I started banting, following a clean, green, real food diet. And I’m not just talking about weight loss either. I’ve noticed improvements in so many areas of my health and life, most notably, my immune system and also my skin – no more acid bumps on my upper arms and no more break outs.

Anyway, back to Hungry For Change, if you haven’t watched this documentary yet, I’d really encourage you to do so! (It’s available on Netflix, but don’t tell anyone I admitted to that) Water watched it this weekend and I caught bites of it and what I heard and what we learned blew us away and reminded us of why we embarked on this journey to better health and cleaner eating.

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Some of the interesting tidbits I took away from the bits I saw were:

Obesity is a symptom of being malnourished – this is really something I learned first hand when I started banting.

Processed foods – all the pitfalls! Read this, it’s quite fascinating – 10 things the processed food industry doesn’t want you to know!

If it’s made in a lab or has to be advertised, it’s not real food!

After watching the documentary, Walter was also keen to try taking in more homemade, real, vegetable juices. I know there have been a million and one articles written about juicing as fad but the benefits of juicing do seem to make sense and so we decided to give it a try.

• Juicing allows us to take in a large serving of vegetables and fruits at one time and can be the key to giving you a radiant, energetic life and truly optimal health. Dr Mercola typically buys up to 20 pounds of raw vegetables per week and juices a few pounds per day. Some people may find eating that many vegetables difficult, but it can be easily accomplished with a quick glass of vegetable juice.
• Juicing is an easy way to absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables. This is important because most of us have impaired digestion as a result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years. This limits your body’s ability to absorb all the nutrients in an optimal way. Juices go straight to your blood stream which in turn carries all the nutrients to where they are needed the most by the body without further delay as in digestion. 
• Juicing can help you add a wider variety of vegetables in your diet. Many people eat the same vegetable salads every day. This goes against the principle of regular food rotation and increases your chance of developing an allergy to a certain food. But with juicing, you can juice a wide variety of vegetables that you may not normally enjoy eating whole.
• Juicing is also an incredibly effective way to cleanse the body, especially green juices! Green juices contain high levels of chlorophyll a powerful phytonutrient which attaches to toxins and heavy metals and helps remove them from your body. It also increases your blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity by stimulating red blood cell production.

We started this morning with a cabbage, beetroot, ginger, celery juice that actually tasted a hell of a lot better than I was expecting. Beetroot is, strictly speaking, not banting friendly, mostly for those who are diabetic, not exercising or struggling to lose weight because it is high in carbs but it is also so nutrient dense and I figured seen as none of the above warnings applied to either Walter or I, adding some beetroot to our juice occasionally would do no harm.

So I’ll let you know how this goes. For now, we’re going to try and take in a glass of fresh, homemade veggie juice each morning and I’ll give you a report back on if I notice any of the differences they claim.