Commitment?

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I jumped off the fence today and bought myself an electric masticating juicer. I ordered from the company that makes these gadgets, and it should be here in a few days by UPS ground. Buying this juicer at this time of the year when most all my domestic bills and taxes come due made me real nervous. I keep thinking I probably should have bought the manual hand-turn juicer and paid a lot less.

My buying this juicer is a commitment for me. I could have continued to use my sister-in-law's manual juicer when and if she was at home, at least until I gave myself more time to try this wheatgrass diet for long enough to be sure I might feel strong about it, but this is not about something borrowed, something blue. This is about the food I eat everyday.

I decided I needed to own my own juicer to be able to use it whenever or however I wanted to. I needed to have my own say so about wot's what when it comes to something to eat. I needed my own juicer that I keep at my house to do with as I pleased. After I became certain about that, then for me it was just a matter of whether I wanted a manual juicer or an electrically-driven one.

I questioned my sister-in-law about her manual juicer to find out how strongly she felt about it being a manual juicer as opposed to having one that was driven by an electric motor. She grinned at me and told me she could get along just fine with an electric juicer. She had the juicer she had because it had been given to her as a gift from my brother.

In my web search to find out more about what kind of juicer I might wanna buy one of the articles provided a link to a youtube video. When the linked video was over it displayed links to other videos about juicers, i watched a few that way, and then decided to do a youtube search to see how many of them were available. Hundreds! Maybe thousands! I must have viewed about 20-30 youtube videos about the various types and brands of juicers to get a good idea of what kind of juicer to buy.

The biggest problem that the various types of juicers seem to encounter is how much oxidation of whatever fruits and vegetables being juiced the machines themselves cause. I've never studied much about wheatgrass juicing and the problems to avoid before. The documentation I've used suggests that oxidation is not a good thing if you're going after the freshest, most beneficial juice. The authors I read pretty much all agreed that the longer you take from harvesting the wheatgrass to when you process it through the juicer, the less of the good stuff you'll get.

Apparently the enzymes start dying pretty quick after the plant is harvested, and they're dying mostly because of oxidation. You can see the result of oxidation when you bite into an apple and it immediately starts turning brown. From what I've read and listened to, that's why wheatgrass has to be juiced and consumed in a short time.

It seems like oxidation has a lot to do with the type of juicer one chooses to buy. There are two basic types, and they're used generally for different purposes. Centrifugal juicers are fast and easy to use, but they generate heat (which kills enzymes) and there high speed motors areates the plant material while its chopping it up with titanium blades.

Slinging fruits and vegetables around at 10,000 rpms to separate the chlorophyl from the cellulose whips up the extracted juice, and produces a froth. The froth is the result of mixing air with the wheatgrass juice and thus initiates oxidation which also kills the enzymes.

Centrifugal juicers sling the juice out of the blade chopped plants you feed into it. It's not the best design for wheatgrass and leafy vegetable like kale, collards and cabbage. They require a different mechanical design that don't whip up a froth and don't generate heat during the juicing process. The juicer that seems to work best for the wheatgrass and leafy vegetables perform a sort of cold press methodology by using a rotating graduated screw design that turns slows and masticates the plant material through compacting pressure. That's the kind I bought.

I actually bought some enzyme pills in the past. I must have unconsciously realized I needed something to help break down the junk food I kept cramming into my digestive system. After I started taking them I got some strange impressions from some critical article on the internet, and I sorta backed off of using those pills.

The problem I had was that I had no way of knowing what's wot with the dosages. I couldn't find any information that made me trust my health to it. I guess that's why the information I read about drinking wheatgrass juice made sense to me. Supposedly a natural sensitivity to when enough is enow becomes apparent as the diet self-regulates it's needs and the amount of juice needed to get the job done.

I guess I'm still not totally sure this diet will work out for me. How could I know after only a week? I worry about the money I spent on the juicer because things are getting a little tight financially, but I think I'll save enough money on food to justify my investment. Have I ever mentioned that I'm a miser?

When I was driving to mail my car insurance I saw a field of green grass that looked like somebody had planted a cover crop. Acres and acres of it. Since we've only gotten started planting wheat grass and it's gonna be a week or more before it grows enough to harvest I figured I'd get my scissors and a plastic bag and go out and harvest some of this cover crop grass.

I don't know whether the grass is wheat grass or rye grass. Its usually rye grass in this neck of the woods. The grass was just a couple of inches high, so it took a while to gather enough to get enough to make a couple ounces of grass juice, I got tired of messing with it, and I didn't exactly have permission from the proprietor to harvest, so I stopped before I got as much as I intended and went to share my booty with the juicer owner. We each got about a jigger of juice by the time all of it was consumed.

I had to make sure my sister-in-law was gonna be home before I harvested the grass in order to be sure I could get it into the juicer in fifteen minutes of cutting it. That's why I figured it would be the smartest thing to do to buy my own juicer. If I run into some living green stuff I wanna make juice out of I won't have to wait.

The colonoscopy that was performed on me a few months ago really helped me to know where I'm at with that. The fact that my next appointment to get another one is nineteen years from the last one was a pretty good sign I may not die from a pain in the ass. My heart has been checked out pretty good too. That leads me to believe that it's my diet that's causing me the arthritis and bone problems.

I don't know if I'll follow the living plants or raw food diet exclusively. It might come to that, but I think the problems I'm having has to do with not getting the enzymes I need to digest the food I eat, in the the food I eat.

So far as I can reason it out, what really needs to happen is for me to use wheatgrass juice to get what I need, particularly living enzymes, to digest whatever else I put in my body without taking the enzymes from other parts of my body to digest the new stuff.

There are other things at play, of course, things I may or may not know about this way of life yet, but the way I figure it, I got nothing but this one body to lose presently, and that's gonna happen no matter what I do. They'll make more. Some won't be ready. I'll trick 'em out of their new body, and things will keep on keeping on.

Tonight will be the coldest night of the year in this area. It's supposed to get a few degrees below the freezing mark here in the coastal plains, but not too much further inland up toward the capitol it's supposed to be a hard killing frost. We've been lucky that hasn't happened yet.

The grass around my house is still green, but the new fig tree I planted finally lost the two leaves it kept alive this past summer. The original branches that came with the plant died last winter, and I didn't think the plant would put up another leafing stem. It actually put up two stems. One of them died, and the remaining one settled down for the summer with just those two really healthy leaves.

The two leaves gave me a little hope that the fig plant will take root where I planted it and eventually thrive. I pretended all last summer that those two leaves were all the root system needed to acclimate to the soil I planted it in and establish at least stronger root ball.

My old fig tree has that kind of established system. I've found one inch thick roots from it twenty feet from the mother plant itself. For the last two seasons I've pruned back branches as thick as my leg and it's come back stronger each spring.

This tree came from a cutting that's said to have been in my father's side of the family for generations. Makes sense to me. Three of my four siblings have their own fig tree. It's a common brown fig variety. It could have come from anywhere. I kind of act like it's a member of the family. It'll be here long after I'm dead and gone, but it won't have my own family for a family. They live in another part of the world.
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