Toss aside those 'empty' foods which pack on the calories and choose, instead, the stream-lined juicing principles which will juice you slim for life.
THE CORE PRINCIPLES
The core principles of this lifestyle choice, are perfect for anyone, whether you are juicing yourself slim for life or juicing yourself to amazing health. The core principles are short, precise effective, flexible and incredibly easy to follow, wherever you live and whatever your lifestyle. Juice Yourself Slim is a lifestyle. This isn't about simply juicing yourself slim and then going back to what made you fat to start with. This change is for life and these principles are simple to implement.
1. Replace two meals a day with a juice, smoothie or soup, five days a week.
This is the big one and the main principle behind juicing yourself slim for life. It may almost sound too simple, but it works!
Your new juicy lifestyle involves replacing two of your three regular meals with a juice, smoothie or soup, while your other meal can be whatever you desire. I am hoping by now that you love the juices, smoothies, soups and salads so much that you desire them. This is the pattern for five days of the week, then at the weekend you are free to be even more flexible. If you follow the same principle at weekends, the results are even more dramatic.
My aim is that by the time you get this far on the programme you will be truly free to choose foods that are good for you, and you will crave fewer empty foods which do nothing for you. The beauty of juicing yourself slim for life is its flexibility — that's why people like it and find it easy, and why it's something they can do for life. As long as you follow all the other principles, you can be incredibly free around food and still get the results you are looking for.
Many people choose to have a juice or smoothie for breakfast, a soup or smoothie for lunch and then a regular meal in the evening. The regular meal is often nutritious, such as a large salad, maybe a brown rice dish, some wholegrain pasta and pesto — you get the idea. Some prefer to go down the not-so-healthy meal route and tuck into fish and chips now and then.
Others prefer to have a juice or smoothie for breakfast, eat a regular lunch and then have soup in the evening. At weekends, virtually all choose to have a juice in the morning and then maybe other stuff for the rest of the day — they are so used to getting their daily dose of health they need nothing else. Others keep to the same principle as they have for the five days.
Clearly it's your choice and depends on your lifestyle. If your family cherishes their evening meals together then it makes sense to enjoy the same meal, and have your liquid fuel for breakfast and lunch. If, however, you enjoy hitting the deli with friends at lunchtime, your lifestyle is better suited to having your regular lunch and a juice or smoothie for breakfast and soup for supper. The choice is yours.
If you are very overweight then you will Juice Yourself Slim more quickly by sticking to the principle of juice/smoothie/meal (or whatever combination you have chosen) for as many days as possible. It is also clear that if you choose your meal to be fish and chips with half a loaf of bread every night, your journey to the land of the slim will be a much longer one.
2. Don't feed an emotion with food
If you are not genuinely physically hungry then anything you eat as a response to an emotion will turn to fat in the body. You simply cannot feed an emotion with food, and even good food will cease to be good if you are genuinely not hungry. Remember to always ask yourself this core question: ‘If I didn't know how much food I had eaten, how hungry would I be?’
Never eat as a response to an emotion or indeed simply because the clock says it's dinner time and therefore you must be hungry. Learn to listen to your body and become an intuitive eater: We have been programmed by BIG FOOD manufacturers to eat as a response to emotion, but part of any negative emotion was often caused by the last fix of BIG FOOD you had.
You may think you eat as a response to emotion but the fact is you eat certain things as a response to emotion. No one, to my knowledge, has ever said, ‘I’m pissed off. I need a grape!’ BIG FOOD creates BIG EMOTIONS and fools us into thinking it can help. Don't fall for it. Life can often be challenging but if you are stressed you should look for the cause, and I can guarantee that the cause is never a Mars Bar deficiency! ONLY EAT WHEN YOU ARE GENUINELY HUNGRY.
3. Do not overeat!
If you want to Juice Yourself Slim and build your body and life to a Grand Design, keep to this principle. Just as it is important to eat only when you are genuinely hungry, it is essential to stop eating just before you are uncomfortably full. I realise this may take some training, but you are building your Grand Design here and this principle is core to laying the right foundations. There is no pleasure to overeating. You don't gain more pleasure from the food by having more of it. Once the body has had enough, the sensation stops being one of pleasure and you feel bloated and stuffed. At times like Christmas you will inevitably forget this principle and experience, again, how awful it feels to be bloated. However, what you do most of the time determines your health and body shape – once in a while for anything, won't interfere with your bigger picture.
4. Watch out for snacking!
If you swap two meals a day for delicious, nutritious juices and smoothies and then eat a salad for your evening meal, you will see superb results in no time. However, if you do the above but also start munching on chocolate biscuits, blueberry muffins and chips, your chances of success on this programme are slim.
Clearly we all have different body types, jobs and physical and mental demands which all require different levels of energy. This is why it is important that you should eat if you are genuinely hungry. Just make sure it's something good. Also, keep in mind that the real pleasure in eating lies in the ending of a genuine hunger, so if you skip the unnecessary snacking, you will love your meals and juices all the more.
5. Don't label it!
It is also important not to label yourself. The second you say, ‘I’m a vegetarian/vegan/ pescatarian’ and so on you may be setting yourself up to feel deprived at some point. I am not saying don't be a vegetarian, vegan or whatever, just that there is no need for the label. Yes, you choose not to have animal produce but don't keep saying ‘I’m a…’ If it doesn't drive you nuts, it may have that effect on other people.
Talking of labels, I often get asked, ‘What should I look to avoid on a label?’ My answer is often ‘THE LABEL!’ Natural foods don't have labels, although with increasing EU regulations that might not be far away. I think if we all just ate ‘NO LABEL’ foods 80% of the time, all would be well. Think about it. Fresh fruits and vegetables, natural seeds and nuts and organic free range meats and fish don't have labels. Obviously, when you go to concerts, football matches and the like there are many ‘no label’ foods for sale – I class these as ‘mystery foods’ as it's often a mystery as to what's in them!
As for labels on food, I would skip anything you can't pronounce! That should sort the good from the bad. Okay, that's slightly too ambiguous, but I think you get my point. Watch out for things like ‘organic’ on anything other than fresh, no-label foods. I know many people who think ‘organic’ chocolate or sugar is good for them. Just because it's organic doesn't mean it's good for you. You can, after all, get ‘organic cocaine’ and ‘organic heroin’! Also, don't be deceived by ‘green' packaging and words like ‘natural'. BIG FOOD and the government are often working together, and remember, their idea of pure natural health might be light years away from what your body actually needs. So in these cases, yes, check the label. Oh, and anything with transfats in it – RUN A MILE!
6. Eat your food and drink your juices slowly
This might seem like an off-the-cuff remark but it is really important, especially when it comes to your juices and smoothies. The digestion process starts in your mouth so take your time over sips. It takes a number of minutes for your brain to register that you have ‘eaten’ so if you gulp your smoothie down in five seconds the chances are you will still feel hungry.
7. Move your body DAILY!
It is so important to move your body as much as you can. Physical movement is a vital element of juicing yourself slim for life for many, many reasons. As well as helping with the slimming process, exercise makes the body firmer. You will also notice a decrease in your desire to eat rubbish; you will get an instant release of endorphins which will make you feel ‘alive’; and you will probably start meeting a whole bunch of new people. You need to find a way of exercising that is fun so it feels like you are playing. Everyone will be different but maybe you would love to join a football or hockey club or start playing badminton with your partner, start jogging or get a mini-trampoline. Not all exercise needs to involve running or jumping about. In fact some of the finest exercise involves slow fluid movement.
8. Keep your spirits high!
Perhaps this is the most important principle. Nothing is more detrimental to health than losing that fire within. When our spirits are sky-high, it's no coincidence that our health usually follows. The chemicals released when we are excited about life are a whole different concoction to those we get when we are highly stressed. This is why it is vital to find as many ways to lift your spirits as possible.
Fill your life with things that excite you and keep the fire alive. Don't rely on only one thing, as if that doesn't work out the way you expected, it is easy for your fire to die down. Every day you are on the journey of Juice Yourself Slim you have something exciting happening — you are building your Grand Design. However, once you are slim and the Grand Design is a reality, you will realise that life as a slim and fit person has its ups and downs. To avoid returning to ‘fat land' it is important to find ways to keep that fire very much alive.
9. Use your culinary imagination
For some superb recipes refer to my book Juice Yourself Slim for Life. You really need to enjoy what you are eating and drinking in order to feel fulfilled, so if you don't like a particular recipe simply skip it. Have some fun and play around with your own combinations depending on what is in season or happens to be in your fridge.
However, it's important that you adhere to the basic principles of the recipes. For example, all the soups are made with no dairy, so if you start using full fat milk, cheese and butter to make your soups you really have missed the point. Be creative with the juices and I expect that after your initial playing around you will find a few core recipes you love, and making them will soon become second nature to you. For further inspiration, you will find over 100 other recipes in my book The Juice Master: Keeping it Simple.
10. The C.A.N.T.principle
If you feel your mind entering that ‘I want but I can't have’ mode, then STOP! Either change your thinking or have the food. This is a flexible lifestyle where you are completely free around all food and drink; where you can make the genuine and free choice to eat or drink whatever you want and not what others have manipulated you to ‘choose’ in the name of profit. Don't continue with any kind of self-imposed tantrum. Remember, it's only a feeling of mental deprivation that makes people believe it's hard to change their eating pattern – I cannot repeat this point enough.
CONSTANT AND NEVER-ENDING TANTRUM
For Juice Yourself Slim to be effective it is imperative that you are free around food. And by ‘effective’ I don't simply mean you getting slim. I mean a total sense of freedom around all food and drink. This means you are free to have them if you want to. The only question you should ask most of the time is, ‘Why on earth would I want to?’ It is also good, if you do feel you are about to eat a load of rubbish, to ask, ‘What would it genuinely do for me?’ If you are doing it out of emotion, ask yourself how on earth this ‘food’ could possibly feed any emotion. If you are doing it out of a genuine hunger then ask yourself, ‘Will this “food” genuinely satisfy me or simply leave me feeling empty in no time at all?’
Food manufacturers are very clever with how they trap you and convince even the most rational thinker that a chocolate bar can cheer them up. The real pleasure in eating food is the ending of a hunger. Hunger is an empty, insecure feeling. When we eat food we stop this feeling and so feel good. The bigger the feeling of hunger, the more we relish the food. What we are actually enjoying is the ending of an aggravation.
Source
Vale J. Juice. Yourself Slim for Life.
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