BEFORE photos...

Soooooooo...I think I'm serious about this now, because I'm about to show you something that I'm not exactly proud of...

THE BEFORE

Feel free to weep. I know I do. This is what 60 pounds of unhappiness looks like.

You know what this means, right? I have to show progress in pictures now, if I don't want to feel like a sloppy fool. You've seen the worst...now, get ready for the best! Or at least the better.

And THIS is how I'm going to get there:

6 peaches

4 stalks celery

4 carrots

2 big leaves kale

2 cups spinach

That's a 52-ounce container, and it was almost full.

Conclusion: heavy on the celery, but good!

(photo's blurry, but it was orange in color)

4 cucumbers

3 apples

2 stalks celery

1 cup spinach

And this is only half - a 24 ounce container, nearly full - Hubsy took the other half to work with him.

Conclusion: heavy on the cucumber (one day I'll get my proportions right), but refreshing! Tastes like cucumber water, but sweet because of the apples.

This is the pulp left over from the last batch (amazingly, it only made a handful of pulp!), plus half of the pulp from a strawberry/peach/apple juice we did this morning. I'm going to make it into a soup!

The other half of the strawberry pulp mixture I stirred into some plain yogurt and ate with a handful of walnuts for breakfast. It was DELICIOUS! The fruit pulp tastes almost like jam.

The craziest part about the veggie pulp is that it is completely dry - almost like a sandy veggie paste. The machine really spins out ALL of the juice and just leaves the dry pulp! Sounds unappetizing, but add some onions, garlic, and broth, and you've got a tasty veggie soup, and you get to use up the roughage of the veggies after you've drunk the juice. That way, you don't waste anything, and you get to eat the insoluble fiber (the soluble fiber all ends up in the juice). It's a pretty efficient way to eat your veggies - you get 90% of the nutrients by drinking the juice, which is way more than you'd get by cooking them, and then you still get all the fiber, both soluble and insoluble.

The most amazing part is, we get such a burst of energy after drinking the juice - Hubsy and I were literally jumping around the kitchen after we drank ours this morning! I don't want to sound like some nutty health freak, but if this is how we're going to get in our daily fresh fruit and veggie quota, I could totally see us doing this for the rest of our lives. Think about it - let's just list all the fruits and veggies we've already consumed in the last 24 hours alone:

7 peaches

6 stalks celery

4 carrots

2 big leaves kale

3 cups spinach

4 cucumbers

4 apples

10 strawberries

Plus, with lunch yesterday we had squash and onion casserole, and stuffed zucchini (both leftover from when my parents were here - they have a hard time consuming veggies without some sort of cream or cheese involved). Amazingly, I think we may have actually gotten in our 4-5 servings veggies (or is the recommendation 6-7 now?) and 2-3 servings fruit! We've each had about 48 ounces of juice, which is 8 servings fruits/veggies. I find that incredible.

Anyway, enough about my new obsession - off to Zumba now! (Which, seeing as today is the first day since my parents left that I've had the energy for it, it's about time!)