Before you learn about the common juicing mistakes, you better have a brief on what you are deprived of while making juicing mistakes.
As we all are not dieticians or expert on nutritious food, we tend to overtake or undertake the nutrients we need regularly. If that is the fact, what is the best alternative to fill the nutrients gap and reduce the overdosing of the same?
Yes, you have guessed right, it is juice intake the safest and healthiest way to compensate for the lacking of food value in our diet. And funnily enough, that juicing can help cut down the extra fat caused by overeating known as juice cleansing.
Moreover, juice intake is the most effective and safe way to infest the bloodstream with high dose vitamins and minerals. Thus you get your body and mind go along the healthier way.
Therefore, prior to embarking on your juicing journey, you must avoid the most frequent juicing mistakes to reap the best from juice cleansing.
This article is about those mistakes and how to avoid them and the adverse health affects.
What Are The Common Juicing Mistakes And How To Avoid Them?
The juicing mistakes we have been bragging about are the result of not having proper knowledge on juicing that urgently requires you to know about them. Once you know, you are all set to avoid them successfully. Here you go with the common juicing mistakes that can spoil your juice cleansing effort.
Below you go with 15 common juicing mistakes that you commit if you are well aware and an amateur juicer. Even veteran juicers can fall prey to some of those because of not being knowledgeable enough on juicing.
1. Juicing With The Same Ingredients Every Day
Many of us doing it either for inability to collect huge varieties of ingredients every day or not knowing the flipside of drinking the same liquid over and over again. Yes, fruits and veggies are rich with nutrients but they do contain some toxins as well to protect themselves from attack. And unlike the nutrients, these toxins are pretty harmful for us and continuation of the same elements for long amounts to let those toxins gather in our system.
Therefore, by not changing the ingredients you are taking the risk of increasing the same toxins but they will not be that risky when different toxins are in minimal or nominal amounts. We can mention a long list of the scary toxins residing even in the natural ingredients but this is not necessary here.
2. Going For Random Ingredients But Expecting The Best
While using the same ingredients is a no, putting in random ingredients is a big no. You cannot afford to have zero or insufficient knowledge while juicing and for a starter, the stake is even more grievous. You must conduct a thorough research on recipes not to make the blunder of just throwing ingredients and expecting the best juice in terms of quality and flavor. As for flavor, you might end up throwing at the first sip and what use having nutrients in the drink you cannot or don’t want to sip.
Moreover, combining wrong ingredients can cause chemical reactions and you may fall sick. Avoid the old witted ingredients and gather the fresh ones. To avail fresh ingredients around you at will and need, you better turn your backyard space into a garden.
3. Using Merely Fruits Without Vegetables
We all know fruits contain sugar and natural sweeteners to flood your bloodstream with those. So, when you go on taking only fruit juices, you take the risk of increasing sugar in your system. As for example, every 100 grams of apple contain 13.3 grams of sugar, in mango the amount is 14.8 grams, and thus you go on and on. So, what is the way out?
No, you cannot by pass fruits while juicing because you will lose the nutrients at it. You better mix some ingredients with lesser sugar in them and thus you can keep the sugar scale down and reap the benefits of nutrients at the same time. Vegetables and green leaves are the elements I am suggesting here who have minimal or zero sugar in them.
The other alternative is to go for blended juice or smoothies having the fibers of the fruits in the liquid that will keep the sugar low in your bloodstream. Fruits sweeten the juice and help you drink it with relish on top of providing with healthy food values. But still, they shouldn’t be the only ingredients in juicing.
4. Incorporating Too Much Of Dark Green Veggies
In the previous section, we have asserted the importance of vegetables as essential juicing ingredients besides the fruits. But you should maintain a limit here as some of the vegetables and leafy greens are bitter and sharp in flavor- especially the dark green ones. So, they can embitter the juice given you add them more that can bore a first time juicer to a negative extent.
The salvation is to know the exact amount of the dark green vegetables that cannot affect the juice flavor. For the darker greens, it should not be more than 25% of the total ingredients. And other 75% will easily dilute the intense flavor of the bitter or strong ones.
5. Delay In Drinking The Prepared Juice
You are taking juice for the nutrients, minerals, enzymes and anti-oxidants the juicing ingredients are enriched with. After the juice is prepared, the said food values will lose their effectiveness with time though the juice will taste the same after a prolonged period. When you extract the juice from the fruits and veggies, the enzymes and the nutrients become exposed to open air and gradually lose their nutritional value. Therefore, to reap the max nutritional benefits and enjoy the freshest flavor, ensure that you are drinking it the sooner.
As of giving a clear guideline, you can store the prepared juices in your fridge for 2-3 days at best. To delay more than that will amount to nutritional loss but to get every single nutrient, minerals, and antioxidants, and enzymes, drink it in 15 minutes.
6. Avoiding Sugar-Rich Fruits
That juice intake is the best alternative to compensate for the nutrition lacking in your diet. But you must know the sugar-rich juicing elements so that you may end up ingesting loads of sugar and this natural sugar thrives our body. The fruit-based sugar metabolizes far easier than the processed and refined sugar. Do not go confused as I am suggesting for added sugar intake though it is healthy to keep sugar intake to its lowest.
There is fundamental difference between refined sugar and its fruit-based counterpart. The later one is the combination of glucose and fructose that help insulin and the liver to smash them far easier than any synthetic sweeteners. As for blood sugar, fruits sugar is a lesser evil. But you must take care if you have underlying medical issues, it may prove counter-productive otherwise cold-pressed juice or naturally-occurring juices are not alarming. Therefore, do not avoid sugar-rich juicing ingredients taking them to be harmful for blood sugar.
7. Cold-Pressed Juice Vs Heated Blending
Juice made by cold-pressed juicing contains the maximum nutrients. Conversely, the blending or pulverizing fruits destroy the enzymes and vitamins to a great extent.
To be more specific, cold-pressing of raw fruits involves a hydraulic press that extracts the liquid from the core of the ingredients and keeps the nutrients intact. As for minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants, the cold-pressing the best way as it produce zero or nominal heat in the juice-extracting process by applying pounds of pressures.
On the contrary, blending exposes the liquid to high heat. This process is good for increasing the shelf life of the produce but eliminate the lion share of the food values.
Therefore, make sure that you are cold-pressing the ingredients while embarking on a prolonged juice cleansing as you have to compensate for incomplete diet.
Read: Blender vs. Juicer vs. Food processor: What’s The Difference?
8. Getting Dehydrated
It is a grave mistake to avoid or lowering water intake so long juice cleansing is on. You may fall prey to the misconception that juice being a liquid will substitute the required liquid along with filling up the nutrition gap. If we keep in mind that water makes up 2/3 of our body weight and so is crucial to keep that to its required level. Therefore, juice and water intake should go simultaneously to save the body from being dehydrated. Otherwise, dehydration can cause several physical discomforts like dizziness, headaches, fatigue, weak memory, and mood drop.
The water contained in the liquid is not sufficient to compensate the required water level that is not less than 8 glasses a day. To avoid getting dehydrated, you must make sure consumption of this much water on top of the juice make out of nutrient-rich fruits and veggies. If proper hydration and juice consumption go hand in hand, you will feel less hungry and eliminate toxin from your body and thus you can bag all the benefits you are after.
9. Keeping Caffeine On
Juice cleansing benefits you in two ways that include cutting down your weight to the natural level and freeing your body off all the toxins in your system. In this circumstance, you need to get prepared for this beforehand. To get the maximum result, you must get rid of all types of stimulants like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine before you are on with juice cleansing. The juices you are drinking throughout your cleansing period will supply the urgent energy needed as they are full of vitamins and minerals.
In the case that you are a coffee addict or avid coffee drinker, you may find it difficult to stop having coffee suddenly and can cause you headaches or other issues. As for rescue, try tea with zero or minimal caffeine and chicory root, rooibos, and dandelion root might offer the able replacement.
10. Post-Cleansing Diet
Juice cleansing is not a course to go through for certain length of time and then resume the traditional unhealthy diets. That is what people do and thus destroy the full effect. In fact, cleansing your system through juice is the starting a new food habit dominated by fruits, veggies, and so. That is to say, eating clean even when juice cleansing is over should continue. To be specific, your meals should include salads of fruits and raw veggies, raw and steamed vegetables, soup, whole grains, legumes, and more.
Not to stop here, it is better to alternate the meat intake with steamed fish and cow milk with goat’s milk. That is to say, organic foods should be your preference for the other types. Therefore, not to follow the nutrients-dominated diet is one of the major mistakes and that must be avoided.
11. Common Misconception About Juice Intake In empty Stomach
You might have a pre-conceived notion that taking vitamins and minerals on an empty stomach may cause stomach upset or other concerns. You should blow out this idea and drink raw juice in a vacant stomach to get the maximum nutrient-absorption and effective toxin-flushing action.
But if you have a problem in taking raw pressed juice in empty stomach, you can take juice simultaneously with other meals or in between the meals.
12. Supplement With Wrong Smoothies
Yes, it is the wrong types of smoothies that may affect your juicing negatively. What do I mean by wrong kind of smoothies supplement? Smoothies prepared from non-organic processed substances rich with preservatives and refined sugars are the wrongs ones to supplement your juice. That can surely reduce or destroy the effect of the organic raw juice cleansing.
But if you want to add smoothies made of pulverized fruits, veggies, leafy greens and more, they will harm not the least. In that case, you will have lesser nutrients as high heat produced from blending can damage several nutrients but they will no way prove to be damaging to the juicing effect.
13. Not Getting Prepared Beforehand
You have taken decision that you will go through a thorough cleansing process with raw pressed juice and gathered all the right instruments and ingredients to start the process. No, this is not done yet. You must give a thought to the fact that our body is not a machine to receive a drastic change in its regular intake all of a sudden.
You must start the process with altering the some of your food items if you are in the habit of taking processed, fried, packaged, and fast foods since a week or two earlier you have planned to start juicing. Thus your system will not face a shock and juice cleansing will go on smoothly.
When you are deleting the harmful food items, you must take the healthy ones in place. You have already known about the healthy alternatives.
14. Considering It A Substitute Of Solid Food
Juicing helps curb appetite and compensate for the lacking of nutrients occurring from your imbalanced diet. So, when you think that juicing will fill the nutrients gap and give you the regular energy essential for work or other activities, it is a grave mistake. Unlike a machine, our body cannot run only on one type of fuel. In fact, it has multiple functions and needs various types of food intake. And solid foods do have their particular role to play and keep the body workable though many of them may lack nutrients. Instead, juicing is a natural supplement to fill in the blanks of vitamins, minerals, and more caused by not maintain a balanced diet in your regular food habit.
It is not that our bodies need merely nutrients, it needs calories found in poultry and meat. So, you can supplement a solid food with another one from the group not by juicing. Doing so will prove to be disastrous leading to a hectic working day.
15. Not Cleaning Or Not Cleaning The Juicer Thoroughly
The stress in cleaning is significant because cleaning doesn’t only mean to give a thorough water wash. Instead, you must make sure that pulps and tiny particles are removed from the crevices and the parts hard to remove from. Otherwise, they will dry up and will become too stubborn to remove later on.
Do not go by the advertisement that some juicers do come with a self-cleaning feature. They may clean to a certain extent but to complete the course, you must disband the juicer to clean thoroughly. Use a brush and spray water with speed to remove the accumulated pulp inside.
And after that, soak the water with pure kitchen cotton to protect the metal parts from growing rusty. If you are in rush and want to clean it later on in the same day, soak the critical part in water so that pulps are not dried up and stain the appliance.
Read: Best Easy To Clean Juicer – Top Models Reviewed And Analyzed
Takeaway
Now, you have been aware of the common but damaging mistakes regarding juice cleansing. That knowledge can excite you as you will not repeat the mistakes further and can enjoy juicing to its fullest. As it turns out, you are now in the right direction to a happier and healthier life. Eating fruits raw and full is not a mistake but juicing wins over as it can enable you to take the benefits of huge fruits without overloading your stomach.
Just take care that you are avoiding the common juicing mistakes.
Related Reviews:
- 9 Amazing Benefits Of Drinking Vegetable Juice For Health And Beauty
- 7 Best Tips To Make Juicing Simple For Beginners
- Top 10 Juice Recipes To Start Losing Weight