I'm Suppose to Eat How Many Vegetables?!

I recently read online people should eat 1 pound of  vegetables for every 50 pounds. At that calculation, I should eat 2 1/3 pounds of vegetables. That seems like a lot to me and I am guessing the amount of vegetables in vegetable pho isn't going to cut it. Not knowing how many I eat or how much they weigh, I decided to weight my juicing vegetables and find out.

I've been juicing since Christmas when I got a Hurom Juicer as a gift. I love it. It makes juicing so easy! Along with a $20 scale I got a Target (a throw back to another time when I was trying to eat more healthy and control portions.) I added the vegetables to the scale and was surprised by the weight. I easily piled on just over 2 pounds of veggies.

Two pounds seems to make around 16 oz of juice. The picture looks like more but the top layer is really foam, the real juice is over 16 oz. I can easily slurp down 16 oz. of juice in a few minutes.

The result of this? I have been eating at least 2-3 pounds of vegetables a day. Good for me? Sure. Haven't seen must change, though honestly I have only been juicing for a few weeks...and I haven't done much else to improve my health such as increase exercise or reduce fatty foods or vanilla lattes. But I can't find a reason eating more vegetables is BAD for me, on the contrary, I can only find things online that indicate more is better.

As a matter of fact, I think it is so good for me, and fun, I just bought a Groupon for a farmers market coop where you buy in and get fresh, organic vegetables every two weeks. You can get 30 or 50 pound bins that last two weeks. I'm starting off with the 30 bin amount. I'm pretty excited about it, I can't wait to see what I get and what makes good juice!
 
If you want to try the juice I made, here is a list of what I used:

4 carrots
1/2 cucumber
1/2 lemon
3-4 leaves of kale
Big handful of spinach
5-7 pieces of pineapple
3-4 large florets of broccoli

Pulp from 2 pounds of vegetables

Shortest List Ever to Maximum Productivity

Have you ever noticed we live by lists? Lists for work, personal growth and improvement, business strategies, etc. Everyone has steps, tricks, ways, ideas, thoughts on how the rest of us can improve our lives. This time of year in particular seems to bring out the "list" people, shelling out their advice to anyone that will listen. And listen we do. 



I was struck today by how many lists I have seen in the last week or so. (I just got a Kindle Fire so I am reading a lot more articles via Pulse.) Here are just a few I saw this week and one oldie but goodie...


6 Steps to Transform Your Body, Shape Magazine


5 Tricks from a Linkin Jedi


5 Ways to Cut Customer Risk


5 Small Steps to Change Your Body Dramatically

Bombshell Hair in 4 Easy Steps 

 Five Ways to Drive Customer Conversions Rates in Your Store

 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

In the honor of January and what I might fondly call List Month, here is my own list, Top 1 Thing to Do in 2012. 


1. Do Something! 


Shortest list ever! 


I think it really encapsulates the essence of any good list. Want better abs, Do Something! Get off the couch and do something about it. What a way to get out of your horrible job? Do Something about it! Need to improve customer service? Do Something about it! 
 

How to clean reusable straws

My parents got me a juice for Christmas, it's a Hurom and wonderful! I have been juicing almost every day. I bought one of those insulated plastic cups with a plastic straw so I could take my juice on the go. I figured a reusable straw was better than all the disposable straws I use to use.

I was doing fine running water through the straw to clean it until I left juice in the cup for a few hours and food residue was left in the straw. When I ran water through it, nothing happened.

Bits of food left in the straw

I looked up straw brushes on Amazon but zero came up. I wondered, how do people clean these things? I did find a pastry bag brush that seemed like it might work but it was $12 for a set of 6 and I only need one so I didn't order them.

Then I went to Target to see if they had a pastry tube brush. They didn't. They had a turkey baster with a cone shaped brush that looked like it might fit in the tip of the baster...probably would fit in the straw, at $10, I declined and left.

Today it came to me. I just needed something to create a bit of friction, like a piece of fabric. Now how am I going to get a tiny piece of fabric through a straw?!

The same way you pull an inside out spaghetti strap through itself, with a long stick.(sewing trick) I started walking around the house getting my necessary props; hanger, pliers, wire cutters, fleece.

I cut the fleece about an inch thick and at least 6 inches longer than the straw. I cut the "hook" part of the coat hanger off and pulled the cardboard tube off. I was left with a reasonable straight piece of wire with a hook on it where the tube use to be. I used the pliers to straighten out the rest of the wire and cut the extra piece of the hook part off.

Straightened wire

I then cut a tiny hole in the fabric and slipped it over the hook part. I used the pliers to clamp down the hook so the fabric didn't move.

Then I tested it, and it actually fit! Snug but it fits. And snug is really what you want so it cleans the sides.

I ran the water and pulled the fabric back and forth through the straw. After several passes I pulled the metal wire and fabric all the way out and whola! A clean straw!

Here is a video of the process. Sorry for my arm covering the shot at one point, I'm not great at taking video.

Bulk Food and Paper Napkins, Dichotomy?

I was in line today at Whole Foods and watched the lady in front of me as the checker beeped her items through the scanner. She had three large, bags of bulk nuts of various types. They looked like the size of soccer balls, had to have been more than a few pounds. Her total purchase consisted of a bag of sugar, organic of course, three huge bag of nuts and two packages of dinner napkins.

I was standing there impressed the lady remembered the bin codes from the bulk nuts; thinking to myself, man, she must buy a lot of nuts to remember the codes! As I was pondering this thought I glanced down and saw the dinner napkins. And odd purchase to me. Paper dinner napkins don't seem very earth friendly, which I think shoppers at Whole Foods are...for the most part, and they don't really seem to match up with the person I think would buy bulk items.

I say this because, in my opinion, people buy bulk food items for two reasons, cost and reduction of waste. Maybe people buy bulk for quality but as far as I can tell there isn't much difference in quality when it comes to Whole Foods and packaged verses bulk. 

Cost. Bulk items are often less expensive both in price overall and just in the fact a person can buy just what they need. (Ah, the latter also reduces waste!)

Waste. The idea behind bulk is the manufacturer doesn't have to spend money on packaging so they pass that savings onto the customer. The customer then uses a store provided baggie or container.

Stay with me...if these in fact are the two main reasons people buy bulk, and I proport they are, it seems odd to me a person concerned with cost and waste would buy paper dinner napkins, again, basically in bulk. (She purchased two packages.) And these weren't decorative napkins for a dinner party or shower. These were plain white napkins, nice ones but still plain and paper.

If you want a cheap option, go cloth; if you want a "less waste" option, go cloth.  You can buy sale napkins for less than a dollar a piece, or go to Goodwill and buy yourself last seasons perfectly good napkins some Highland Park mom discarded.

I personally don't have paper towels or paper napkins in my house. I only have the occasional random paper napkins some drive through cashier gives me; they never seem to think twice about provided a wad of napkins. I use dish towels and cloth napkins; it's what my parents always did/do and it seems to make sense. I just throw them in the washer and they get washed whenever I do laundry, which is daily since I have sweaty yoga clothes every day.

So the question is, is buying bulk items and paper napkins a dichotomy?