I’ve always been a healthy and active person through gym, mountain biking, and enjoying team sports. Diet has never featured high on my agenda apart from cutting back on junk food and concentrating more on eating protein and reducing carbs when looking to get into good shape ahead of summer. I’m not an adventurous eater and in the past didn’t eat a large variety of fruits and vegetables.
This all changed just over two years ago and oddly on a trip to Nigeria. I had just stepped up my weight training and gone on my normal Atkins type diet but this time I really felt that my body was lacking something. I sat in my hotel room that night and jumped onto Netflix to pass time. It was by chance that I stumbled upon a movie called ‘Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead’, which documented an Australian who went on a journey of juicing and losing a stack of weight over a 50 day period. I was inspired by his story and figured that if I can’t stomach certain veggies, such as beetroot, then perhaps juicing was my answer. Surely I could just down a mixed fruit and veggie juice even if it didn’t taste great?
When I returned to South Africa a few days later I hauled out a juicer, which had only been used for making orange juice in the past, and embarked on my new mission. Fortunately, I had downloaded an App called ‘101 Juice Recipes’ to help me work out what ingredients to use for these myriad of concoctions. I randomly chose a juice from the list and prepared to hold my nose as I downed the colourful drink. Then suddenly my taste-buds awoke to a whole new world. A world where the what seemed like daunting ingredients from childhood now seemed to intrigue me and I had a hunger for more.
Over the next few weeks I jumped from one juice recipe to the next. I was consuming fruits and vegetables that I had feared to put on my dinner plate in the past but now were exciting for me to experiment with. More importantly I started to notice the benefits of juicing. I just felt better. My concentration increased and my mind seemed clearer. My banting diet combined with consuming the juices, with their all important micro-nutrients, transformed my body so that my muscles were more defined, lean, and my body fat dropped. When I started the diet I weighed 83 kg (183 lbs) and within three weeks my weight leveled of at 76 kg (168 lbs), which was what I once weighed in high school (24 years ago). My vitals of blood pressure, cholesterol, body fat percentage, and resting heart rate were excellent. This was the beginning of my journey into juicing and it’s truly changed my life.
John Westermeyer 