Elaine Lalanne: “Total Juicing”

One summer morning in 2007, I was up at 4:30am – and that particular morning, I felt like watching TV while working. Jack Lalanne and Elaine Lalanne were having their infomercial on their fancy juicer. I watched them make juice after juice. Jack Lalanne, the authority on fitness in America, is a man of ultimate discipline, one who eliminated from his diet all foods with white flour and sugar since 1930. He has been quoted to say, “I just want to be living while I am living!” – and has he ever lived up to his own word and wish all his healthy life and well into his 90s. That is the morning I ordered my own first juicer – while it is not a Jack Lalanne juicer, my juicer is definitely inspired by Jack.

If you are going to be juicing, you need a reliable, top notch juicer, and it will be your BEST investment. I highly recommend the Green Star Elite juicer by Tribest.

A few weeks later, I saw Elaine’s book in Barnes and Noble and picked it up. While I was still having heaps of fun with my juicer, I was in dire need of some exciting recipes, even as experimenting with countless fruits and vegetables with my own creativity was still fun. I’m afraid I did not agree with Elaine’s suggestion of having the green juice with a meal or a snack. I would highly recommend AGAINST that advice for the following reasons:

From all my other research, green juices should be drunk in a reasonably empty stomach so that it is absorbed immediately by your cells. No food should be ingested in the next hour. This way the juice can have the best results which is to help your body eliminate waste. If you have nausea or light-headedness, a light cracker can help settle the stomach. Cracker is dry, easy to digest, and soothing for nausea.

Image: A Green juice made with Apples, Carrots, Carrot top, Ginger, and Lime. For more of my favorite recipes, see my Juicing Journal.

The very best parts of the book are Chapters 4 and 5.

• Chapter 4, Essential Ingredients: She talks about nearly all fruits and vegetables, the benefits of each, whether they juice well, what they mix best with, top nutrition provided, and other related advice
• Chapter 5 with the 125+ Recipes: The recipes are good and abundant, covering every fruit and vegetable imaginable. She explains benefits of each juice recipe, best time to consume it, and a word on her specific combination.

A good recipe book to have, light on concepts of a juicing diet or detoxing, and heavy on recipes and benefits of fruits and vegetables listed. The book was published first in 1992 and this is a good indication that little changes on the well-established long-standing benefit of juicing raw fruits and vegetables.

The beginning of the book takes you through some personal history by Elaine. She was turned on to juicing, naturally, through Jack. She talked about the faded sparkle in her eyes after years of her general diet. When she started juicing carrots every morning, she could see the sparkle again. It had returned. She painted a vivid image of positive change and visible health through this story.

To lose bits and pieces of our health is one of the saddest signs of aging – and yet, ignoring it, submitting to it, and believing it to be a natural course of events is worse yet – it is a sign of giving up on fully living. While aging will come to us all and aging gracefully is all we can aim to achieve, giving up on fully living while alive is a worse than living at all.