Juicing Update from the Winter Garden Farmer's Market

I fully admit that in the past when my specialist told me to stick to a soft diet, I haven't always done it.

Usually, it's because I don't make plans in advance. If you don't plan, it's too easy to grab fries or a falafel or something unhealthy and hard to chew. In an effort to heal and reduce the swelling from my TMD (which has grown increasingly worse over the past few months) I'm taking that whole "soft diet" thing way more seriously nowadays.

I genuinely regret not doing it sooner, so if you have TMD and your doctor recommends a soft diet, please do it!

I think one of the things that made a soft diet feel so challenging to me is that I'm already a vegan and I recently cut out sugar. So it felt like my options were growing increasingly slim. But here's the thing about feelings, they're not always the truth. Just because I felt like the only things I could eat were soup and mashed potatoes doesn't mean those were the only things.




There are literally millions of food options out there for a vegan who needs to follow a soft diet and also wants to eliminate sugar. I just had to make my mind up and start researching new recipes and new ways of shopping.

I've started by using juice to replace either my breakfast or my lunch each day. I've been doing the Migraine Reliever pretty consistently. I can't say if the anti-inflammatory foods and vitamins are having an effect or if it's eliminating the action of chewing that's helping, but you guys, juicing more consistently is helping. I'm not saying it's a cure. I don't know if there is a cure until they know how to re-grow cartilage. But if you're anything like me, even a small improvement is a big deal.

One of my first steps to making this a permanent change? Planning! Planning starts with shopping and setting a menu for the week. (I also make a lot of food in advance on Sunday so I don't get lazy and cheat on my diet during the week. My cousin over at Zero Junk Life taught me how to do that. If some of the food is already made, I can reach for that first. I typically make carrot fries, hummus, super finely chopped cobb salad, etc.)

Utilizing the Farmer's Market makes planning easy and cost-effective. I intend to do it at least twice a month from now on. Living in Florida, we have a lot of year-round options. But we decided to dip our toe back into the water by visiting the Winter Garden Farmer's Market. It's probably been a year since we went and I forgot what a wonderful selection they offer!

Just check out some of this gorgeousness...

These carrots were ginormous! I put my hand in the picture for scale.

More carrots and romaine...

Kale for $1.00 a bunch!

Fresh, pretty radishes.

Gorgeous green beans.

I just saw these adorable dogs and their owner was nice enough to let me take a picture. That's the other bonus of a farmer's market, getting to experience your community. There are cute dogs and adorable babies pretty much everywhere.

It was pretty slammed, so next time we plan to go a little earlier to avoid the crowds, if possible.

Check out our haul! Two eggplants, two bunches of kale, fresh ginger, a giant bag of sweet peppers and three lemons for less than ten bucks. This is going to bring the cost of my juicing down considerably. If you have a Farmer's Market near you, please take advantage of it. One thing I hear people say a lot is that juicing and being vegan are "too expensive". But it's just like anything else, if you make your health a priority, you'll start getting creative and doing research and finding ways to make it work for your budget. You can do it!

I also found something really cool that I'm going to try for TMJD, but I'll be blogging about that later this week!