Juicing for Weight Loss

January 6, 2010 Culinary Medicine 0 Comments

YourDoctorsOrders.com – the Juice and what it’s full of! from TweetMeTV on Vimeo.

Today in the supermarket there is a wide variety of juices available. Great combination of just about any juice you could imagine.  And, if you wanted even fresher juices, there are machines that will do it for you. One of my favorite devices is a juice press that I use for making fresh squeezed orange juice from the trees in my back yard.

But what about using juices for weight loss? For weight loss you want to have a lot of volume in your stomach of bulky high fiber items that are low in calories. For that, vegetables and fruits work well. But if you juice those fruits and vegetables, then the stomach doesn’t register the bulk with the brain.

Every time you eat something, especially something with bulk – the brain registers that sensation through a complex nerve network that begins in the top of the stomach. As bulky food goes through this area, your brain gets the sensation and when it reaches a certain amount it will hold off on sending out those hormones cause you to be hungry.

For example, if you eat a cup of broccoli you will have a lot of bulky foods, but only 12 calories! Your brain will sense that you have eaten a lot and as a result you will not feel hungry for hours. But if you juice all that broccoli you will drink about a cup of juice, and in two hours you will start to feel hungry again.

So while juicing allows you to concentrate a lot of good vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients, the juice doesn’t provide the bulk that the stomach needs to keep you from being hungry.

The other caution with juicing is this: don’t store the juice too long, and be sure to keep your juicer clean. There are a lot of bacteria that grow in juices – like salmonella and E. Coli, that can cause severe food poisoning. So, keep your juicer clean — and if you store the juice, be sure to drink it within a day or two — and keep it refrigerated.

So if you want weight loss– eat the vegetables and the fruits– they have plenty of bulk to keep you from being hungry – and provide a lot of nutrients for your body.

About the Author
You probably first saw Dr. Simpson on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Dr. Terry Simpson received his undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees from the University of Chicago, where he spent several years in the Kovler Viral Oncology laboratories doing genetic engineering. Until he found he liked people more than Petri dishes. After a career in surgery, his focus is to make sense of the madness, and bust myths. Dr. Simpson, an advocate of culinary medicine, believes in teaching people to improve their health through their food and in their kitchen. On the other side of the world, he has been a leading advocate of changing health care to make it more "relationship based," and his efforts awarded his team the Malcolm Baldrige award for healthcare in 2018 and 2011 for the NUKA system of care in Alaska and in 2013 Dr Simpson won the National Indian Health Board Area Impact Award. A frequent contributor to media outlets discussing health related topics and advances in medicine, he is also a proud dad, author, cook, and doctor “in that order.” For media inquiries, please visit www.terrysimpson.com.