Welcome to day sixteen of my 30 Days of Ayurveda series! Throughout these blogs and videos, I will be sharing some upbeat thoughts and wellness tips, as well as some Ayurvedic tricks and food recommendations to help you lead a balanced life.

Juice your way into the new week! As we enter the height of summer, here is a breakfast vegetable juice recipe to start your day with. With many of us often enjoying a few cheeky treats over the weekend, the perfect way to reset your digestive system and get your metabolism going again is to start your Monday with nothing but a fresh vegetable juice.

 

Summer Time Juice Recipe

2 carrots

1/4 to 1/2  bulb of fennel (depending on its size),

1 good sized desert apple

1cm fresh ginger

3 – 5 basil leaves

If you haven’t got any fennel, you can simply substitute it with two celery sticks. Simply pass all the ingredients through your juicer.

I have already discussed the benefits of ginger and basil in some of my recent blogs, which you might like to read if you haven’t already. Both the ingredients are really great to be using at this time of the year. By adding ginger or basil to your juice, you are giving it some heat. When we juice our ingredients, all of the cellulose structures in the fruits and vegetables are broken down; this makes a lot of their vitamins and minerals readily available to us to be assimilated more quickly. Therefore, in order to further help the digestive system and take out the ‘coldness’ of the raw vegetables, it’s nice to add a bit of ginger or basil to your drink.

You can further build up your juice by adding a teaspoon of spirulina powder, or other kinds of powder. Spirulina is particularly good for iron; in fact, after you use it for a couple of days, you can often notice the whites of the eyes becoming a lot clearer as it really supports the blood.

Of course, if you don’t like the ingredients that I suggested for my recipe, you can easily swap them out for your favourite fruits and vegetables instead. In the winter, try adding spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg for additional heat (and they also taste quite Christmassy!)

Drinking Your Juice

Once we have our juice, the next step, from an Ayurvedic perspective, is how you actually drink it. In the world of Ayurveda, we suggest that you drink your juice slowly. Take a mouthful and create a sensation of slightly chewing it. It may sound a bit weird, but we are encouraging and promoting the digestive system. We are signalling that it is not just a drink: this is something more than that, and is instead more like a food. By slightly chewing your juice, you will help to break down and absorb its great nutrients. What’s more, it will also create the feeling of being fuller. This will carry us through the course of the morning and keep us going until lunchtime.

Over the next 30 days, I will be sharing even more tips and tricks to help you build some great Ayurvedic routines. Hopefully, they will soon be imbedded in your life and you can progress with them. Be sure to let me know how you’re getting on, and why not share your favourite breakfast vegetable juice recipe? Find me on Instagram @anneheigham and on YouTube.