5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Flossing – And a Water Flosser Review!

sterline-water-flosser

I received a water flosser at a discounted price in exchange for writing an honest review. I did some research to learn about the benefits of water flossing and wanted to share that with you.

Check out the video below to learn about the 5 things you (probably) didn’t know about water flossing and then check out my review of the Sterline Water Flosser. You can get the Sterline Water Flosser for $40.99.

Continue reading “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Water Flossing – And a Water Flosser Review!”

Review of the Manual HealthyJuicer by Lexen

As you might already know based on my most recent posts lately, my fiance purchased a Breville juicer at the beginning of January this year. Juicing was something I’ve never done any research on prior to getting the Breville and when it comes to topics related to health, I become obsessed, and that’s exactly what I did with the topic of juicing. During all of the research I did, I learned an important thing about juicers; that there are centrifugal and masticating juicers and they each work in very different ways.

Basically, a masticating juicer squeezes the juice out of a fruit or veggie, while a centrifugal juicer shreds the produce and spins the pulp away from the juice. After watching a bunch of videos and reading dozens of articles on the differences, the general consensus seems to be that masticating juicers are simply better at juicing. The key main benefits are that they get more juice and the yield is richer.

We didn’t want to get rid of the Breville because we actually like it a whole lot, but I really wanted to give a masticating juicer a try, so I started looking around for something affordable, which eventually led me to the manual HealthyJuicer from Lexen. Everything I could find about this machine was positive so I wanted to test it out, which gave me the idea of contacting the folks at Lexen and seeing if they would be willing to part with one of their awesome HealthyJuicers so that I could do a review. Much to my pleasure, they agreed!

Since the HealthyJuicer is designed as a wheatgrass juicer, and my Breville can’t do wheatgrass, I decided to pick up some wheatgrass from my local health food store. This is another topic I watched a lot of videos on and read plenty of articles about. Wheatgrass seems to be healthy, but I was more worried about the taste. Some of the videos I watched showed people complaining that the wheatgrass tasted like a freshly mown lawn. I wasn’t sure I would enjoy that taste.

So I set up the machine, which was really easy. Now, I could have it up and going in about 20 seconds.

Since the machine is designed for wheatgrass, that’s the first thing I ran through it. I was delighted to find out that wheatgrass juice tastes nothing like a lawn. I’ve heard that bad batches of wheatgrass might have a lawn taste, but good batches are supposed to taste sweet. Luckily, mine must have been a good batch, because it tasted sweet and it was really good. The only bad thing about wheatgrass is that it doesn’t contain much juice, so you sort of need a lot of it to get a good yield.

I liked it so much that I actually decided to buy a wheatgrass grow kit from Amazon to grow my own and to save a little money. That’s my first batch of wheatgrass in the picture below 😀

The HealthyJuicer is designed mostly for leafy greens, but I wanted to put it to the test. It passed with (mostly) flying colors. Since this juicer is manual, I was interested in how tough it would be to crank through some of the harder varieties of produce. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve made lots of juices containing stuff like pears, spinach, apples, celery, kale, beets, apples and carrots.

Sometimes it gets tougher to turn on the hard veggies, for example when putting too many carrots in or when juicing a large kale stem, but it works it’s way through the machine quickly. It’s actually not much more difficult, but the handle seems like it might break if you put too much pressure on it. I’ve been grabbing the handle closer to the base when this happens. To be safe, I would recommend chopping up hard veggies into smaller pieces.

Considering that the manual HealthyJuicer is only $45, I would definitely recommend picking it up or giving them as gifts. I honestly can’t believe that it’s so affordable. To be fair, I haven’t tested any other wheatgrass juicers so I don’t know if the yields this one produces compares, but I can tell you that I’m happy with it. You can buy one from 877MyJuicer.com with free shipping and a 30-day return policy.

First Impressions of the New GaiamTV

I just got a free trial of the newly announced GaiamTV service and I wanted to write up a quick review of my first thoughts.

There are tons of videos to pick from in each section. The first day I chose to do a workout from the Fitness Videos section. I sorted the list by Level 3 (the toughest) and the type of workout by ‘Weight Training,’ which pulled up only 3 videos, all from the same workout series, and all which looked very much designed only for women. 🙁

So I decided to un-filter all results and then looked for one that interested me. I chose the Balance Ball: Core Cross Train, because I haven’t used my balance ball in a while.

I had lots of time that morning so I did the entire workout, upper body, abs, and lower body. This video wasn’t designed to do all in one day, since normally a person wouldn’t work out upper body and lower body on the same day, but since each section was short enough, I said “what the hell!” and did ’em all.

As you can see from the picture above, there is a plus sign next to each section so that you can add it to your playlist. I think that’s really cool. For some odd reason though, the videos didn’t appear in my playlist in the same order I added them. They were all jumbled up, so I had to reorder them and then save the playlist order. That’s kinda annoying.

My first workout was the Upper Body workout, which I have to admit was surprisingly difficult. Have you ever done arm circles? If you’ve done P90X, then you have, and you know that after doing them long enough, your shoulders really start to burn and you just can’t wait to put your arms down. Well, that’s what this workout did to my entire upper body.

The legs and abs workouts weren’t as tough, but they were still pretty good. After looking over the videos in GaiamTV and seeing that not many of them were designed for men, I hadn’t expected much, but after doing this workout, I’m actually excited to try out some of the others. I must admit that some of the more ‘aerobic’ style moves feel a little silly, but they are few and far between and I got over it.

Based on my first impressions of GaiamTV, I think it’s a really cool service. So far I’ve only looked at the Fitness Studio section, but there are lots of other sections, such as Yoga Studio, Wellness Center, Films & TV, Spirituality, Metaphysics, Explorations, Environment and Vintage Library. My next stop will be the Yoga Studio and then probably the Wellness Center.