I love meeting our community. These interviews remind me of the power of juicing and how everyone has their story. They are also fun because we come away with new inspiration. Whether it is juicing for health to avoid powders, and in this case, making dog food from pulp or grinding ingredients in PURE’s stage one. Christina, thank you for motivating so many women to nourish themselves without calorie counting…and for juicing! – Jen, Chief Juicing Officer
Transcript
Jen – Hello everybody. Jen Longtin here, Chief Juicing Officer from PURE Juicer. I am so excited to have Christina here. She is our Spotlight Juicer for the week and I am gonna go ahead and dive in. And Christina, tell us everything you want us to know about yourself.
Christina N. – Okay, well I am very much into natural living. I like to do pretty much a lot of things from scratch. So unprocessed foods, what I’m basically trying to teach people is that you can heal yourself through your gut, through the foods that we eat, that everything that we take in our type of diet can affect us health wise. I do a lot of like health and fitness stuff, so exercising, but safety is always like my primary concern. So when I do my exercises and stuff, I always think about kind of like the long-term aspect of it. So same thing like with my diet, you know, I know that like everybody has, there’s not like one diet that is specific to everybody and that’s kind of like another message that I like to tell people as well. But definitely into juicing for sure. Love the PURE Juicer, yeah, it’s an amazing way to really increase your nutrient content.
Jen – So Christina, I’m so glad that you’re here and I have so many questions for you because you span so many different areas of health and wellness, which I really appreciate and I know that you have a really strong focus and passion for women’s health, which we really, really appreciate. But I’m just wondering if there was a point in your life in the past that, what made you decide that was what she wanted to do?
Christina N. – Yeah, so growing up in an Italian household in New York, we ate all the pasta and the breads growing up, just completely unhealthy of course. But as I got older and my mom got older, she started to kind of like change her ways and she started to turn to like natural remedies and just like healthier options for us. So we were able to see that like in our teens growing up. And I know that that kind of like sparked pretty much the interest as far as in like, you know, my health and fitness goes. But I do, actually my biological father was adopted and so I do not know like an entire half of my health history. So I was like, I don’t wanna leave that to chance, so I’m gonna do everything in my power that I can to help prevent any type of disease or sickness. So that’s pretty much what kind of sparked the whole thing and kind of set it into overdrive if you’ll.
Jen – I love that ’cause we know, we’ve interviewed folks and we know folks that do know what their history is and it’s typically very unhealthy and lots of risks. But they’ve been able to use that genetic expression by eating healthy and taking good care of them to live a really healthy and vibrant life. So I love that you’re taking that and turning it into a positive and just focusing on health and wellness regardless of what that could be or could not be.
Christina N. – Yeah, absolutely. I was just gonna also add in the fact that, you know, positivity and trying to live as much of a stress-free life as possible is definitely important to like the whole mindset thing, it’s definitely part of the whole puzzle as well.
Jen – Could not agree more. And one of these days we’ll have to do a live together where we can kind of cook and juice together because one of the things that I love about social media is that we can kind of incorporate community and fun and creativity together rather it than it just being around. You have to have this to be healthy, like you have to have that mindset and have joy and have connection. So I agree with you, I’m very much the same. Okay, then how did you get into juicing? Did your mother juice too or was that later?
Christina N. – She did not. So there was a period of time actually where I was basically raw vegan for, I wanna say, I mean I tried the raw vegan thing for like a year, I was actually a vegetarian for 12 years, but I knew that I needed to increase my nutrient content, so that was kind of like one of the main reasons that I started juicing and I loved it so much. It was just such an easy way to get in a very dense amount of nutrients in such a concentrated formula if you will. And then, you know, I think like when you’re just getting into the whole aspect of eating more fruits and veggies, it can be kind of overwhelming and also a little bit strenuous on the gut.
Jen – Yes.
Christina N. – So, yeah, so juicing is just a little bit easier to digest.
Jen – We’ve talked before, so I’m gonna jump into, you had some great advice for folks who are just getting started and you are kind of touching on that. Like what would you recommend for someone getting started with juicing based on what you know and what you’ve learned?
Christina N. – Yeah, so I mean, I would start out slowly, don’t like be overwhelmed or anything like that. For a lot of people, the very intense flavors can be like maybe kale or something like that, initially can be very overwhelming, and I know that the taste buds can adapt. So I would probably start out with something more mild, like cucumber, celery, lemon, green apple, something that’s a little less intense but not something that’s like overly sweet. ‘Cause I feel like a lot of people are also dealing with like sugar addictions.
Jen – Yeah.
Christina N. – And so we have to be really careful with the amount of fruits, with the intense fruits that we’re adding in. So I feel like if you start out initially with the more mild flavors then can kind of like work your way up to the more intense ones.
Jen – And I loved starting with carrots. Carrots and apples were great as well. They were gentle yet they were, I’ve had so many sugar cravings and I had cravings for lots of different things and I noticed that when I started juicing, I started craving things less, you know, the things that were, I think, and I think it was because I was just so hungry, my body was so hungry. So I love that idea. There’s some things, the cruciferous vegetables are a little bit more gassy forming as well, so cucumber, carrots, green apple, is so great for the digestive system too and just kind of wakes everything up. So I love those suggestions. But I would add carrot in there too.
Christina N. – I love carrot, I totally forgot about carrot.
Jen – Oh my god. Well carrot, I learned, has a cell the size of a human cell, like the size of a blood cell, so it’s actually very adaptable to our body and it has several amino acids, which, ooh, we talked about proteins and amino acids, and so I thought that was really interesting that there’s such a high number of amino acids in carrots. Do you wanna talk about proteins and juicing and then as far as your diet, how you balance those? I’m really curious to know how you do that.
Christina N. – Yeah, absolutely. So being, you know, I do a lot of like weightlifting and stuff, so one of the things that is very important to me is making sure that I’m getting enough protein. One of the vegetables that actually has a pretty high amount of protein is actually broccoli, which is great. Yeah, broccoli actually has, if you compare, and I know it’s, we can get into that at a later time, but like the veggie protein versus animal protein kind of is a little bit different.
Jen – Yep.
Christina N. – But that’s why variation is key when it comes to these vegetables. I mean even like peas are actually very high in protein. So when we’re dealing with like adding, you know, using like vegetable content as some of our protein sources, variation is definitely key. So just make sure that you’re not sticking to like one single thing but definitely multiple different high protein vegetables. So that’s one of the things that I look out for, is the protein content in the vegetables as well.
Jen – Romaine is another one that’s very high in protein.
Christina N. – Oh that’s good because I love romaine.
Jen – I do too, I do too. I love to eat it and I love to juice it. It’s so juicy.
Christina N,- It is.
Jen – And subtle. So it’s a nice one, especially when you’re getting started, working your way up to kale.
Christina N. – Much easier than kale.
Jen – Yeah, yeah. I love that. So yeah, having a combination of both. And again, when you’re juicing for me I find that it balances out my cravings. So I’m not craving a ton, I’m actually eating a more balanced meal just because I feel like my body is able to absorb those nutrients through the juice.
Christina N. – Yeah, I’m actually glad you mentioned that about the cravings because a lot of people don’t realize, but our body tends to crave more if we’re like, if we’re needing something. And I truly believe I’m about like intuitive eating, I don’t count calories. I believe indefinitely listening to your body. I think a lot of us kind of like when we start counting calories, we over, we kind of like forget about listening to our body and we concentrate more in a number instead of like the feeling. So yeah, it’s super, super important.
Jen – What is your go-to juice these days? What’s your favorite? What are you craving?
Christina N.- Yes, so I actually love, my absolute favorite is gonna be green apple, lime, ginger and beet.
Jen – Yellow beet or red beet or doesn’t matter?
Christina N. – I need like the golden beet ’cause it’s a little bit more mild. beet is a very, beet can be very intense for some.
Jen – It sure can, it sure can. I love that combination. Do you do large quantity or do you do four ounces, 10 ounces, 16 ounces?
Christina N. – So sometimes I actually juice ahead. So what I use that one in particular for that blend in particular for is actually for my pre-workout ’cause I don’t take any synthetic pre-workouts and like beets are actually known to boost nitric oxide in the body, which helps, in simpler terms for people that are watching out there, it basically widens the blood vessels and allows more oxygen. So your workouts end up being so much more, I don’t wanna say easier, but in a sense, easier. You can power through them a lot better.
Jen – I like that one. I like the watermelon beet as well ’cause the both, the combo of both of them actually does it. You can throw in lime too ’cause it’s sort of like duct tape, it just works with everything. But yeah, I love beets and I know Alchemist Organics, they do the same thing, they do beet juice before their workouts.
Christina N. – Mm hm, yeah. I’m gonna have to try the watermelon though, that sounds delicious.
Jen – It’s so good. And while you’re at it, juice the rind as well, the green rind, it doesn’t really have much flavor and it doesn’t really have a beautiful color, but when you mix it in with both, you’re getting three times the nutrients as the watermelon meat itself. So you can cut around the watermelon, just press the watermelon and then you just cut the watermelon rind up and grind it and then press it. And it’s, doesn’t really, again, doesn’t really taste like much, but knowing just how yummy it is in there, it’s great. And sometimes I’ll just use it as an electrolyte. So I’ll just throw it into water and it’s so subtle and I’ll put it with ice water and that’s sort of my electrolyte for the day.
Christina N. – That sounds great. Do you juice the outer layer of it too?
Jen – I do, as long as it’s organic, I do.
Christina N. – Gotcha.
Jen – If it’s not organic, I’ll probably steer away from it. Like I just did grapes today and I couldn’t find any organic grapes, so I just pressed the grapes because I just, from what I’ve heard, there’s more pesticide on the outsides of it. But if you have the organic watermelon, I, yeah, juice the whole thing. The only thing you wanna do is, for some reason it does wanna kick back a little bit more often. So you can either cut it into smaller pieces or just make sure you’ve got a hand or something over the feed shoot. So when you’re putting it in that it goes down instead of…
Christina N. – And not, yeah. Yes, I know exactly what you mean.
Jen – Yes, yes. Yes, oh, that’s exciting. Okay, and then if you’re needing just like a big juice, I know you love cucumber, right?
Christina N. – Yes, I love cucumber. Yeah, so a lot of the times I’ll focus on like, I’ll really focus on like green juices and stuff if I’m not doing like the pre-workout one, I rarely do kind of like a more sweet juice on a regular basis. So my go-to is usually cucumber and then lemon and also, was it romaine lettuce.
Jen – Yum.
Christina N. – And a little bit of celery too.
Jen – Oh, nice.
Christina N. – Yes.
Jen – Nice combination. I love that. You know, even the Gerson Green which has got, it does have some apple, it has some green pepper, but it has water crest, escarole, romaine, and a couple of green leaf lettuce, it’s green and it’s a really, it looks pretty ugly, but it’s so soft, it’s such a nice, soft, nourishing green juice. So I really love green juices too. And I really like the tinctures, I’m really into strong tinctures. I did a green apple with a large clove of garlic.
Christina N. – Yes.
Jen – And lemon. It’s amazing. I love it, so I hope you try it. And trust me, like the garlic, it is there for about an hour, so just plan for that, but then it’s gone, after an hour you are done with the garlic and you don’t sweat it either. So a lot of times, we’ll, growing up in your Italian household with garlic, I was thinking that you might have some garlic going on in that household. But you don’t sweat it when it’s raw, which like if you eat it, you do, you kind of have, you start to smell like garlic.
Christina N. – Yes, exactly. Well that’s good to know. So basically plan ahead. So before you go out, give yourself about an hour.
Jen – Hour, hour. It’s so good though. It’s amazing benefits. Okay, how did you find PURE Juicer?
Christina N. – So in the process of, I had this old really bad juicer, it was not good quality, it was small, it was a masticating juicer, but it certainly wasn’t anything like the PURE Juicer. So I wanted to replace that because I really wanted to increase the amounts of juicing that I was making and it just wasn’t, it like, it wasn’t, it was very time consuming with this little teeny juicer.
Jen – Yeah.
Christina N. – So I went online and I started researching, one of the things that I was looking for was basically like something that was close to commercial quality, something that was going to last. And so I put like, I think I typed in high quality commercial juicers on Google, just like totally random. And lo and behold, PURE Juicer popped up, I opened the website and I’m like already in love because it’s stainless steel and it’s just beautiful and it looks like it’s built like a tank.
Jen – And as you can tell, when you lift it, it is built like a tank.
Christina N. – Sixty something pounds, what is it? 67 pounds? Something like that.
Jen – Yeah.
Jen – Yes. It’s one of those where you keep it on your countertop because it’s beautiful, but also because it is heavy, yes.
Christina N. – Yes, it’s definitely a conversation piece when people come over to, they’re like, “What is that?” You know?
Jen – Yeah, and are you happy with the results? Is it everything that you wanted it to be?
Christina N. – Absolutely. And I saw, well, another thing too is I’ve watched some of the content that you put out on Instagram too and I saw you doing nut milks and everything too.
Jen – Yeah.
Christina N. – Like, I’m all about the almond milk, I think you made coconut milk, grind coffee with it, I mean, like that’s, it’s amazing.
Jen – And when you do the plant-based milks, you make sure you get yourself whole cinnamon and star anise If you like the licorice flavor, green cardamom, ginger and turmeric, you can grind all of that into those milks. And it’s that fresh ground spice is one, is something that we just kind of experimented with in the past year. But it’s one of my very favorite things to do with the PURE. I don’t buy anything, well I guess I buy some ground stuff, but if I don’t have to, I will buy it the whole just cause I love the way it smells. And I’ll actually mix those into shrubs, have you ever heard of shrubs? Shrubs are like this new thing that I saw. It’s basically a fermented juice.
Christina N. – Okay.
Jen – It’s not a kombucha, I guess it could be a kombucha. But anyway, so I made one with cranberry, pomegranate, orange, and I ground clove in there too. I only used stage one and I ground everything, I mixed it with a little bit of agave and then you let it sit for two days. It’s normally three days but my test was, can you get it to the fermentation you wanted within two days versus three because you’re grinding, so you’re increasing the surface area of the fermentation. And it is so rich and delicious. But I loved being able to grind the spice in there too, so I just had whole clove. And then I took all of the pulp, after you’re done fermenting, I pressed everything, I took the pulp, dehydrated it, and turned it into this phenomenal, just delicious, and so it smells so good, I turned it into a powder. So I baked with it and I put it into tea and all kinds of stuff.
Christina N. – Wow, that sounds amazing.
Jen – Yeah, I’ll send you the link, it’s in our blog.
Christina N. – Okay, yeah, definitely.
Jen – Yeah. Let’s talk about your puppies or is there anything else about PURE Juicer? So you’re happy with the PURE,, you’re making lots of juice. How is the cleanup? Maybe just tell me what you think about the cleanup.
Christina N. – Yeah, honestly, so I’ve actually juiced, like had juicing sessions on my Amazon Live Shows before. And I show them how easy, because like I think when you look at the PURE Juicer, you think, “Oh wow, it’s probably gonna be such a pain to clean up.” But it’s so easy and honestly the way I do it, so like sometimes when I’m done with like the masticating section, I’ll literally just pop that off real quick before I press it and run the water through there, clean out and dry it and put it right back on.
Jen – That’s what I do, yeah.
Christina N. – Oh, you do, okay.
Jen – My favorite way. Yeah, then you’re over halfway done.
Christina N. – Exactly. And so the next, I mean, then all you have left is the plate. You just take that off, you print it with some warm, soapy water dry and put it back on, then you’re good to go, wipe it down, and it’s literally, it’s super easy.
Jen – Good. All right, all right. Back to, let’s talk about my next favorite thing in your life, is your dogs.
Christina N. – Yes, yes. I have three large dogs. I have one standard American Bully, her name is Anaya. And then I have two, my larger one, the golden child that you see a lot on my Instagram, his name is Cairo.
Jen – Cairo.
Christina N. – And, yes, and then we have, those two are XL American Bullies and then we have Luna, which is our new addition. She’s going to eventually be Cairo’s wife when she gets old enough. Yes.
Jen – Right, ’cause you’re gonna start breeding. And we were, when we talked the last time, we were talking about dog treats and the fun different things that we can do with purees as well as the pulp from the carrots and the cucumber, like all of that stuff is so good and healthy for the dogs.
Christina N. – Yes, I’m actually getting into, I’m gonna be, I’m basically transitioning my dogs out of the kibble into a homemade diet. So the PURE Juicer is gonna be a whole lot easier, it’s gonna make the process a lot easier because instead of me having to like be very meticulous with making sure that these veggies and fruits are small enough to kinda incorporate and get equal amounts in per serving, it’s gonna be a lot easier getting it done from pulp. So yeah, with the Juicer, I mean, that’s gonna be great.
Jen – Yeah, that’s what I wanted to do. I was gonna, you know, you can make cauliflower rice with stage one, so you just don’t use a grid tray, I mean, you use the grid tray, you don’t use a grid plate, so you don’t use anything from two to 12, just take that out. And so there’s a little bit of texture, that’s really ideal for the cauliflower rice, but I’ve also done carrot cakes and things like that, and I’ll grate the carrots and I’ll make the applesauce on stage one, but I think I just used a 12 for carrots when you are supposed to grate carrots. And I think that worked great and it’s very smooth and easy to digest. I mean, I love that for us and I love that for our animals too. It’s just especially a great way to get greater absorption if you’re gonna go through all that work. You don’t want ’em just to like send it out the other side.
Christina N. – Right, that’s a great idea.
Jen – And I haven’t ever done any meat or anything in there which might gross people out, but I think that it’s definitely strong enough to do that. I did great parmesan cheese in there recently. It was quite actually phenomenal.
Christina N. – I need to try that because as you know, I definitely have parmesan in my diet.
Jen – Yeah, yeah. So here’s the trick, is one, make sure that the feed shoot is dry, so you don’t want the cheese to get stuck in there at all. So if it’s dry, it won’t, and then I don’t remember, it’s in the blog, but I think I used maybe a two or a four and just kind of tapped the pusher in through the grinder and it worked beautifully.
Christina N. – Gotcha.
Jen – Yeah.
Christina N. – Yeah, you know what, when you said the whole thing about the meat, I think a lot of people don’t realize that it can actually, like you could make your own sirloin burgers if you wanted to, with fresh sirloin. So it literally does so many different things. I’m, yeah, it’s very impressive.
Jen – It’s funny, there was one press that we did, it was this beautiful rich red color and everybody thought we were pressing meat. I know. But now here we’ve come full circle and we’re like, you could though, I mean, you probably could.
Christina N. – Yeah, you could.
Jen – But yeah, Mimi Kirk has another book that has, it’s more like a raw vegan for her dogs and animals. And she’s got all kinds of great things and you could probably doctor any of those up too. But she’s really into raw vegan for herself as well as for her pets. But she also lives in San Diego, so.
Christina N. – Oh, nice.
Jen – Just seems like warmer, just seems more doable. I’m always so cold up in here in Seattle.
Christina N. – Yeah. Texas, it’s, it’s either super hot or it’s cold because we live in northern Texas. So yeah, I go from one extreme to the next. And then sometimes it’s just all over the place, we don’t know what we’re gonna get.
Jen – Yeah. So we talked about all kinds of fun ideas and ways to use the Juicer. We talked about, I loved eating intuitively and kind of satisfying your cravings, I think that’s really great, being able to use the juicer not only for us, but also for our animals. And then, is there anything else that you’d like to share? We’ve gone through so much, I don’t wanna take too much more of your time, but I feel like we should do a couple of these and I would love to do an actual live where we’re like cooking and juicing together too, but–
Christina N. – I would totally do it.
Jen – Okay, let’s do, let’s do that. And then is there anything else that you’d like to share?
Christina N. – Well, if anybody wants to find me on social media platforms, it’s actually, everything’s under my name, so Christina Nichi. And that’s gonna be on Instagram, It’s gonna be on YouTube, Facebook, and even TikTok.
Jen – Fantastic. And she will be on our website, our blog, as well as our social media channels as well. So if you can’t find her, we’ll make sure and link over so that they can click over to you and learn more about you, ’cause I love what you’re doing and your passion for women and for health and for balance and for joy. So bravo to you.
Christina N. – Thank you so much for having me.
Jen – Thank you so much. All right, we’ll see you again next time.
Follow Christina Nicci on instagram at @christinanicci and @niccination
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