Lemonade--Healthy Style!

So, despite my woeful weight gain, I'm continuing on with my quest for health. I will not weigh myself for another month, and if I don't have a weight loss then, I am going to feel very, very concerned.

For now I would like to tell you about a discovery I made. Fairly recently I heard about the benefits of drinking water with freshly squeezed lemon juice in it. It's good for your liver, and it's good for helping your body's pH level to lean more toward alkaline, which in turn helps to promote good health.

So I started out with lemon in water and not surprisingly, it was sour. I didn't enjoy it, but was able to drink a lot of my water that way throughout the day.

Then I read an article that reminded me of stevia. Stevia is an herbal supplement that sweetens foods without calories and has a zero on the glycemic index. I bought some the other day and decided to see what I could do with it. I ended up discovering a healthy lemonade that my enitre family loves!

All I do is use a citrus juicer (just a hand-twist model--$2 at the store) to squeeze the juice from two fresh lemons, add enough water to mostly fill a two-quart pitcher, then add two droppers of the liquid stevia. Yum! The kids are wild for it and are very excited to have a tasty treat. They normally only get juice in the morning and water for the rest of the day. Now I am letting them drink healthy lemonade all day long and they feel like they are really getting something fun. :)

This morning I experimented with using this lemonade in my smoothie, instead of juice. It worked just fine, and now my smoothies are all-raw, and lower calorie.

Stevia is a better alternative to other sugar substitutes. So many of those are truly bad for your body, plus taste disgusting. Stevia is actually good for you. Although I wouldn't say stevia tastes exactly like sugar, my husband and kids and I felt like it was close enough that we could enjoy it and not feel like we were getting some yukko aspartame or splenda taste to suffer through. My husband tried out stevia in his coffee and thought it was excellent that way too.

The liquid stevia cost $11 for a 2 ounce bottle. Although that seems kind of expensive, it seems that it is going to pay for itself. I normally spend about $15-18 for two weeks of juice here. I would be very happy to reduce or eliminate the juice consumption and offer healthy lemonade (or limeade! limes are fun too!) instead. Lemons fluctuate in price, but if you get the ones in the bags they aren't very expensive. Considering the health benefits, even if it turned out to be a little more expensive than juice, it would be well worth it to me to make that change in our diets. I am going to keep track and see how far my $11 bottle of stevia goes, plus see if I can find it anywhere for less money.

I love it when I find painless ways to improve our diets!