Thursday, 28th March 2024 14:48
Home / Uncategorized / Better living through juice

In between grinding online in Canada, juggling twelve NFL fantasy teams and spending time with my family in Michigan, I’ve been working hard to get into really good shape. Growing up, I played soccer and was always competitive, but when I started player poker full-time, I got lazy and became much less active. Now I’m getting older and realized that I should be taking my health more seriously.

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I’m running again and I’m trying to get my time down in the mile. Right now I can finish it in about 6:30, but I’d like to get it under 6:00. I’ll usually start my workouts with a really fast mile, then jog another two or three miles at a slower pace. After the run, I’ll get in some strength and core work with body weight exercises like push-ups and crunches.

While I really enjoy my workouts, eating healthy has been a real challenge. I cannot cook at all and, to be honest, my diet is pretty bad. I eat way too much take-out (case in point: today’s lunch was Arby’s) and dine out almost every day. In order to counteract all that junk food, I decided to try a juice cleanse. I picked up a special blender called the Nutri-bullet and about $200 worth of organic produce. The goal was to eat nothing but fruit, vegetables, nuts, and seeds for four to five days.

The juices themselves weren’t that bad, especially seeing as I pretty much started throwing things in the blender and hoped it turned out edible. I was skeptical about how green juice would taste, but discovered that if you combine your greens with fruit, the vegetable taste isn’t as strong. If you mix spinach with some strawberries and a banana, the juice may look green but it tastes like a strawberry-banana smoothie.

I made it through a couple days of juicing before I learned a hard lesson about organic produce. It doesn’t last nearly as long as the regular stuff! I think I made it through only $40 worth of my grocery haul before everything started going bad. But I still feel like my experiment was worth it. It’s important for me to have a balanced life. I have the type of personality where I tend to fixate on things in spurts. I’ll go on a poker binge, then a travel binge, then I’ll take a break where I don’t do much of either. Not only does it keep me from getting burned out, it helps me appreciate my work even more. Living a healthier lifestyle brings even more balance to my life and hopefully it will start paying dividends at the table as well.

Joe Cada is a member of Team PokerStars Pro

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