Why I Fell in Love With Beets (And What Juicing Taught Me About Myself)

I didn’t discover beets in a wellness boutique or on a trendy influencer’s feed. I discovered them at a corner carryout in Lower Manhattan, around 1999, standing in front of a salad bar with options like chicken, mixed greens, and sun-dried tomatoes. My friend—the one who’d just introduced me to veganism and handed me a little self-published book called “If You Have a Disease, You Ate It”—was loading up her plate with things I’d never considered eating. So I followed her lead. And one of those things was pickled beets.

I’d never tried them before. But something about that deep, earthy sweetness on top of a simple salad just worked. I didn’t have a revelation in that moment. I just filed it away: beets. Interesting. I’ll come back to that.

And I did.

The Cleanse That Changed My Mindset

Years later, I did my first real juice fast—sixteen days. I built it around cucumber as a water base, kale, asparagus, citrus, and of course, beets. That cleanse was the first time I made my juicing practice public. I posted it on social media, not because I had a brand strategy, but because I was genuinely amazed at what was happening to my body and I wanted to share it.

Here’s what beets did for me that nothing else quite matched: more energy, easier digestion, a flatter stomach, and workouts that lasted longer than they had any right to. I know people don’t like to talk about elimination, but it’s one of the most underrated indicators of real health. When that part of your system is working, everything else starts to follow.

And my skin cleared up completely. Some might call that vanity. I call it science. Your skin, hair, and nails are the last parts of your body to receive nutrients. If you’re glowing on the outside, your body has what it needs on the inside. That’s not a beauty hack—that’s biology.

That’s when I started digging into the research. I learned about polyphenols—the powerful antioxidants found in deeply pigmented fruits and vegetables, especially purples and reds. They help neutralize toxins, support your body’s ability to clear heavy metals from your blood, and protect your cells from oxidative stress. Beet juice health benefits weren’t just anecdotal for me. The science backed up exactly what my body was already telling me.

What Juice Fasting Really Taught Me

Over the years, I completed fasts ranging from three to sixteen days. But the juice fasting benefits I valued most weren’t physical—they were mental. After a fast, I didn’t just feel lighter in my body. I felt lighter in my thinking. There was a clarity, an energy, a sense of being stripped back to something essential. And once you feel that, you can’t unfeel it.

Fasting taught me that when you reduce your inputs—whether it’s food, noise, distractions, or habits—you can finally hear what your body has been trying to tell you. It put me in a mindset of wanting to change everything. Not from a place of desperation, but from a place of possibility. If simplifying what I consumed could make me feel this different, what else in my life could benefit from that same subtraction?

That’s the piece most people miss about juice fasting. It’s not just a detox. It’s a practice of simplifying your wellness routine down to the essentials so your body can do what it already knows how to do—heal, restore, recalibrate. You’re not adding a miracle. You’re removing the interference.

From My Kitchen to Other People’s Doorsteps

I couldn’t keep this to myself. I started sharing my juicing journey on social media—showing the process, the recipes, the mistakes. A lot of my content back then was unpolished. I made talking-head videos, showed what tasted terrible, showed when I was tired, and people loved it. The rawness was the point. This was around 2008, early enough on Instagram that the right hashtags could actually grow an audience, and “juicing” was still a relatively new concept to most people.

My following grew, and that’s when I started learning the hard lessons. People weren’t avoiding juice because they didn’t want it. They couldn’t afford it and didn’t have the time. That was a lightbulb moment for me. I remember thinking: this is a problem that needs to be solved.

So when I moved back to the DC area, I started a juice delivery service. I wanted to make fresh juice a grab-and-go solution for busy working moms and families. I caught the attention of a well-known social media influencer early on—she became one of my first customers, and because people trusted her, her endorsement drove a wave of business my way. Word of mouth did the rest. For a while, it was working.

But the model wasn’t sustainable. Delivering fresh juice at an affordable price while preserving its integrity was physically daunting and financially impossible at the scale I needed. I started researching alternatives—how long juice lasts when frozen, what happens to nutrients during freeze-drying, whether powdered formats could preserve what mattered. That research planted seeds I wouldn’t fully harvest for years.

The Idea I Didn’t Take Seriously Enough

Here’s a story I don’t tell often. After the delivery service, I came up with a concept I called “juice bombs”—freshly juiced vegetables frozen into a single-serve ball you could drop into water and let dissolve. Your juice, ready in minutes, no juicer required. I wrote out the whole concept. And then I let it sit.

Six months later, I was shopping for frozen blueberries and right there in the freezer aisle was a bag of perfectly formed, single-serve balls of juiced vegetables. Exactly what I’d written down. My first thought? Not again. I waited too long and didn’t take myself seriously.

It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, and honestly it’s frustrating every time it does. But that moment taught me something I carry with me to this day: trust yourself. Trust your instincts. Every great product starts with a problem and a question, and if you’re asking the right questions, someone else probably is too. The difference is who acts.

Life Had Other Plans (And That’s Okay)

Around that time, life shifted. I moved to a new city after a breakup, and my focus became my son—making sure he stayed in the best schools, that he was settled, that he was the priority. It wasn’t a bad thing. It was the right thing. But it pulled my attention away from building, experimenting, and chasing the next idea.

And yet—I never lost the desire to figure it out. That’s where the resilience piece lives for me. I wasn’t discouraged because something didn’t work. I didn’t quit because life got complicated. I just knew, somewhere deep, that I was eventually going to find a way to make eating healthy more convenient, more accessible, and more real.

That belief didn’t come from a business plan. It came from standing in front of a salad bar in 1999, trying pickled beets for the first time and thinking: huh, that’s interesting. It came from watching my body respond to simplicity during a sixteen-day fast. It came from every customer who told me they wished healthy could just be easier.

Simplification as a Superpower

Looking back, every chapter of my wellness journey has been about the same thing: stripping back to what matters. Beets taught me that powerful nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated. Juice fasting taught me that clarity comes from reduction, not accumulation. The delivery service taught me that people don’t need more options—they need simpler ones. And the juice bombs taught me to trust the questions my instincts were already asking.

Today, that philosophy lives in everything I’m building with Earthkiss. Practical Resilience isn’t about adding more to your plate. It’s about identifying the one or two things that actually move the needle and committing to those. It’s about understanding that resilience anywhere is resilience everywhere—and sometimes the most powerful wellness move you can make is subtraction, not addition.

Your Turn

What could you strip back this week? One habit. One food. One distraction. What would happen if you simplified your inputs and just… listened? I’d love to hear what comes up for you. Drop a comment or send me a message—I read every one.