Remember I promised to tell you about something else I drink every day? Ta-dah! Here it is!

Perhaps you weren’t expecting lemon juice.

I picked up this habit when I first read Jackie Warner’s “This Is Why You’re Fat.” In explaining that drinking 2 to 3 liters of water a day will help with detoxification and assisting bile acids in flushing out toxins, she suggested adding lemon juice, because the combo is a natural fat metabolizer: “Water with lemon juice is a bile thinner. This means it helps bile do a better job of processing fat.”

(Prefer Dr. Oz? He says pretty much the same thing.)

Cool, I thought. My liver could use some help. I don’t abuse it with alcohol the way I did for a while, but I’m certainly not hopping on the wagon anytime … well, probably ever.

I’m also inclined to try to do nice things for my liver because of something I can’t control, and that’s the need for a certain potentially liver-damaging drug that I’ve been told I’ll likely have to take the rest of my life. In a stubborn fit, I tried going off it for about six weeks last year. Bad, bad, bad move. Need the drug. Damn.

Being nice to my liver, which helps process sugars, is also important because – yay! – diabetes runs in my family. As in, my grandfather had it. My mom had it. I had gestational diabetes with my first pregnancy, although strangely not my second. (I hated the three-hour blood test so much that if I had shown even an inkling of sugar problems the second time around, I’d have said, screw it, just put me on the damn diet, I’m not taking that test again.)

So while every time I have my sugar tested (at least once a year) it comes up within normal range, I remain wary. I need to keep all of my sugar-processing organs humming along efficiently.

Which brings us back to the lemon juice. It’s certainly not the only liver booster. Here’s a list of 14 of them, for example, including avocados and garlic, two more of my favorites.

I do this because it’s simple and I can incorporate it into something I already do, which is drink a lot of fluid. If a splash of lemon juice makes my morning green tea that much healthier, why not take that step?