ADDED: I can't resist adding an anecdote to this: Right after I learned the trick in the paragraph above from a paper of Schoen-Simon-Yau, I went to a colleague's office to show it to him. As it happens, Eli Stein was there, and he exclaimed, "But it's in my book!" And indeed it is. You will find it presented very nicely in VII.3.1 "A subharmonic property of the gradient" of Stein's 1970 book, "Singular Integrals and Differentiability Properties of Functions". It is obvious that S-S-Y did not know this or forgot, because their proof is much messier than Stein's.