12 Step Testimonials
“I have LOVED 12 Steps! The book is very informational and easy to understand and implement. I did tackle a couple habits at once since I already had the green smoothie drinking part down as well as some others. The biggest thing I want to comment on are the recipes. Recipes are KEY to success and you need GOOD tasting recipes to make transitions like these. Robyn’s recipes are FANTASTIC! I have yet to try any that we did not love and now use as a family favorite consecutively. Whenever I am “experimenting” with new recipes my hubby gets nervous, but if I tell him it’s a 12 Step recipe he calms down and doesn’t worry since there’s not one he hasn’t loved. (He’s my skeptic at times). I really like that I can count on the recipes being tasty since I’ve read/owned many, many health books with crap recipes in them. BLAH! These are great!
Another thing I wanted to mention about the recipes I’ve enjoyed is that we eat gluten, dairy, egg, and soy free and a huge majority of the recipes are naturally free of these things. There are still plenty of worthwhile recipes in the collections having these restrictions that make it worth the purchase. I have shared 12 Steps with family and friends. My aunt bought the program and has loved it, and I have several other friends who are slowly making their way (they do green smoothies now–hooray!).
I love that Robyn has broken it into 12 Steps and if you can add them into your life you will be so much healthier and happier!”
—Laura Tervort
“I have been reading Robyn’s blog for a few months and then attended a class she taught about green smoothies. It has been just over a month but we are drinking green smoothies daily and I’ve already converted a few friends. I can’t help but smile as I watch my 5 kids drink their smoothies loaded with veggies and fruits every day.
I bought the 12 Step program shortly after I started my new green smoothie habit. I had already watched all of the YouTube videos and read everything on GreenSmoothieGirl.com. I just couldn’t get enough. I have read so many books and articles on healthy eating and this feels like a breath of fresh air. I find some of the same things I’ve learned elsewhere but the 12 Steps is much easier and enjoyable to read and follow.
I love the practical approach. I love that Robyn is sensitive to the time and money constraints that are part of real life. The 12 Step program is simple, affordable, and doable even for a busy mom with 5 kids. We are just getting started but I’ve made the Chocolate Beet Cake (Ch. 11) along with several different smoothies and some fabulous salads. I’m so excited to implement each of these steps throughout the coming year and record the benefits that we experience from each upgrade to our diet.
The 12 Steps program is loaded with information. I bought a freezer and am already planning for my garden next year with all of this new information in mind. It has really changed the way I look at food and food preparation.
I can’t thank you enough for the time and effort you’ve put into sorting through all of the information available and bringing the most relevant and useful information into one program that can be followed by anyone. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to take it one step at a time and not get overwhelmed by trying to do it all at once. Thanks again and keep up the good work.”
—Kelleen P
“I started drinking green smoothies about 3 months ago kind of sporadically. I felt great when I had them but some days I didn’t plan well enough and forgot to make them. When I’m on green smoothies I feel lighter, lose weight quickly, and sleep better. My whole energy over all is so much higher, and my skin looks the best it ever has! A few weeks ago, for some reason I stopped drinking them, dove back into not eating great, and I felt awful immediately. My skin broke out bad and I was miserable. That’s when I said I am never going off of them again. I started again last Tuesday, and here it is Monday and I feel wonderful again!
I’ve been following the 12 Steps / GSG diet. I have a hot pink smoothie in the AM and a piece of fruit mid-morning. Lunch is a green smoothie and salad, sometimes just some almonds. Dinner is something healthy and a large salad. I have no cravings for any of the junk I used to live on.
My kids actually really do like green smoothies. The way I make mine they taste like lemonade which they like. I also started cooking with coconut oil and using it on my skin. WOW! I will never use anything else again! The recipes are awesome, and the advice is great! This is the best life style change ever. So thank you!”
—Beth from Connecticut
“I have been drinking green smoothies every day since April of this year. Since having my son and breastfeeding him exclusively, I have had a hard time getting enough nutrients and calories into my diet because he is allergic to gluten and dairy so I couldn’t eat anything I was used to.
I never had any energy and I was constantly feeling down. Then I learned about the benefits of eating a raw green diet with plenty of raw veggies and fruits and how it could change your life. I decided to jump on the web and search for some smoothie recipes. I couldn’t find any at first.
The only thing that I kept coming to was a YouTube video from GreenSmoothieGirl.com on how to make a green smoothie. I tried it and I was hooked! I bought the 12 Step program the next day and have been drinking them daily with my infant/toddler son ever since.
The information in the 12 Step program and on the site is so abundant and it seems that Robyn has done all of the research on all of the nutrition stuff out there. She has sifted through it leaving pure truth about nutrition. I would have never been able to put all of this information together myself. It truly has changed my life and given me a completely different perspective to what eating a healthy diet truly means. I feel so great now and my digestive cycle is very regular. I am so passionate about eating right and including greens in my diet daily.
My friends and family have started asking me what I am doing that is giving me so much more energy and vitality. Then I basically explode with information that I have learned from the 12 Steps and GreenSmoothieGirl.com. Currently I have converted 4 family members and 3 friends to drinking green smoothies at least regularly if not daily.
Oh, and I must have a bowl of the granola everyday (Ch. 10), which is one of Robyn’s amazing recipes. I can’t live without it and I am so thankful that I found the information all compiled into one place.
So, thank you Robyn to devoting your life to living healthier and teaching others how to live healthier too!”
—Leslie W
“I started 12 Steps during the busiest time of my life, when my fourth baby was 6 weeks old. My other little ones were 2, 5, and 6. It was three days before school started and everyone was sick with a cold but me. I was sick with an inflamed gallbladder and scheduled for surgery at age 33! We had been sick more than 50% of the last 365 days.
“Enough is enough!” I thought, “I know what I should be eating, I’ve been studying this since I was pregnant with my first, but I can’t figure out how to apply what I know. It overwhelms me. I want my family to be healthy, especially my son who is sick the most. Maybe Robyn’s program can teach me something I don’t already know. I trust Robyn’s nutritional philosophy more than any other author out there.” (Sorry I was skeptical at first, but the beauty of 12 Steps I now see, is putting the transition into a do-able order and adding one thing at a time.)
We started 12 Steps on the first day of school. An awesome time to start because fruit and veggies are abundant in the garden and cheap at the store, and the beginning of the school year is a time of transition anyway! I had paid for school lunch, but we started 12 Steps just in time. None of my kids will ever have school lunch (they serve corn dogs every single day; I hurt for the other kids).
The first week curriculum for first grade was “health and nutrition.” At dinner I remarked on the coincidence that I was taking a health and nutrition class too. My kids already know to expect fallacious nutritional information from school, so we compared notes on what we were learning each night at dinner. My kids loved that I was going “back to school” too.
I call “12 Steps” my online class and I always say “my teacher says . . .” Rather than being on a crazy diet, in my family’s eyes, I am taking a university-level, highly prestigious, nutrition course and I will “graduate” in a year (you never really graduate, though, do you?). In my eyes, it’s even better than that. Each month as my kids start new units of study, they are excited to hear about my new unit of study.
During the first month, my goal was to drink 8+ glasses of water a day instead of 3 or 4. I had been perpetually dehydrated since I got pregnant, and nursing was making it worse. That was a hard goal because I was so insanely busy I didn’t even have time to get a drink until 10 in the morning some days.
More than once, due to kid distractions, a green smoothie took three days to make. Water in the blender the first day, wash produce the next, chop stuff up and blend it the third. Getting hydrated was wonderful and I had green drinks on days when I couldn’t get a smoothie made. A ginormous burden of guilt (that I didn’t even know I had) lifted off my shoulders about my family’s nutrition. That gave me an emotional boost. The water made me feel physically so much better. I cancelled my gallbladder removal surgery and I don’t recall when it happened, but all of a sudden I had an extra 30 minutes to make green smoothie every day (it takes longer holding a baby or toddler or both while you do it).
Organic ready-to-eat salads just happened to be on sale for $.99 a box when we hit month two. That would convince anyone to love salad, no work and so tasty. When the sale ended two weeks later, I found again that I magically had the extra time to wash piles of romaine, spinach, and other lettuces. Another huge burden lifted off my shoulders, because I didn’t have to think of what to have for dinner anymore, it was always salad. We had main dishes too, but they were way simpler, just side dishes really. Salad was fun. My kids love picking out toppings for the salad and my picky eater has a passion for making her salad pretty. She also loves that dinner every night is a salad bar. Dinner battles at our house almost disappeared. As the quality of our meals went up, there was less to complain about.
The third month was my birthday. I got a beet cake, a salad spinner, and the “okay” to order almonds in the GreenSmoothieGirl.com annual group buy. I have been substituting almonds, apples, and raisins for chips and pretzels (just a few per snack) since we started 12 Steps. I reverse engineered our favorite store salad dressings using high quality ingredients. It was fun.
Where did I get the time to sit around reverse engineering salad dressing recipes? It is a mystery to me. I am getting salad making down to a science. I love buying it. I love being the lady who fills her cart up with lettuce and practically nothing else every few days at the grocery store.
Instead of fruit snacks, my toddler hugs the bags of romaine and skips the complimentary Laffy Taffy at the check-out. (Toddlers transition so much faster than the rest of us). I took salad to the family potluck, and impressed my relatives when 2 of my 3 kids took big servings of it before eating anything else.
My husband won’t touch green smoothies, but he has enjoyed the improvement in the family menu and the unanticipated weight loss from having salads for dinner every day.
Wow, now we are into November and neither of my school kids have had a sick day! My toddler has been sick every other week like usual (and my husband too). Even the daily green smoothie can’t save her at age 2, I guess. With one kid and one parent sick a lot though, it is miraculous that no one else is getting it, as they got everything last year. And my son went off asthma medicine without a hitch. In the past, running out of medicine meant he would be sick in the next day or two, but so far so good! Thanks!”
—Regina Slaugh