Robyn's Blog

One thing that frustrates me is when people my age forget something, or can’t keep up with their kids physically or whatever, and they say versions of this: “Well, I’m old!”

When did we come to accept that we are “old” in our 40’s? Please join me in rejecting this notion! There are accounts in the Bible of people living to be 800 years old. So obviously somewhere we went wrong. We have every living plant food on Earth available to us, in a market within 5 miles, and we all have a car to go get them. I think my writings and research to this point have shown that plant foods (plus breaking a sweat almost every day) are the fountain of youth.

So why start slowing down, some even screeching to a halt, in our 40’s and 50’s?

One of my favorite things is getting emails from folks who are 60 or even 80 years old. They tell me how dramatic their health improvements are, from following my program and enjoying the foods their bodies were designed to eat.

The point is, IT’S NEVER TOO LATE! You can turn it around RIGHT NOW.

I was friends with Kristi for years before she finally decided to try GS. Once she did, she was hooked. She still eats gobs of candy, but she’s noticed huge benefits from just the GS habit. She told me recently that last time she went to Oklahoma to visit her sister, she bought GS ingredients and made them during her visit. This time she was PMS-ing and just ate all the donuts and waffles and junk—and she was so sick she almost used the barf bag on the plane home.

I love how experimenting with good nutrition teaches us powerful things. Even if it took us YEARS, even DECADES, of rolling our eyes at the health-nut weirdos, before we decided to join them. (I have a number of friends who thought I was a weirdo 15 years ago and have since then joined me and even brought family and friends along.)

Do you have a bucket list? Put, “Start a daily green smoothie habit” at the top of that list. After that, add,“Shift to a whole-foods diet in one year.” Some of my bucket list, tomorrow.

Do you know this song? It’s called Magic, by B.o.B.

If that doesn’t turn your bad mood around, listen to this OTHER song also called Magic, by Selena Gomez, too.

Sometimes when I’m in here on my PC working, I play Magic and bust out all my dance moves. (The ones that embarrass my kids.) Jump out of my chair and just kick it for a while. These songs are so awesome I can’t stand it.

I’ve got the magic in me. It comes from whole plant foods. They make me glow, they make me dance, they make me bust out smiling for no reason, they help me see good things even in the hard times in life. They are magical!

It’s perfect, living, expansive nutrition, delivered directly to organs, tissues, blood, and bone, with the cell walls crushed and all the micronutrients immediately available. It makes me SO HAPPY to think that my kids went to school this morning with amazing nutrition now feeding their brain so they can learn.

Enjoy. Go ahead. Nobody can see you. Dance! You’ve gotta do SOMETHING with all that energy!

I just got a facebook message from a childhood friend, Cathy K, that said, “I’m looking for a Robyn Openshaw who grew up in Bellevue, Nebraska in the 70’s—you look too young to be her though, right?”

Nope, I’m her!

In case I was feeling elated for being told I am too young to be “that” Robyn, this was Cathy’s next message:

“Remember that you drew a picture of me on the chalkboard with clumps of mascara on my eyelashes? And I threw a chalked-up eraser at your back when I tried to erase it and you tried to stop me?”

Wow! Would I do something so mean? Thank goodness we get to grow up. I was grateful for the opportunities to right 30-year old wrongs! And thankful, too, for the perspective that if my own 6^th grader acts like . . . well, a 6^th grader . . . she’ll eventually develop some wisdom and maturity. Anyway, I wrote Cathy back and asked her forgiveness. And recounted my main memory of being jealous of her for being beautiful. (I was the ugly duckling pretty much the entire decade.)

Then she said,

“You look like a 22 year old. I look like a stay-home Mom who nursed four children and ate Pop Tarts. That’s going to change—my goal is to look like you! I’m getting on my exercise bike right after I pick up my kindergartner!”

As I’m going to blog about soon, it’s never too late to give up the Pop Tarts. (p.s. And it’s WORTH IT to nurse those babies!)

Wendy Ray gave this idea for using zucchini, on the GreenSmoothieGirl facebook fanpage:

Slice young zucchini into a quart jar (or whatever). Add these:

1/3 cup raw apple cider vinegar

1 Tbsp. sea salt

2+ Tbsp. raw honey

2 Tbsp. fresh basil

1 cup water

Optional: sliced onions

Marinate at least 30 minutes. Lasts at least a month in the fridge.

Trystan Alexander Knight-Timm said this:

Put some zucchini in your raw hummus. Tastes amazingly like the real thing only healthier and raw.

(Note from Robyn: you have hummus recipes in 12 Steps to Whole Foods and in the Sprouted/Crunchy recipe collection.)

Kathy Chastain Culp said this:

You can get rid of several of them this way: juice them with celery, cukes, lemons, ginger and add liquid stevia.

And several people mentioned my favorite thing to do with zucchini: spiral it as “pasta” noodles and serve with a marinara made chunky in your blender, with raw tomatoes and onions and garlic!

This was posted as a response to my very old blog entry yesterday. WOW! Scott, thank you for sharing this! (And YES, it is amazing to see people’s lives change for the better!) (Original blog here.)

Robyn,

First I want to extend a heartfelt thank you for what you do. I know it sounds a bit dramatic but you may have helped to save my life. And for that I will be eternally grateful.

I cannot for the life of me remember how I ran across your website. But the important thing is that I did. I would like to share a little bit about the impact you have had on my life up to this point.

I first found greensmoothiegirl.com somewhere around the end of February of this year.

Before that point I was somewhere around 370 or 380 pounds. I am not exactly sure but the only way I could estimate is that my doctor’s scale (350 lb max weight) wouldn’t weigh me and I had to press pretty hard on the end of the balance point to get that thing in the middle. We guessed about 370 or 380. Not good. Obviously! I was officially “fat, forty five and ‘fraid a dyin.”

I have been in the medical field for more than half my life. I have seen people die senselessly for 25 years. All products of bad nutritional choices. And here I was heading in the same direction.

Back in 1985 when I started in this field it would be uncommon for people in their 50′s to die of sudden cardiac death. As time has gone by that age has continually dropped. Now it is COMMON for us to see patients in their 40′s go into cardiac arrest and the 30 year olds are the new 50. Uncommon, but they are now dropping dead in their 30′s. Scary.

Two months ago my friend had a 14 year old patient who was having a full blown STEMI (ST segment elevation myocardial infarction). A STEMI is a type of severe heart attack in which the coronary artery is completely blocked off by a blood clot. It’s usually recognized by an elevation of the ST segment on an ECG, which indicates that a large amount of heart muscle damage is occurring.

So back to me……..

I started reading all your stuff and decided to try the green smoothies or what I affectionately call  my swamp water. I was very pleased. And have only missed about 3 days of smoothies since I began the first of March this year.

Reading your content led me to “The China Study” which led me to “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” which led me to Dr. McDougall.

My life has been altered and changed for the better since. I no longer eat oils of any kind, meat, poultry or dairy and have not had a single “cheat day” since. You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to the dark side of nutrition.

My numbers are very impressive to date. I am down almost 70 pounds in 5 months, my total cholesterol is 119, triglycerides 59, LDL’s 64, and HDL’s 25.

I no longer take either of my high blood pressure meds. I was on those for nearly 20 years and it took all of 1 month to throw them away. Absolutely amazing.

It all started with green smoothies. Thank you, thank you, thank you for what you do. It must feel amazing to affect lives in such a profound way.

Respectfully,
Scott Venezia

My former husband nicknamed my parents BobDad and MomPam in the 80’s. I just went down to return my dad’s Mini Cooper and pick my car up in the shop. And look what my dad was doing, to the side of his house! It’s a shed, with the top level being a grandkids’ playhouse.

Cool, right? I TOLD you he was tireless and energetic!

We were talking about my son having no job this summer and how my dad and I, being rather ambitious by nature, don’t get it. Don’t get him.

BobDad said, “You told me when you were 15 that you wanted to go see Laura in Florida. And I said, ‘Great! Get a job to pay for it then! How about McDonald’s?’ And you were horrified. You said, ‘Who’d want to work in that greasy place?’ And you came home with the polyester uniform THAT DAY.’”

Heh. If you want, you can go check out the photo of me in my McD’s uniform at age 16 on facebook, mercilessly dug up by an ex-BF.

We drove down to the shop, and as I gave Miguel the third $600 check this year, BobDad gleefully started lecturing me in front of all the guys who did the work on my Pilot’s front end: “So, Robyn, as you drive away, glance around, at things in front of you. It’s important not to drive CLOSE to those things.” (All the shop guys yuk-yukking.)

At the gym the other morning, I walked into the locker room and there was a lady swimming in the pool wearing a tiara on her head. I’m not even kidding.

Sadly, none of my three friends I work out with were there to see the festivities. You can bet I texted them, though:

“We now have a three-way tie for Gold’s Gym’s Craziest:

“Tiara Swimmer Girl is neck and neck with Tone Deaf Loud Singer.

“Followed closely by Heart Attack Dude and Treadmill Dancer.”

TDLS is a lady who brings sheet music (hymn arrangements and Christmas music, year-round) and loudly sings off-pitch over the Van Halen and Black Eyed Peas coming out of the gym’s stereo system. While exercising on the elliptical trainer.

HAD is a guy who is actually quite fit, but gets on the Stairmaster and gasps and wheezes and heavy-breathes to the point where people either (a) ask him if he’s okay, or (b) complain to the management.

TD literally dances on the treadmill, and if you know dance, you can even tell what ballroom steps she is doing, and she does all the hips and arms too.

My BFF Laura has told me for many years that she thinks everyone—really, EVERYONE—is weird. You just have to get to know them well enough, to learn what their specific brand of weird is. And after she and I both got married, her theory evolved to encompass how married couples develop some serious enmeshed weirdness TOGETHER.

The one nice thing about my “weird” is that it’s no secret. With the advent of this site, and publishing my books, everyone knows!

I was driving my 17 y.o. to do some school shopping last week, and I pulled out a cooler of green smoothies. Got one out, handed it to him with a straw.  Had this convo:

Robyn: Here, drink this and I’ll drop you off at this store and I’ll come over in a few—I’m going in Sunflower Market for a minute.

Cade: Of course you are. Always with the vegetables, all the time. I’m sick of the healthy eating-thing.

Robyn: Well, that’s who I am. Better get used to it! It’s what I do. We eat healthy at our house. [I could say this in my sleep.]

Cade: I’m not asking you to start going through the In-N-Out drive-thru, Mom. I’m just saying. Most people are HERE. [He puts his hand, palm-down, on his leg.] And you are HERE. [He puts his hand, palm down, on the roof of the car.] How about a happy medium?

Robyn: [silent for a minute, thinking] Well, I don’t think I’m up there. I am just trying to make sure you get what you need to be healthy. I know people far more hard-core than I am.

Cade: No, nobody is.

So I chewed on that, all the next morning, on my bike ride up the canyon. I’m thinking I shouldn’t overreact, because we HAVE been eating an awful lot of zucchini lately. All our lunch and dinner meals in August, every year, tend to be 80% vegetables.

And I’m thinking, I know why I do it. Because when the kids come back from their dad’s house, there are smears of chocolate across my youngest son’s face, from his stepmom’s Crazy Cake, and her chocolate chip cookies, and whatever.  So I probably feel at some level that the 85% of the time they’re with me, I have to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I know what our health was like before. And I Never. Ever. want to go there again.

But what can I do so I don’t feel I caved to the teenager pressure, the stepmom-feeds-us-candy-and-cookies pressure, the pop-culture pressure? AND so my son is happier? Can I have both?

The answer I came up with is to continue—but try to focus more often on the healthy meals he LIKES. Even if some zucchini goes to waste. Even if there’s more fruit in the green smoothie than I like to use.

(FYI, just to show him how versatile I am, I came out of Sunflower Market with fruit only, no veggies.)

And to offset experiences like I’ve just described, there will be little rewards along the way. A few days later, my youngest son called me from home, even though he was supposed to be at his dad’s. This was the second time he had done this in recent memory.

He said, “Please can I just eat dinner here? I’ll make it myself, and I know, I know–I’ll eat veggies and fruits first.” He had his food laid out on the counter, told me what he was making. He said, “I don’t want to eat dinner at Dad’s–he makes disgusting stuff.” Like what, I asked. Like boxed mac-n-cheeze, he said.

It’s working. They’re getting it. You can’t take a little tantrum here and there to represent their whole experience with your consistent, whole-foods lifestyle.

You could literally drink green smoothies till you’re full, all day long, and still lose weight.

If you drank TWO GALLONS a day (that’s 8 quarts), you would get only 1500 calories. That 100 fewer calories than someone my height and weight needs, even if I don’t exercise, daily!

I’ve been accidentally saying the wrong thing in my classes. A quart of green smoothie doesn’t have 400 calories—it has 200! (Hot Pink smoothie from Ch. 10 of 12 Steps has 400 calories, perfect for breakfast.)

A quart of GS will fill up your stomach. I often get emails saying, “I can’t drink a quart in one sitting! How do you do it?”

Well, first, I’m just used to it. I burn 400-600 calories working out every morning so I’m really hungry at lunch time. Sometimes I save some of my quart for late in the afternoon, but often I drink it all at once—and I always have something else, too.) And sometimes when I have an extra pint in the fridge, I have another GS for dinner!

I also get this a lot: “I am hungry an hour or two after drinking my quart of GS. What’s up with that?” Well, what’s up with that is that it’s less than 200 calories.

I was filing stuff and found this DietPower breakdown of a quart of green smoothie:

¼ lb. spinach

¼ lb. chard

½ banana

¾ cup mixed berries

1 peach

Here’s what you get (with 1 ½ cups water and a pinch of stevia):

188 calories

84% carbs, protein 12%, fat 4% (That is a BEAUTIFUL macronutrient breakdown, by the way! If someone told you 20% protein is necessary, it ISN’T.)

Because this is the highest-nutrition, lowest-calorie thing you can eat, I outline a Detox plan (3 days) and a weight loss plan (30 days) in my book, The Green Smoothies Diet.

You also get, from this recipe:

More than 50% of your daily requirements of Vitamin C, Vitamin A, Vitamin B6, magnesium, copper, manganese.

Very significant amounts of fiber (31% of daily allowance), as well as niacin, Vita E, iron, calcium, potassium, and sodium.

p.s. I do recommend adding 60-100 cals. of flaxseed to your diet, and a GS is one easy way to do that. I buy sprouted flax on Amazon. It’s live and it absorbs less water in the smoothie since it’s already been soaked (and dried).

I’m stoked! My children’s book is done and Lori Sume is hard at work illustrating! Check out the first page, and read all about the book, by clicking here.

My book educates kids about my whole-foods mission. But it does it colorfully–it’s fiction, it’s fun, it’s heartwarming and uplifting, and it has easy recipes at the end.

For those who pre-order, I’m going to ship autographed copies. Feb. 1 or sooner (can’t guarantee it by Christmas, though we’re trying). Here’s all about it! Your credit card won’t be charged until the book releases and is shipped to you.

So I checked my son Ten out early from school yesterday because he had a double header far from home. On the front step on the school is my favorite edible weed, purslane, see photo below.

It’s higher in iron than any other green I have ever found—cultivated or wild. If you’re anemic, find some and toss it in the blender. It’s also really mild-flavored. Most non-cultivated greens taste pretty strong.

I don’t see that much purslane in Utah. I saw a ton of it in Nebraska a few years ago, and it grows many places—very close to the ground, with small, fleshy leaves and stems, all of which is “food.”

No, I didn’t pick this from the school steps, for my green smoothies. I didn’t want to drink whatever is on the bottom of kids’ shoes! Don’t pick weeds on the side of busy roadways, near where weeds are sprayed, or where people walk.

I am going to try to locate enough wild edibles to do a video soon to help you identify them. I rode up the canyon today on my bike with my camera to take more photos. I mostly enjoyed the ride and forgot to look for greens.

But I did see a thistle and got off my bike to photograph it. I put a leaf in my mouth to chew it up and make sure it is what I thought it was. (That’s me taking one for the team: if I don’t get sick, it’s edible!)

All the squirrels went running as I gagged and choked. OMG. Worst thing that’s ever been in my mouth. It would take 20 pounds of fruit to neutralize that bitter-awful blech. Which I could still taste 20 minutes later, even though I then drank half my Camelbak of water.

I put thistles in my green smoothies a few times, years ago, but my younger daughter got an itchy throat from it, so I quit. So, um, maybe don’t eat those.

This time of year, a lot of the weeds are too tall and woody and bitter. They’re best in the spring. If you pick them in the heat of the late summer, find small, tender ones.

There’s another photo here of me YEARS ago eating one variety of lambsquarter from an empty lot in Provo. Lambsquarter is also abundant in Utah and great to toss in your blender. It’s good to know this stuff and start using wild greens, for emergency preparedness.