Archive for August, 2010

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

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.

I kinda wrecked my car. Today my dad met me at the auto body shop where the owner and I are now on a first-name basis, since this is the third time this year I’ve had pointless parking-lot fender benders. My dad came so he could lend me his cute yellow Mini-Cooper for a couple of days.

As I was sitting in the front seat re-familiarizing myself with the controls, I could feel him staring at me. Glancing over, I saw a nostalgic look on his face I am very familiar with as a parent myself. “When you’re with me, do you ever,” he asked, “go back to when you were a little girl? Kind of feel like one again?”

I smiled. “Well, I know what you mean because I look at my kids and suddenly see them as a little child again. I was doing that with Kincade the other day, looking at how he’s a year from adulthood but imagining him as the 6-year old boy carrying his pet chameleon around. And suddenly I was shocked: ‘What are you doing with those whiskers on your chin!’”

So I start the car and my dad says, “You don’t need to drive me home. I’m just going to run it.” And he takes off down the highway, miles from his house.

Oh my goodness, this bodes well for my future. I love that dude. He’s so upbeat all the time—you can’t bring a depressed mood or be whiny with my dad. He’ll just ignore it and be all cheery and spunky till you either knock it off or get really annoyed. He has so much energy, always undertaking projects. If he calls me, he starts with, “How ya doin’?!” I find myself saying “Great!” even if I just wrecked my car and broke up with my boyfriend.

You’ve gotta find your lodestar. That person who is way ahead of you in life and has consistently, one day at a time, lived a wholesome life and looks and acts like YOU want to, when you’re that age. I know I write about my dad all the time, but really, he is the living proof that you don’t have to slide into sedentary, substandard, subsistence living as you age.

p.s. Got a few emails about this, immediately–I didn’t just break up with a boyfriend (mostly bc I don’t have one), but thanks for the concern. It was just a hypothetical example of how my dad lightens everything up even if you’re having a rotten day.