Tomorrow I begin writing about the amazing week I just spent speaking and studying with Dr. Thomas Lodi, M.D. at The Oasis of Healing in Arizona. I hope the words I write and the videos I share give shape to the journey a cancer patient takes who chooses the path less traveled, to educate and empower  herself.

Julie from Houston sent me this photo after winning a BlendTec Total Blender! I am back home in OREM, SANDY, and LAYTON in January—so if you love someone who needs my message that it’s totally possible to get your health and your ideal weight back, with simple whole foods, have them sign up and I will fill their bucket for the journey with love and information.

I’m also working it out to speak with Dr. Leigh Erin Connealy, M.D. in IRVINE, CA, Dec. 12, on my cancer research tour, so don’t miss that one if you live near there. She’s an M.D. who treats cancer holistically and I want to go check out her hyperbaric chamber and other cutting-edge ideas to support the immune system, rather than nuke it, in America’s failed “war on cancer.”

And we’ve got ST. GEORGE, LAS VEGAS, SAN DIEGO, FT. LAUDERDALE, and ORLANDO coming up. I would like to plan a trip to CHICAGO so write us at amanda@greensmoothiegirl.com if you want to help with that one.

Stephanie was smack on the front row in Houston, a gorgeous tiny little mom who has lost 50 lbs. doing green smoothies. (Check out her before-and-after photos!)

Her husband was with her, and Stephanie said he’s gone from “couch potato to marathon runner.” Stephanie told me that despite the oohs and aaahs about how she looks, “What happened is more on the inside than on the outside!” I believe she would endorse my statement that a change in fuel impacts your emotional and psychological health as much as your physical health.

Here’s her story:

Since Green Smoothie Girl was so pivotal in my own transformation, it is poetic that I now get to share my story here with Robyn and her readers.

Just a few short years ago, I was overworked, overstressed, and overweight. I was living in a daze and life was not joyful. I was headed in the wrong direction and I was bringing my family with me.  I had to hit rock bottom before I decided to make any changes. I was a junk food junkie, not spending much time in the kitchen and never shopping in the produce section.

I had already tried diet pills, the no-carb diet, boxed food delivered in the mail, and counting points. I knew that I did not need a temporary diet, I needed a permanent change. I learned about a Raw Foods lifestyle and my interest was piqued. However, there was one major problem. I really did not like eating vegetables.

I soon discovered that I could drink them instead. I am a visual learner, so I hit YouTube to learn more. And voilà – I discovered Green Smoothie Girl. I soon bought some fruits and veggies and pulled out my 15 year old blender and went to town. I LOVED them! Before long I purchased a Vitamix and decided that I would replace 2 meals a day with green smoothies and incorporate more whole foods into my diet.

Magical things happened! As my diet cleaned up, my head cleared. The weight was coming off (50 lbs total) and I was feeling really good.  The fog had lifted. I decided that I was not going to return to my legal career.  I had a new passion for everything associated with health and wellness. I researched more, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to share with others.

This led me to enroll at The Institute of Integrative Nutrition. I am now working as a Health Coach and a Raw Food Chef and have a new zest for life!  I became “The Nutrition Mom” and my message is “Simple-Healthy-Solutions.” Eating does not have to be so complicated.  Let’s bring it back to basics.

I coach others to take one step at a time. I feel so blessed to not only teach people about proper nutrition, but to go on the journey with them.  I meet them where they are and give them the support that they need along the way. It’s a beautiful journey.

Thank you Robyn, for sharing your message.  You have set me, and so many others, on a new path and I am forever grateful.

Stephanie Merchant, Health Coach

TheNutritionMom.net

That’s how much green smoothie my daughter, Emma, made for nearly 1,000 people who came to my local classes in Orem, Layton and Sandy a few weeks ago! It was a cases of the fishes and the loaves—-thanks to Dixie cups!

My favorite moment besides the AWESOME return-to-health stories we heard was a lady on the front row. She’d already confessed when I asked for a show of hands, “Who has no idea what this racket is, and got dragged here by someone who loves you?”

I read a few pages from my children’s book, The Adventures of Junk Food Dude, where Green Smoothie Guy suggests to his new friend, Junk Food Dude:

“Try not eating sugar for four days!” (“Then good food will taste great!”)

Upon that statement, the lady on the front row gasped, “OH MY LORD!”

As if 4 days without sugar might kill her. I cracked up. It is what it is. That white stuff is the most addictive substance on Planet Earth.

And then, out of 300 people in the room, she won the 12 Steps to Whole Foods course and whooped it up, which made my night.

Check out an excerpt of this email from Kim Newhouse in Arizona, with the photos she sent us:

“I won the [12 Steps to] Whole Foods Course when Robyn came to Tucson and I wanted to show you all what I’ve been doing with it! My birthday was coming up so I decided to do a ‘Green Smoothie Demo Party’ with my friends. It was so successful that I did another one the following week, opening it up to the first 15 people who signed up from our buying club (we order Azure Standard, Frontier Wholesale, local honey and other foods together—there are a couple hundred on our yahoo group from all over Southern Arizona. In fact, one of our members was your volunteer who ate the plate of greens!) Everyone had so much fun that we’ve decided to have GSG parties every Friday and Saturday night of the first weekend of each month!

My husband made a list on the web where individuals can sign up for an ingredient to bring to make a recipe that’s featured in the selected videos we’ll be watching. We obviously made the smoothies the first time and this time we’ll be doing super salads, 2 dressings, and the almond joy fudge! We’ll do the fudge first and stick it in the freezer while we watch the other videos and assemble salads…by the time we’re done eating those, the fudge will be ready to enjoy

You’ve got many new followers in Tucson now! Here’s a testimonial from a 21 year old who attended my first party (she has 7 siblings):

“We all love the green smoothies and are making them at least once a day with ginger, bee pollen, kale, collard greens, chard, spinach, cabbage, chia, flax oil, and fruit. My brothers think they are dessert and say we haven’t made a green smoothie they didn’t like yet. Thank you so much for opening your home for green smoothie night and we are looking forward to the next one!”

In my Utah classes last week, we had 200 in Layton, 300 in Sandy, and 400 in my hometown of Orem. A few people stood up to tell us the radical health changes they’re experiencing, as they begin eating whole foods.

(Lauralee in Layton came for the 5th time with new friends, and Elisa in Sandy came for the 6th time! I feel like I should make up new stories, just for them.)

Knight Hunt who had a heart attack at age 30, now my age, had to fly to NYC at the last minute, so he wasn’t there. But he emailed me the day of class that he’s now drinking 3 QUARTS of green smoothie a day, and his tastes have changed so much that he puts almost no fruit in them, and looks good and feels amazing!

Jen Baldwin won the blender in Layton and was ecstatic (here’s a photo she took). She blogged about her journey to health using my 12 Steps program and green smoothies—check out how her weight finally started to really drop when she added the green smoothie habit! Read about her reaction to winning the blender, and more, here:

http://jenbearbaldwin.blogspot.com/

Steve Terry has been to my class 3x and he looked so great this time, having lost 45 lbs., that I gasped when I saw him. He was a cardiac patient in a desperate health crisis, blood pressure and triglycerides off the charts, when his daughter got him to read my book. He’s now a green smoothie devotee and 12 Stepper and he is RUNNING MARATHONS in his 50’s! Here’s my blog entry from when I first met Steve:

http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/blog/2010/08/12/if-this-doesn%E2%80%99t-motivate-you-i-don%E2%80%99t-know-what-will/

Mechel in Sandy read my book six months ago and lost 9 lbs. the first WEEK, as she put it, “sitting on the couch eating ice cream.” I was stumped when she told me this, thinking, “Uhhhhh, that is NOT part of my program.” (And I was also thinking, “You must have been retaining a lot of water!” How does anyone lose 9 lbs. in one week? Wow.)

She then explained that she learned about GSG from the blender demo guy at Costco, who showed her how to make my “Green Ice Cream.”

I have a chocolate pudding with greens in it, but unless they’re freezing it, I’m not sure where the Green Ice Cream came from in my books? When I started doing green smoothies 17 years ago, I did call it “Green Cream” for my 1-year old. If I’ve forgotten a recipe, somebody help me. Mechel is not the first person to tell me that a Costco Demo Guy is showing a green “ice cream” and attributing it to me. I think it might be in one of our recipe collections with reader contributions!

But here’s it is:

Costco Guy’s Green Ice Cream He Thinks Is My Recipe

3 Cups Spinach

7 oz. Almond Milk

4 oz. raw, organic agave

1 Scoop Sunwarrior Protein Powder

3 Cups Ice

Blend on your ice cream setting in your BlendTec, and enjoy!

Mechel went on to lose a total of 31 lbs. in the past several months and DISAPPEAR all her symptoms of multiple sclerosis!

Just home from two weekends of travel with my kids. First in Yellowstone with my friend Brent and his kids, where all 5,000 bears in the park managed to elude us but Old Faithful doesn’t disappoint. Second, school shopping in St. George and Las Vegas (with my friend Wendy and her daughter). See photos below, including the t-shirt my daughters made me buy. And do you know how my boys shop these days? They make their mom snap cell phone photos of every shirt and jacket and text them for approval!

For the rest of 2011, here are the cities where I’ll be speaking. We don’t have locations or sponsors for most of these and will email you with the details later if you sign up. So if you’re interested in helping, please write amanda@greensmoothiegirl.com, thank you!

Los Angeles area
San Diego
Mesa (I will speak, followed by Dr. Thomas Lodi, an oncologist in Scottsdale
who runs An Oasis of Healing)
Phoenix

St. George
Las Vegas

(You may already know I’m speaking in Orem, Sandy, and Layton in a few weeks. Then Boise, Kennewick, Portland, Seattle. Then Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Hope to see you soon!)

We decided to start answering more questions on video rather than just in writing, on this blog. I’m sorry that there’s just no darn way I can get to all of them. But feel free to send your questions to support123@greensmoothiegirl.com, and Jenni and Jackie will tell me what you want to know. I’ll do as many as I can!

These are a couple of questions that folks in Denver sent us:

(1) Can I bring my child to your class? And

(2) Do you like your job? What’s the best and worst part about being GreenSmoothieGirl?

I met this really cool girl in Castle Rock, Colorado last weekend. She was dying to tell me about how my homemade granola, chocolate beet cake, green smoothies, and other whole-foods habits and recipes have helped her THRIVE going into her third pregnancy. This is radically different than her first two, which were a scary experiment in managing blood sugar and other tough issues faced by Type 1 diabetics.

I am routinely frustrated that most diabetes doctors focus exclusively on insulin, and NOT AT ALL on nutrition. Some things that are tough and time-consuming to turn around with diet. Entrenched degenerative gut conditions (IBS, Crohn’s, colitis, etc.) and auto-immune diseases, for instance. But heart disease and diabetes? Top two for SO EASY to turn around and control, if you understand what WISE, RESPONSIBLE FUEL is. I’ve had a number of Type 2 diabetics and pre-diabetics reverse the disease completely by following my program—even though it’s not a diabetes-control program per se. There’s NO reason for diabetics to be losing limbs and sacrificing quality of life.

I would love to hear from some diabetics, here, about what happened when you made a strong commitment to whole foods!

Emma and Libby had a blast with some of your kids, at their Health Kids’ Chefs Camps last week. Next year they want you to know they’ll be doing all new recipes.

This year they did a scavenger hunt, where they learned about WHY lots of our favorite foods are healthy. They made aprons, they got their own recipe book with their photo in it, and played lots of games. They made fruit leather, blueberry muffins, hummus with vegetables, vegetable pizza, green smoothies, halvah, fruit and vegetable kabobs, and caterpillar sandwiches. All from our not-yet-released recipe book, Junk Food Dude’s Yummy Healthy Recipes.

If you’re on my facebook page (personal, and GSG page), you probably get the idea that I work hard and play hard. I don’t sleep much and have to be practically held down to watch TV. Kristin and I are going to go visit my friends in the 4 major cities of Texas, say hi to my brother and his family in Dallas….on our way to scuba dive in Mexico for a few days.

So sign up here for our free class in

DALLAS Oct. 20

AUSTIN Oct. 21

SAN ANTONIO Oct. 22

HOUSTON Oct. 22

(We’re giving away a $435 BlendTec Total Blender, a $180 12 Steps course, and lots of my favorite stuff at each class, so check out the raffle page when you sign up.)

We need a location and a business to sponsor each lecture—so please write Amanda@greensmoothiegirl.com if you’ve got ideas? Think chiropractors, naturopaths, gyms, health food stores, yoga or massage clinics, for sponsors. Think school gyms, rec centers, churches, for venues.

Just for fun, I had to show you these photos of Tennyson and me fishing with friends in the Uintahs last weekend—it was JULY 16 and there was still a few feet of snow on the ground! I’ve never seen that, in my 25 years here. Don’t you worry, I took the hook out of these tiger trouts’ mouths and sent them back to their mamas.

Barbara inspired us in Boise! If making simple changes in her diet helped her drop 20 lbs., disappeared a pre-diabetic condition and allergies, gained energy, decreased fibromyalgia symptoms—what will happen if she sticks with it for a year? Or for life? Watch her tell her story in 2.5 minutes here:

We are coming back to Boise in September—sign up for my free class here.