I am curious about green smoothies, but being a first timer to them (I usually make smoothies with all fruit) I have really no idea how to start. Does anyone here know anything about them?

I've been looking them up, but they seem to be highly commercialized, and I want to hear real facts and results from real people.

I'm also curious about raw foods dieting as well, so any information on that would be a wonderful help too.

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I went on an all raw vegan diet because I was having digestive problems that weren't being solved by anything else and I was desperate for something that would work. I did it for 30 days...then wound up in the hospital to have my gall bladder removed. That was the reason for the digestive problems!

I really loved the food on the diet. I mostly made stuff from Raw Food Raw World. But I hate the fact that it's so much coconut and other exotic stuff (I'm a local food nut). I also realized that it is impossible to eat with your friends and family ever again. It was very limiting.

I think a 50%-75% raw food diet is great, but 100% is crazy in my opinion. But there are plenty of people that do it. It's just not for me at all. Besides, I love cheese and eggs. I could never be a vegan!

Ok, green smoothies. I did these a lot while raw. I read Victoria Boutenko's book Green for Life. It contains some pretty severe truth stretching, but it was the best introduction to the concept that I could find. It also contains recipes. Basically, you just blend up an entire bunch of dark leafy greens with some fruit and possibly juice (or water). I ended up rather liking kale smoothies with apples and grapes. Bok choy made me gag. I made some pretty retched concoctions along the way.

You have to have a vitamix or similar blender for green smoothies (or so it is claimed). You have to completely pulverize the plant cells to release all the goodness and a regular blender won't do it. Hype aside, a regular blender leaves a plenty lumpy stringy mess and it's rather undrinkable.

As far as "results"? Well, winding up the hospital doesn't lend much credibility to the diet, but I had been having the severe digestive issue for almost 2 years. I lost 10 pounds while eating raw (for a month) even though I wasn't counting calories. It's hard to say if this was all water weight or real fat loss. I gained it all back in the next few months but I had a terrible recovery from surgery that included no movement and lots of weird fatty food cravings (since I hadn't been able to eat fatty foods in a few months!).

The green smoothies are supposed to really aid in digestion. According to Boutenko's book, they will basically cure heartburn. I never have had a problem with that, so I didn't really see any results. They were quite filling and really low in calories because of all the fiber as well as being packed with other nutrients.

Well, I could probably go on, but I'm not sure I'm even answering what you are asking! Do you have any other specific questions?

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September Progress

This is really good! I'd love to have recipes for green smoothies. My attempts lately have been to simply add spinach or carrot or celery to the regular smoothie i drink (or all of them; makes for a very filling smoothie that I can drink throughout the day). Today I threw in some watercress too. I'm not much for kale, but I like spinach and watercress. Also a one ounce shot of wheat grass juice makes it taste something like a very green banana when mixed in.

I seem to have lost a lot of weight by just drinking smoothies and eating vegetables (but part of that could be stress as well).

But I am looking into a raw foods diet in the percentages you have mentioned, maybe eating eggs or meat once or twice a week. (Funny, too, how my freezer is loaded with frozen meat right now. :P)

I remember an odd thing once, a while back; I hadn't been eating beef very much because it's so expensive, I was mostly eating chicken, or tofu if I couldn't afford meat that week at all, so one day I did get a pretty good sale on beef, and I fixed myself a small steak. My first bite was a mixture of "Hey, not too bad" "Wow, beef definitely isn't what I remember it to be" and "Do I really like this?"

When you stopped the raw foods diet, did you find yourself having the same reactions to anything?

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Ah, I forgot about spinach. It is really good. The best spinach drink is to take a bunch of spinach (I think it's about a pound) and juice it with half a pineapple. It's not a "smoothie" but it's the best drink in the world. I could literally live off of those things. Well, maybe not literally, but they are delicious.

Raw kale smoothies are entirely different than cooked kale if you haven't tried it yet. Put the kale in the freezer the might before and it removes any bitterness. Then just blend a half bunch of it with an apple and a kiwi or a handful of grapes and enough juice to make it a liquid.

I'll look back at my own recipes when I get home tonight and post some others. Mostly, I just experimented and made something new everyday. But there were a couple of really good ones that I wrote down. Oh, and I can't believe you put a carrot in your smoothie! I tried that and couldn't stand the texture. Too much fiber for me!

I don't really have a good before and after comparison for my food reactions because of the gallbladder issue. Sometimes, grapes would put me in a fetal position on the floor within minutes of consuming them. Cheese would cause such sharp pains that I literally couldn't talk for a few minutes. I was really screwed up. And after the surgery, I had more crazy reactions because of the lack of gallbladder. I had phantom pains and I would get hideously nauseous if I didn't eat a bite of something every 30 minutes (because bile was constantly dripping into my stomach instead of being stored in the gallbladder). So I can't really say what the diet did or what ending the diet did!

Oh, I forgot to mention something odd about 100% raw foods. After this happened to me, I did some research and it's not all the uncommon. My sense of smell increased to the point where I could hardly stand the common smells of every day life. I already had a pretty good nose, so this was just crazy. I couldn't be in the house when the dog was fed, I couldn't go to bars (smoke), sometimes even walking in the neighborhood was too much for me because of the exhaust fumes from cars. It was bizarre. One night, I thought I was going to go insane because I could smell something strange. I thought for sure there was something rotting in the kitchen - a sickeningly sweet smell. I tore the whole place apart. And this was a day after my surgery when I shouldn't have been moving around so much. I never found it that night. But I thought I was going to puke if I couldn't get rid of it. The next day I finally found the culprit. It was a perfumy smelling incense stick (unlit) sitting in a drawer in the kitchen. I was such an insane mess.

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September Progress

I have one nearly every morning. I just throw some spinich or kale in my fruit smoothie. It does help with cravings. And I agree Victoria Boutenko's book Green for Life is the best book on the topic.

Carrots in smoothies are great, especially with Orange and Banana. You can have so much fun with these, and they are very good for you!

Oh and I should add that I've lost 39 lbs. drinking these.

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