What people are saying
I am so in love with green smoothies!
I am so in love with green smoothies! I am a 31 yr. old mother of four children. I am very into fitness/weight lifting to build muscle in my body. I started green smoothies just after I had been referred to GreenSmoothieGirl.com by my zoning lady for chronic headaches and muscle tension in my neck that would not go away. Soon after I started drinking green smoothies daily, the headaches and muscle tension left! I have not had the problem since.
I drink green smoothies for breakfast along with a whey protein shake every morning, and also for my snacks during the day, I make a full pitcher of green smoothie every 2-3 days and keep it in my fridge when I need a snack. It is quick and easy and very healthy! It keeps me on track for my ideal weight goals! I have converted many friends and family to green smoothies! I recommend them to everyone I meet! When someone asks me what I am doing to look so good, I just give them my personal green smoothie recipe and some fitness tips!
I would like to thank Robyn for this AWESOME idea and for taking the steps to get the information on her website to help others who so desperately need a nutritious lifestyle!
— LaDawn Doxey, Syracuse , UT
No longer crave junk food!
My New Year’s Resolution was to GO GREEN. My husband and I (yes, I converted him) both love the green smoothies. They are very satisfying. We no longer crave junk food. We have begun to lose a few pounds. I am turning on my grandchildren and children to them. My husband is Hispanic, diabetic, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. We are seeing improvements. It has only been a month. We use our BlendTec for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We make smoothies, salad dressings, soups and using your 12 Steps to Whole Foods book each month to be totally green after one year. Thank you for all your research and recipes.
— Pat M.
Feel Better
Feel better, have decreased the amount of sugar in the diet due to the smoothies. Like the increase in green veggies. Hate the taste of wheatgrass. Like this manner of getting chlorophyll better.
— Anonymous
We are hooked!
My husband and I have been enjoying green smoothies 6-7 times a week for the past 9 months. We are hooked! In fact, we went on vacation for a week and missed our BlendTec blender and green smoothie so much, we could hardly wait to get back home to start again. My husband was diagnosed with bladder cancer three years ago, and the doctor consistently was removing new tumor sites every three months.
Once we found the Green Smoothie Girl.com site, got our blender, and started making the smoothies, he has consistently been clear of any new tumors. His latest colonoscopy this year was also clear, he has more energy, and feels healthy and strong. We will not go without our healthy green start each day! We can’t thank you enough!
*results may vary
— Nancy K.
Green smoothies are easy and quick
Green smoothies are easy and quick to do and keep me full and alert way past lunch time. This past growing season I had access to lots and lots of lettuce. I would use between 2 and 3 cups in my smoothie along with other greens, but long after the other greens were gone there was still plenty of leaf lettuce in many colors and kinds. All of my greens came from my local farmers’ market.
— Anonymous
No More Pain and Numbness, Lighter, and Clearer Thinking—and More Energy!
This was my first 26-day detox and I would recommend people try this. I loved the full-support buddy system that helped as we both experienced being spacey the first two weeks. I was experiencing neck, shoulder and arm numbness before starting this program and within 7-10 days, the pains quit and numbness stopped shortly after 10 days.
I feel lighter, have no bulge in the middle and am much clearer in my thinking process. I have more energy with more clarity to details. Was a great success for me. Thank you, Robyn.
— Jacquelyn S., Allen, Texas
The green smoothie has lived up to the expectations I had
I tried the green smoothie after juicing for several years. Juicing was expensive and demanded a lot of time and work extracting the juice from the fiber and cleaning the juicer. Blended raw foods made a lot of sense and I did not need to be converted on the idea.
When I began drinking the green smoothie I weighed 285 lbs. One year later I weigh 240 lbs. Daily workouts have contributed as much to my weight loss as any other factor. However, the benefits of the green smoothie as I experienced them are as follows:
1. Drinking the green smoothie changed my bowel movement habits, which are now frequent (2-3 times a day) and regular.
2. The green smoothie is my pre-workout, first thing in the morning food. I have been surprised at the energy it sustains throughout my workout.
3. The green smoothie fills me up without slowing me down. It satisfies my hunger and cravings till early in the afternoon. It has curbed my overall appetite thus decreasing the overall calories I consume in a day.
4. I find that the green smoothie helps my digestion, especially with the foods that do not digest well. I eat a lot of lean meat and I feel the organic raw food in my gut facilitates digestion and elimination of meat.
5. Beginning my day with green smoothie drinks and working out provides me the momentum, nutrition, and motivation to eat a strict lean diet throughout the rest of the day.
The green smoothie has lived up to the expectations I had. Several of the above benefits caught me totally by surprise. I have been drinking green smoothies every morning for the past year. They have served me well. Now that I have lost the weight I needed, I have significantly increased my strength and energy. My new goals are not to lose any more weight but to increase my overall lean muscle mass. My idea is to begin drinking green smoothies twice a day rather than just once in the morning.
*results may vary
— Gregg L.
I have been telling all my friends about green smoothies!
I have been telling all my friends about the green smoothies and converted several of them to start drink them on a daily basis. My friends are all west coast dancers and energy is important for the 4-5 hours of dancing we do 2-3 nights weekly.
— Anonymous
Oh Happy Days!
Oh happy days! That’s how I feel about the detox. The fact that it was 26 days is exactly why it is so powerful. Anything less, although beneficial, would NOT have given me access to the numerous breakthroughs in my personal awareness and true intentions for my life, which are now crystal clear and accessible due to personal power derived from simple discipline and commitment to health.
I started with a casual interest, then to just buying the digital course manual, then realizing I wanted the hard copy….which, after I read it, made it clear: this detox was for me. Then I upgraded to the Full Support option, and I jumped in with both feet. By doing the program, I have turned the corner away from a long life of the same roadblocks to my personal success.The daily audio, video, and written emails were key to my personal breakthroughs. The physical detox is secondary to the access to my personal power I discovered.
This is the best investment in my own health and happiness I’ve made in a long time. It’s subtle but profound to know of my own personal strength to sustain health, joy and vitality.
What more can I say? The five pounds lost is the tip of the iceberg of personal growth that awaits anyone willing to follow Robyn’s gentle and loving path.
Regret will be a word in a vocabulary associated with your past–which is nicely established where it needs to be–behind you! The future is yet to be created–go for it!”
— Ken, Oregon
Neither of My School Kids Have Had a Sick Day!
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!
*results may vary
— Regina Slaugh
Husband Lost 40LBS and Cured of Multiple Illnesses
I always considered myself a healthy eater and a good cook. I had been on Weight Watchers for 2 years and was almost to my desired weight, so I thought the foods I was preparing for my husband and children were healthy. Our dinner meals consisted of a medium serving of a white meat such as chicken, or lower fat ground beef in some form, a side of fresh or frozen vegetables, and a salad of lettuce and tomatoes with regular dressing and croutons.
However, in 2001, my husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He also had asthma, tons of allergies, and high blood pressure. He had suffered from these ailments all of his life and fought colds, bronchitis, and pneumonia every winter. If we had gone ahead with the doctor’s advice to remove the prostate, the operation alone would probably have killed him. Instead, I asked my husband if he was ready to try the “green diet” . When I’d told him about healthy eating before, his reaction was immediate, “That diet would kill me, I’m allergic to all of those vegetables!!” Now, with cancer looming, he said, “Well, if I’m going to die anyway, I might as well die trying something”.
In one month of eating mostly vegetables and drinking a green drink, he lost 40 pounds, stopped using his asthma inhalers, never went back to the doctor for allergy shots, and stopped using almost all of his medications. After a year of many healing illnesses, he is now enjoying the best health he has ever had in his life. The doctor who treated his cancer was very concerned with my husband’s choice to avoid surgery and told him that he would die within 10 years. He recently saw a new specialist in the area where we now live who could find no sign of the cancer and told him to never come back to see him! He said, “There is no proof that diet can cure cancer, but whatever you are doing, keep doing it!” It has been over seven years since the original diagnosis.
I discovered the GreenSmoothieGirl.com site while searching for new recipes and ideas for meals. I ordered the 12 Step plan for the recipes. I have found the book be to very informative and wish that I had raised my children in this way. They can see that the way we have been eating has really benefitted us, but prefer to continue to eat in the manner they were raised. We will keep working on them!
We began drinking green smoothies this summer, and now my husband complains if I don’t make time to prepare them! He has still had issues with his blood pressure and has recently noticed that he doesn’t need to take as much medication and is sometimes able to go completely without it. We attribute that to the additional nutrition we are getting from the smoothies. I am slowly trying the recipes in the book.
Last week I made the Chocolate Beet cake (Ch. 11) for a church dinner. It was entered in a dessert competition. Unfortunately, the highly sugared desserts won, but I had one lady who asked for the recipe and was excited to try it. She couldn’t believe it had beets in it! I also made a batch of the candied almonds for my father’s birthday gift. He has always loved dates and nuts, so this was a perfect gift for him! (I couldn’t stop eating them!)
*results may vary
— Christine Workman, Covington, WA
Easy to Understand and Implement – Even With Lots of Food Allergies
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
