Ep. 103: The 9-Day Green Smoothie Challenge

 

Hi everyone and Welcome back to the Vibe show. I’m your host, Robyn Openshaw. I’m the GreenSmoothieGirl online and today I’m really excited about this episode because I’m going to give you a challenge and I think this challenge is going to make your life better.

But first on a personal note, I just wanted to stop by to tell you what’s been going on in my life. I’ve been loving my new condo in Park City. It’s been six weeks since I moved up here. I have a fire table on my deck and my deck is actually one of my favorite parts of living up here in Park City and living in my condo. And I just got a nasty gram from the HOA saying that somebody saw my fire table on and my space heaters. I have these really tall space heaters and they’re saying they aren’t allowed, which makes me really sad because I was picturing us out on the deck a lot in the cooler weather. And the fire table that I brought from my old house is so pretty. It puts out a lot of heat and it wasn’t cheap. So welcome to condo living I guess. Right? I’ve never lived in a condo before and I guess you have to give up some freedom when you don’t own the exterior of the building and the collective, the HOA runs things.

Besides that though, all the work of moving is just about done and I love this town so much. There’s so much to do here. The weather’s starting to turn colder right now and I’m a little nervous about the next seven months where there’s two or three times as much snow as down in the valley where I moved from and where I lived for 33 years and it’s 10 degrees colder up here. There’ve been a ton of fires burning here in Utah. Not only down in the two valleys where 90 percent of the population of Utah lives, I think, and it’s that air quality that I actually moved to get away from, but even up here in Park City where there’s no weather phenomenon, they call an inversion which traps the dirty air in the valley, even up here we have fires burning and everybody’s congested. Eyes are stinging and there’s lots of respiratory issues. You can’t get away from it anywhere in Utah these days. A lot of days I walk outside and it smells like a campfire and so that’s what’s going on with me. If you hear that I’m a little bit congested, can’t get away from it.

Luckily I have my Air Doctor, air filtration units in my house. And Air Doctor just told me that the 50% discount is about to end. So if air quality isn’t as an issue at all where you live, um, which is anywhere where you live near a city. And really indoors you have, unless you have wool carpet, like what I just put in my house, that was a big move for me, I’ve never had that before. If you have synthetic carpet with polyurethane and Stain Master and all that, that off gases for years or unless you have all furniture with no Scotch Guard and no particle board and you’ve really gone to the trouble of having nontoxic furniture. And unless you’ve completely eliminated the use of chemicals in your home, which takes a little bit of learning and replacing stuff to do, you may want to get an Air Doctor, which is a portable air filtration unit for every 900 square feet that you live in.

It really works and it doesn’t just work for particulate pollution. It also cleans the chemical pollution out of your air. So get yours on this private link that we have: greensmoothiegirl.com/cleanair. We’ll have that in the show notes, but you might want to write that down: greensmoothiegirl.com/cleanair because they’re discontinuing our 50% off pretty soon and you can’t find a price that good anywhere else on the Internet. So before they discontinue it, just want to let you know about it because it’s really affordable with the 50% off.

So today I want to invite you to do a challenge with me. We’ve really set this up for you to succeed and I’m so excited to tell you about The 9-Day Green Smoothie Challenge. We’re kicking it off on October 28th, although you can pick your start date if that day doesn’t work for you can pick the next day or the day after. We suggest you start when you’re not going to be traveling a lot. And we’re supporting you on a private Facebook page. You can go to Green Smoothie Challenge on Facebook and together we’re all committing to making and drinking one quart a day of green smoothie. And a quart, because I get asked this a lot, a quart is the big canning jar, right? It’s actually four cups that fit in a quart.

So that green smoothie can replace your breakfast or your lunch or your dinner. And we’re also going to be suggesting that if weight loss is a goal for you, you can do Level 2 of the challenge and that is drinking two quarts a day, replacing two meals with that. And we’re giving you all the recipes so you get plenty of variety, so it’s easy to shop, just double the amounts that you’re buying from the recipes if you’re going to do Level 2 and really go for two quarts a day. And then you just eat a healthy meal of your choice as your third meal. If you’re super active, uh, if you play sports two or three hours a day like I do, or if you’re a man with higher caloric needs, or you have a lot more muscle mass than the average person, we recommend you add an additional quart to your challenge, and then have your one healthy meal if you’re wanting to lose weight.

So I’m going to tell you a little bit about why I put up the GreenSmoothieGirl website 12 years ago and why and how it’s made an impact on millions of people. I didn’t really have a big dream of reaching millions of people. My brain doesn’t really work like that. I could never have imagined how viral the site would go. But the reason I want to share this is to either validate you if you’re making and drinking your quart a day already or what I really want for everybody else is to motivate you to get back on that wagon. So you know, I’ve been educating people about so much more than green smoothies for years. We talk on this show and in our email newsletter and on Facebook, about human detoxification, which is a research interest of mine. We talk about healing from cancer naturally, another research interest of mine. We talk about making shifts from the Standard American Diet to a whole foods diet, another one of my favorite topics, so many different issues in health and wellness.

But the team at GreenSmoothieGirl wanted to go back to our roots, our original most basic purpose and just help get people back on track and remember why a quart of green smoothie a day was the challenge I gave in 450 live lectures I did nationwide over the course of six years. So I’ve retired from the speaking circuit a few years ago, but I look back and I can’t believe that I spoke in 450 cities and we helped make the idea of a green smoothie a household word. In 2007 when I put the website up, nobody had ever heard of such a thing.

So this challenge is so that we can use Facebook. Facebook has really evolved in recent years to really support you well. I’m going to be doing five Facebook lives during the course of the challenge and I’m going to share all my pro tips that I’ve learned over the years. Some of them I learned from you, my readers. And you’ll have recipes for every single day of the challenge. Just everything I’ve got to help you lose 5 to 10 pounds during the nine days if that’s a goal for you or to just get some of the other health benefits that my research shows people get from drinking green smoothies.

You know, it’s not that green smoothies are the only way to get more living, nutrient dense, raw high fiber plant food in your diet. The reason I really like to teach green smoothies is that in this modern age, it’s important to people that it be easy that it be basically fast food. It’s important that we come up with ways to eat more whole plant foods the kids will eat. And guess what? Kids will drink green smoothies. It’s important that we not have to spend an hour chewing like we would to get an entire amount that goes into your quart of green smoothie. If you sat there and chewed it, it would take you a very long time. And three generations now of eating a lot of processed food, most of us don’t have a very strong jaw, so green smoothies make it really easy to get that nutrition in you without all the chewing.

Another reason I love green smoothies is that you don’t need salad dressing to get all these Greens and vegetables down. Salad dressing, usually most of the salad dressings out there have a lot of garbage in them and a lot of fat. And finally, now it’s so affordable and easy to be a green smoothie girl like me or green smoothie guy. There is organic pre-washed Greens options everywhere now. That was not the case when I put the website up 12 years ago. So you really could accomplish the same effect if you ate a giant plate of salad every day.

When I was on lecture tours, I did this thing because it’s so visual, I would pile up the amount of Greens on a platter that fit into a blended quart of smoothie. When you blend the Greens with fruit and water, you actually get a lot more in the quart than you would think. And so I was proving that point by putting the amount that I put in a quart on a platter. It’s just a really crazy amount of superfoods and greens. And I got to the point I did this enough times that I would always choose a man to come up out of the audience and I didn’t tell him what he was volunteering for it, but I said, can I have a volunteer please? And I would choose a guy, and I’ll tell you why I stopped choosing women, and I would give him this platter of Greens and I would tell him to go stand over in a corner and eat all the Greens. The reason I started having them go over in the corner is that when I would have them stand next to me, nobody would listen to a thing I said because it was so fascinating to watch somebody sit there and eat spinach and chard and collards and Kale.

I made the mistake once of letting a child do it. She was raising her hand and begging and so I chose her. I’ll never forget this. It was in Columbia, South Carolina, and that was the last time I did that because she threw up on the wall next to her. It was terrible. She tried so hard. She was trying to eat it so fast. Obviously a competitive little kid and so I never chose a child again, that was not good for what I was trying to show, is how easy it is to get more whole foods in your diet doing green smoothies, when a child threw up in my class. And women, what I learned about them because I started out choosing them is they’re not super competitive and they’re not really worried about their ego if they fail in front of a group, at eating a giant platter of Greens, and so they would quit on me and they would like give up and they’d hand the platter back to me. So men do not want to look bad to the crowd. And so these guys, they would always finish.

So anyway. Then I would demo how to make a green smoothie because that’s half the battle is if people aren’t scared of it. And so I’d blend water and Greens. That way if you blend your water and your Greens, this is a pro tip for you, if you do that first, then if you have chunks in your smoothie later, it’s chunks of fruit which you add last. So if you sign up for the challenge, I’m going to send you an inspirational email with some of my tips and tricks every single day of the nine days and I want you to read them because I want every day for you to feel the excitement all over again. I want you to be counting the health benefits. I want you to be engaging on the Facebook page. There’s really just every reason for you to succeed. And we’ll send you a little inspirational quote, encouragement or a tip in Facebook messenger if you opt in for that as well.

You know, I don’t think drinking a quart a day of green smoothie is extreme at all, but some people do. I see people calling me and my nutritional methods extreme sometimes on social media, and it kind of makes me laugh because if you went to many parts of Africa or Southeast Asia or South America, you would meet millions of accidental vegetarians or vegans who eat a whole foods plant based diet, but they would never call themselves that. They don’t call themselves vegetarians or vegans because they’re just eating what the earth provides in that part of the world. Did you know that it’s two thirds of the Earth’s population who rarely or never eat any animal flesh?

The more rural people are, the more removed they are from the industrial cities, the more they eat an “extreme diet”. For instance, the Costaricans, in the Nicoyan Peninsula from the Blue Zones, their diet is basically seven foods and they don’t get cancer and they live to be over 100 at 25 times the rate that Americans do. And they eat extreme things if you’re looking at their diet from American eyes, where Americans think that Cheetos are normal food. How is that unnatural orange color, how did that come to be considered food, let alone a mainstream normal diet? See, I think that’s extreme and weird. I’m hoping that the more we eat natural whole plant foods, the more we do not see eating this way as being extreme or weird, or as my kids used to say, embarrassing.

By the way, side note, my two youngest kids who are in college, they’re making green smoothies every day. Right before I started this recording of this episode, my third child, my younger daughter sent me a text about how she over made her green smoothies and she’s been just drinking a ton of them every day. Both my kids went off to school with the best gift I could possibly think of, I sent them both with a BlendTec to college. And they’re doing it. They’re doing it! They know what they feel like on green smoothies and they know what they feel like off of green smoothies.

So both of those kids were my two, who are college freshmen right now, they were my two resistant children and they complained a lot. And, uh, I have told the story of how I found 11 pints of rotten old green smoothie in my daughter’s closet in a little wooden treasure chest, I had been wondering what happened to all my pint jars. So she was resistant then. But you know, when you’re in your parenting for the long play and you know that you’re teaching them something good, you just stay the course, and guess what? They’re doing their green smoothies. My, uh, my 18 year old son is always texting me questions about what he should eat. Just this morning in fact, actually, all my kids do.

So one of the things I love about the quart a day challenge is that I have measured this and there are 10 servings according to the USRDA serving sizes, 10 servings of raw greens and fruit that end up in your quart of green smoothie. That’s a lot, right? And that’s what people saw in that really visual way at my lectures, it took these guys 10 minutes, if they were just wolfing it down and feeling really competitive and I offered them a prize. Sometimes it would take up to 30 minutes for people who weren’t as competitive to eat that much green food if they were over in the corner chewing on it off of a platter.

So even though I’m really happy about the fact that my 450 city tour helped create awareness about green smoothies and make it a household word, people don’t act like I’m crazy anymore when I’m walking around in public drinking greens out of a jar anymore. But, there’s still too many people who aren’t doing it every day and that’s why we’re doing the challenge. Most people really aren’t doing it even if they know about it. So if you’re one of them, I want to invite you to jump in with us. Our goal is for you to notice the big health gains that you’re going to get from just nine days, and then that will be the inspiration to keep that habit going.

You’re going to have thousands of people doing it with you. You will have my amazing Helen and Elsa supporting you. They already have supported thousands of people in our 26 Day Detox. We have a private page for that as well. And they are really wonderful at helping you find ideas, helping you problem solve whatever’s challenging for you, help open your mind, help you succeed. You’ll really feel their love. You’re gonna love Helen and Elsa. We didn’t just hire them off the street. We hired them because they had done the detox a bunch of times. They were pro green smoothie girls already and even though we didn’t pay them back before we hired them, they were in that private page supporting people so very well for free. That’s just the kind of people they are. So we said, hey, you know GreenSmoothieGirl content so well, you know this detox really well and you’re naturally really sweet, nurturing patient people who clearly like helping others, come work for us.

So, I know that Helen listens to this podcast regularly. I should tell you, the GreenSmoothieGirl is not me, Robyn, it’s a team of people like Helen that I love. I love them for their heart and for helping others. And I love Sue, who is listening to me record this episode right now and she edits it. She reads the podcast transcription and she shares the super funny things that she has to change from what the transcription software delivers so that it ends up in the show notes being what I actually said. She too was a GreenSmoothieGirl follower like literally 12 years ago when we started and she dropped something like 70 pounds when she followed my 12 Steps to Whole Foods course to the letter, did all the steps. She got her health back. She got her life back. And like me, she is a single mom now. She works for us full time. Part of her job is customer support where she answers your questions and helps you if you need anything from us.

So I could go on and on but I wanted to introduce you to a few of the team that you might interface with at GreenSmoothieGirl. There’s lots of others behind the scenes who are helping create this green smoothie challenge. There’s over 20 of us now and it’s a mission around here. Everybody is super excited to support you in drinking a quart a day for nine days or two quarts, if you’re feeling hardcore, and want to lose some weight, that’s a bigger challenge.

So if you want to join us, go to: greensmoothiegirl.com/greensmoothiechallenge. Okay. Again, that’s: greensmoothiegirl.com/greensmoothiechallenge. Sign up so that we can put you in all of that support. We’ll show you where to get into our private Facebook page. We’re going to send you recipes, remember to just double the amounts you’ll need in the recipes, if you’re doing Level 2 with two quarts a day or if you’re doing it with someone else in your home.

So to make a green smoothie you can just use greens, super foods and fruits and water. Okay. That’s a very basic, a very powerful detoxifying smoothie. But we are making the two most important add ins that I put in my smoothies every day, we are making them available to you for one third off. I’m going to tell you what they are, these two must have smoothie additions. So we call it the “Smoothies Success Pack”. And the two of these products together that we’re putting on 1/3 off, you’ll have some options, I’m going to give you a URL if you want to go get it. It’s only one third off during the challenge, kicking off October 28th, we’re going to do the 9 day challenge twice in a row because we know some people will join us in the middle. We know that some of you will get to the end of the 9 days and you’ll say, “oh, I want my sister to do it. I want my neighbor to do it. I was telling my neighbor about it on our walk today and she wants to join us”. Some of you will want to do two back to back because you’re going to see such great health gains.

So in the “Smoothie Success Pack”, you have a few options to choose from. The first that I would love for you to do, either one of these is sprouted organic flax to add to your smoothie or TriOmega. TriOmega, is just the higher end product where in addition to the sprouted flax, you’re also getting sprouted Chia and sprouted broccoli seeds. All of it’s organic. And these are the highest essential fatty acids plant foods on earth. And when you sprout them, you are unlocking the enzyme inhibitors so that you get two times to nine times more of all the nutrients in the seed. It’s really messy to try to sprout these seeds yourself so we do it for you and then we dry these germinated seeds below 100 degrees to retain all the vitamins and minerals and enzymes.

Vitamins and minerals you know probably more about those than you know about enzymes, but enzymes are catalysts. They’re used for every metabolic process in the body. They’re not exactly nutrients because they are used up in these metabolic processes. They aren’t absorbed to build bone and the many other functions of the body, but you have to have these enzymes to digest your food and we have only a limited amount of endogenous hormones that can be produced by our pancreas and liver. We have a lifetime supply, but it really is only going to last us a few decades if we’re constantly eating cooked, processed, dead foods. So we do eventually run out and when we do, disease processes begin. So bringing in exogenous enzyme from your food is a great idea.

One of my little food rules that I live by is to eat 60 to 80 percent raw food in every in every meal, and I’m not talking about raw meat, I’m talking about raw plant foods. And Greens are the best. Fruits are great too. So sprouted seeds are living superfood that are probably about as life giving as any food there is, and I put a scoop of the either the sprouted flax or the sprouted TriOmega in my smoothie every day because I don’t eat fish hardly ever. I don’t trust the waterways of the world. There’s too many heavy metals and PCBs, phthalates from plastics in fish. Even in the cleaner waters, there’s some new evidence that there is more plastic by weight in the ocean than there is fish.

And we’ve gotta have our essential fatty acids every day because our body can’t manufacture them from other raw materials like it can with other nutrients. So they’re called essential because of that, you must eat them in their native form. And you really need them, virtually daily. Essential fatty acids are protective of the cardiovascular system and the neurological system and with all these dementias out there and this epidemic of Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s and ALS and Alzheimer’s, these are degenerative diseases of the neurological system and of course with heart disease being the number one killer, one of the very best preventatives you can do is to just eat one to two tablespoons of organic raw sprouted flax or the TriOmega, which is the flax, chia and broccoli seed.

There’s so many studies showing that flax is as effective as hypertensive drugs, literally getting that amount a couple tablespoons a day, several days a week, it’s as effective at bringing blood pressure down as hypertensive drugs. And of course, flax is good for you in so many different ways. And chemical drugs like the hypertensive drugs are good for you in exactly no ways and have toxic side effects, and all that. There’s also sulforaphanes in broccoli seed in the TriOmega, and they have several times more sulforaphanes, the seed does, then you could get by eating the mature Broccoli plant, like the steamed vegetable or whatever. And these sulforaphanes are extremely cancer preventative nutritional compounds.

So if you’d like to add the sprouted flax or the TriOmega to your smoothie, you need to add extra water. They really, really absorb water, these sprouted seeds that we then dried, so they’re going to really soak up water. Sometimes I put one of them, the sprouted flax or TriOmega in my smoothies and the next day I go to drink a pint or quart out of the fridge and it’s really thick. So if this happens to you, don’t worry about it, just put more water in the jar and shake it up. It’s fine.

The other thing in the “Smoothie Success Pack” that we’re putting at 1/3 off right now is our proteins. You can choose which one you want, but we make protein not because we think that protein in a bag should be a staple of the diet, that’s kind of a modern invention related to the American obsession with protein, but I developed these products for a couple of other reasons. One, Americans are spending literally billions of dollars a year on protein powder, but most of the protein powder on the market is total garbage.

For instance, whey protein is a byproduct of the dairy industry, they’ve really oversold the benefits in the marketing. It turns out that the body doesn’t even absorb this type of protein, only about 30 percent of it. Plus those products are very full of steroids and antibiotics fed the cow and lots of other garbage. And soy protein, most of it is genetically modified, causes all kinds of a hormone disruption and other misfires in the human body. Finally, some of the bone broth protein’s being sold out there right now are being tested and proven to have lots of herbicide and heavy metals in them.

So I made my own because I want my own. My children away at college have bags of protein. If they’re going to have protein, I don’t want them getting it at the store where I know it’s going to be junk. And you can get some too because I want it totally clean. We’ve had third parties test our bone broth protein and they found it to be totally clean of what has come out in the media being in most of the big brands. And I want our products to be as minimally processed as possible. So our bone broth protein’s aren’t just very, very clean, they’re also incredibly delicious. The Vanilla Shake and the Chocolate Shake are sweetened with monk fruit, so very low impact on your blood sugar. And you could have it alone and you would find it completely delicious. You cannot taste the bone.

So try to avoid whey, soy, even some of the plant based proteins and even some of the organic ones are being found to be really high in contaminants. Whey protein especially is extremely processed, it goes through 12 to 14 different refining stages, and that is what a whey protein manufacturer told me. So what ends up in the bag isn’t even really food anymore, in my book, it’s really garbage we shouldn’t eat.

Okay, so if you want to get the “Smoothie Success Pack” for one third off with any of our plant based proteins or bone broth proteins to help heal and protect your gut and a sprouted flax or TriOmega is in these packages. Go to greensmoothiegirl.com/smoothiesuccess. OK, that’s where to get the Smoothie Success Pack. So let me tell you the two URLs where you’re going to sign up for free to participate in the 9-Day Challenge. It’s greensmoothiegirl.com/greensmoothiechallenge, and to get your smoothies success pack if you want that, go to greensmoothiegirl.com/smoothiesuccess.

Remember that those essential fatty acids also help you absorb minerals in your Greens as well. And the extra protein that you add will help keep you full until your next meal. So those two additions to your green smoothie together make it a complete meal.

So here’s what I’m going to do for you if you join us in the challenge. First, I’m going to connect you to a lot of like-minded people who want to develop a great habit. So you can have a lot of great people, some new friends you’ll make, on the green smoothie girl page. Okay, so it’s called green smoothie challenge on Facebook. Second, I’m going to give you, Helen and Elsa who are international treasures. You’re going to love them. They’re going to support you. Third, I’m going to give you several recipes to choose from each of the days of the challenge and you can use those as your shopping list.

Fourth, I’m going to do a Facebook live every couple of days just to keep you enthusiastic and keep you learning new tips about how to make the best green smoothie ever. And I’m going to share what I’ve learned from 20 years of being the original GreenSmoothieGirl and six years of speaking live to over 10,000 people on this subject. Fifth, I’m giving you a one third off discount on the two most important smoothie add ins that I use every day. And sixth, I’m going to send you an email once a day with recipes and tips and some encouragement.

One day I’m going to share with you what 175 people said in my study of new green smoothie drinkers, so look for that email, it’s one of the nine days. Look for that. It’s really cool. The health benefits that’ll blow your mind, that 175 new green smoothie drinkers told me that they achieved. So I’ll have something like that for you every day to help you feel better, help you drop a few pounds if you want to. Some of you will lose a pound a day or more and then you’ll read my email and go, oh yeah, that’s why I’m doing this. I have a great video I’ll send you on one of the days that I did about the connection between green smoothies and good sex. I have another one I’m going to send you about my eight best friends and by that I mean my eight best green smoothie ingredient friends. Why they’re great, some of them you’ve probably never thought of, but I’ll tell you why I love them and why I throw some in my blender.

So those are the six things that we’re going to do for you during the challenge. And if you tell us you want a daily inspirational message in Facebook messenger, that’s a seventh way that I feel like I can help you be successful. So I hope you’re inspired to at least take the challenge with us. I’m going to do the 9-Day Challenge myself and then because I know a bunch of you want to do it again and you’ll be like, hey, I feel amazing. Can we do this again or can I get my sister or my son or my neighbor to do it? We’re going to do it twice back to back. So choose your start date and that’s how long we will keep the “Smoothie Success Pack” up at one third off and that’s how long we’ll be in there supporting you with Facebook lives and all that stuff.

So, uh, when you order that “Smoothie Success Pack”, it’ll make you really motivated to do the challenge because hey, you already bought the two superfoods to go in it. So you’re halfway there. After we do this twice in a row, we’ll probably support green smoothie challenges maybe once or twice a year, we’ll see. But for now it kicks off on October 28th. And so if that day doesn’t work for you, just pick a different start date that works for you.

So let’s review. You losing five to ten pounds in nine days. You creating healing and detoxification for billions of your cells and all your organs. You supporting others and being supported in our private Facebook page. And you having more energy than you’ve had in a long time, just remembering a habit that I bet you’ve always meant to develop. So I don’t see a downside here. Do you? I hope we’ve set this up with everything we could possibly think of to help you have a great experience.

So I’ll see you at: greensmoothiegirl.com/greensmoothiechallenge to sign up. See you then.