The only problem with Green Smoothies and other vegetable blends — they’re nearly calorie-free!
If you weigh 140 lbs, you need 1,400 calories a day to sustain your basal metabolic rate at rest (BMR) — that’s the calories you must eat before you make a single move.
Resting BMR is equal to 10 times your ideal body weight. If you’re aiming to weigh 150 lbs (68 kg) then your BMR needs 1,500 calories a day.
A cup of spinach is 7 calories. One slice of vegetarian pizza is 670 calories. That’s 96 cups of green leaves! Do you understand WHY you could be buying pizza after a Green Smoothie? Simply because you’ve not eaten 96 cups of greens today!
If you’re addicted to your local bakery, try eating a lot more calories in the form of fruit and lightly cooked starchy vegetables such as butternut, squash and sweet potato.
Eat as much fruit as you like half an hour before your Green Smoothie, or add more to your Smoothie. Fruit reduces hunger pangs because it’s rich in carbohydrates. Within 20 minutes, the fruit carbs will trigger your GI tract to produce serotonin, your feel-good brain chemical that subdues hunger!
You may crave sweet after your Green Smoothie. Read why here under Energy Soup. These days I satisfy that craving by sucking on a few pieces of home-dried fruit (banana or apple).
Quick Weight Loss with Green Smoothies
Are you looking for massive results without counting calories?
One reason GREEN Smoothies are so good for weight loss is because they’re so high in protein. The cow gets her protein from grass, a leafy green. Wouldn’t it be simpler to get your protein from leafy greens too, rather than eat the cow? If it’s simple, you know it’s true.
Protein triggers our gut to release more of the PYY hormone (PYY3-36) which reduces appetite and 24 hour food intake. You feel fuller earlier and for longer — a little like having your stomach stapled naturally.
Clent Manich lost 240 lbs in one year, Victoria Boutenko reports in her book Green Smoothie Revolution (#ad). He describes how he did it:
“I went full-bore into drinking Green Smoothie every day. I also cut out animal products, fat, and dairy, and the weight started flying right off. The rapid weight loss encouraged me to stay on the diet.
At the beginning of each day I would blend one gallon of green smoothie and drink some every two to three hours. Sometimes after drinking a green smoothie I ate a few veggies.
I found that green smoothies helped me to eliminate food cravings better than anything I had ever tried before. … Most other diets I’ve tried made me hungry and weak. … On the green smoothie experiment, I didn’t have to count calories.
I have lost 240 pounds and have attained my dream weight of 170 pounds. … To my surprise I don’t have any hanging skin. My skin has tightened without any need for surgery, which I attribute entirely to the green smoothies.”
Have you heard of Jon Gabriel? Jon lost 226 lbs! Green Smoothies were a big part of his weight loss.
See his NO-DIET Weight Loss program here — helping you to Lose Weight QUICKLY! Your life is so precious. When you do it the healthy way, you stay at your ideal weight for life. No more yo-yo-ing!
Green Smoothie Healing
Because Green Smoothies are blended, it’s easy to swallow them too quickly. This can result in a runny tummy. Greens are the best food to clean and heal your colon. Popeye was quiet about that 🙂
If you experience a colon reaction, EAT SLOWER. Chew your Smoothie. If needed, refrigerate it and eat over an hour or two, instead of all at once. Get those GREENS into you!
The incredible density of nutrients in a Green Smoothie will feed every cell in your body-mind. We don’t get enough nutrition from eating the greens whole. I experienced this when on vacation recently. My gums were bleeding within three days, with no green blends, even though I was eating a salad of fresh garden greens daily.
Do you have blood sugar problems such as diabetes or hypoglycemia? Then you may want to use less fruit at the start. Raw vegan medical doctor Dr. Gabriel Cousens, author of There Is a Cure for Diabetes: The 21-Day+ Holistic Recovery Program (#ad), advises to avoid sweet fruits altogether in the first three months of changing your diet.
Fat in Green Smoothies
Leafy greens combine well with everything, nuts too. They help to digest nuts.
Only with fat, FRUIT is not a good mixer. Fat is a sticky molecule that clumps together in your blood and blocks the insulin receptors on your cells. As a result, insulin can’t shuttle the fruit sugar into your cells. The sugar stays too long in your blood, leading to blood sugar problems and candida.
The problem in candida is not fresh fruit, it’s too much fat in your blood stream.
I enjoy avocado in my Green Smoothie when I want more fat, or a couple of Tbsp of chia which I grind first in a coffee grinder. Many people add ground flax to their Smoothie. I don’t. Flax is so unnatural, try eating a handful and you’ll see. It’s impossible! You have to spit them out. The flax craze was created by the flax oil industry.
I love ground chia seeds in my Green Smoothie when I feel the need for fat. If you’re too irritable too easily, you know you’re short on essential plant fats. Chia have a far better ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 than do flax or hemp seeds. Chia is your best source for these 2 essential fatty acids (essential because your body can’t make them, so they must be in your diet).
Clary Sage seed oil (Salvia sclarea) is the very best Omega 3 source. You get one box free when you order a 6-pack here (#ad). Quote from amazon:
Clary Sage seed oil is the most stable source of Omega 3 in the world, hence the most effective one. Clary Sage seed oil maintains its natural state at room temperature for more than 3 years. You can bake bread with it, make cereals, put it on your salad, use it as is and it will not oxidize.
Make sure you get& Clary Sage SEED Oil (#ad) and NOT the more well-known clary sage oil which is the leaves & flowers.
Fruits for Green Smoothies
When you’re a rawfooder, fruit or fat are the only two foods that will give you enough calories for high energy — or sprouted grain crackers but they take time to make!
Newbie raw fooders eat too many nuts and dried fruit. They’re starving for more calories.
If you like to keep your fat down to below 10% of daily calories — say a tablespoon or two of seeds, or a small handful of nuts, or one avocado — then you must eat more fruit.
For fruit in your Green Smoothie, enjoy your standard apples, pears, bananas, oranges, or your tropicals like mango and papaya, and all the summer fruits like peach, nectarine, canteloupe.
I peel fruit when it’s not organic. Strawberries and raspberries taste good in Green Smoothie, especially when they’re frozen and you add a ripe banana.
Watermelon is perfect, so sweet and quick to blend with greens into a Smoothie. Watermelon is actually a gourd (like squashes) so it’s more vegetable than fruit.
It’s fine to mix fruit and greens in one Smoothie. I know some books like Fit For Life (#ad) say don’t mix fruit (and especially not melon) with anything. But when it’s blended, that rule does not apply. Leafy greens are not really a vegetable, they have no starch. They’re a class on their own.
Sulforaphane in Green Smoothie Recipes
Add a sulfur green often to your Green Smoothies — all the cruciferous vegetables are sulfur-rich. That’s any plant of the Mustard family — broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese celery, collard, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, radish, rutabaga, turnip, and watercress.
All these grow easily in an Automatic Sprouter. Cruciferous green SPROUTS are the highest known source of the phytochemical, sulforaphane, which stimulates the production of cancer-killing enzymes. The sprouts (see photos) contain 20-50 times more sulforaphane than the mature vegetables — in fact some mature broccoli has no sulforaphane at all.
More recently, researchers have found that sulforaphane protects arteries from the clogging that triggers heart attack or stroke. Sulforaphane switches on a protective protein (Nrf2) in those areas of the arteries vulnerable to clogging — the bends and branches where blood flow is slower.
Sadly, sulforaphane is the phytochemical that makes broccoli bitter. I feel nauseous if I blend mature broccoli into my Green Smoothie. Once I threw up the entire smoothie! That’s one smoothie puke since 1993.
To protect yourself and your family from heart disease and cancer, eat Green Smoothies made with organic micro greens like broccoli, sprouted at home. If you live in USA or Canada, I hope you’ll invest in a GoGreen Automatic Sprouter. Experience the power of vibrantly alive energetic living greens. You can *see* the energy radiating out from the sunflower greens!
Or build your own Sprouter in any country with the GoGreen Mist Kit and my FREE Sprouter-building Plans. Then get your growing container (a plastic storage box) and plant trays from a local store.
* Click here to download my Free Plans to build your own Automatic Sprouter.
I wish every human being could experience how easy it is to eat Living Greens daily! In a Sprouter, they’re protected from heavy rains, hot sun, cold snow, hungry bugs, AND get misted every 3 hours, automatically.
You don’t lift a finger! How easy is that? I tell you, I can’t picture life without the power of my fresh greens daily — ‘specially broccoli sprouts!
Who Invented Green Smoothies?
It’s fascinating. As soon as blenders hit the US domestic market in the 1930’s, a natural hygiene (raw vegan) medical doctor, Dr. Christopher Gian-Cursio, discovered that vegans need blended leafy greens for their teeth and bones!
Dr. Cursio worked in upstate New York with the vegan Penepent family over several generations. He discovered in the children that, by giving them blended leafy greens, he reversed teeth and skeletal problems.
In a 1976 interview with Dr. Stanley Bass, Dr. Cursio reports:
“Then I made my shift into more green stuff, blended salads early. I saw the difference. The children were better. Instead of pigeon-chested or chicken-chested, they were fine-chested. … I don’t think there’s a dental carie in the whole group.
We have here problems that came up in the children when I followed the strict fruit program with nuts, and minimal amounts, compared to what I use now, of green stuff.
These children, the skeletal development wasn’t right, the dental arches were not well-formed, teeth came in crowded because of it.
It was only after adding green stuff that I started to see in the pregnancies that followed, and also in the children that were grown, that came from these pregnancies, the difference.”
Pigeon-chested means they had skeletal deformity, so long as they were vegan WITHOUT blended greens. When they ate blended leafy greens, their bones healed and grew normally.
I explain how it works here: Vitamin K2 to Prevent & Heal Cavities in Teeth and Build Strong Bones – for Vegans & Vegetarians.
Dr. Ann Wigmore & Energy Soup
Fifty years after Dr. Cursio, in 1988, the late Dr. Ann Wigmore re-discovered Green Smoothies, when traveling in Europe. She called them Energy Soup, and added bean sprouts, seaweed and avocado too.
Dr Ann spoke of an instant surge in energy and brain focus with her first Green Smoothie. Wow, more energy and clarity when she was already buzzing from 25 years of raw foods! The higher you go, the higher you go (whoever wrote “the harder you fall” was on cooked food).
Twelve years later in 2000, I posted the first Green Smoothie recipe on the web under Energy Soup Variations.
Five years later in 2005, Russian-born Victoria Boutenko blended kale and bananas in her kitchen, gave it the name Green Smoothie and launched a global popular movement.
But remember, it was Dr. Cursio who discovered the power of blended greens way back in the 1930’s. And my beloved Dr. Ann Wigmore who taught it to me in 1993.
Green Smoothie Recipes
Some people add water to their Green Smoothie, but I leave the water out because I seldom drink with meals. Water dilutes your digestive juices. Freshly-squeezed orange juice makes a tasty base.
I tend to use less fruit, about 30% fruit and 70% greens, because I eat so much fruit the rest of the day.
Greens are the perfect food for building strong bones and teeth — nearly every animal on earth has discovered that, except the big cats and polar bears!
Rinse your greens in a bowl of water with a tablespoon of vinegar added, to kill pathogenic microbes.
Preferably don’t rinse any greens you pick yourself, they have healthy microbes, like the ones making Vitamin B12. Fresh-picked greens from the soil are a good source of B12. Cows get their B12 (present in their raw milk) from eating green grass.
Here’s my basic Green Smoothie Recipe:
- 2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple and pear — blend first to form a tasty base,
- 1-2 vegetable fruits or a salary stalk — add next for extra minerals, e.g. summer squash or zucchini,
- 2-3 cups of chopped leafy greens from my garden or farmer’s market, or a tray of organic baby greens like sunflower from my Sprouter, ‘or one packet of mixed organic leafy greens from the store.
Here’s a variety of Green Smoothie recipes chiefly from Frederic Patenaude. Get his 70 Healthy Salad Dressings for only $7 — if it’s more than $7 today, please let me know.
Always blend the fruit first.
- 2-3 cups any greens of your choice, 2 cups papaya, 2 oranges, 3 dates
- 1 handful lettuce leaves, 1 handful mint, 4 bananas, 1/2 cup water
- Winter Smoothie — 1 cup organic frozen berries (any kind), 2 cups fresh spinach, 1/4 inch fresh ginger, water
- Spring Smoothie — fresh orange juice, ripe bananas, frozen mangoes and several large leaves of kale (extra frozen mango gives lovely thick consistency you eat with a spoon)
- 1/2 bunch romaine lettuce, 1 cup strawberries, 2 bananas, water
- 4-5 kale leaves, 4 apples, 1/2 lemon juiced, water
- 2 big handfuls mixed baby greens, 2 pears, 2 mangoes, 1 cup fresh or frozen berries
- Choc-mint — 2 cups spinach, 10-12 mint leaves, 3 bananas, 2 Tbs. carob powder, 1 cup water
- 1 handful spinach, 2 stalks of celery, 2 bananas, 2 pears, 1 apple, 1 cup water
- 1 small handful spinach, 2 cups arugula, 2-3 mangoes, 1 cup water
- 1/2 head romaine lettuce, 1 small pineapple, 1 large mango, 1-inch fresh ginger
- 1 handful wild greens (e.g. dandelion), 1 smalll handful mint leaves, 3 cups honeydew melon
- 3-4 stalks celery, 2 ripe persimmons, 1 banana
- 1 handful chard leaves, 5-6 kale leaves, 3 large bananas, 1 cup water
- 1 handful parsley, 3 cups of peeled papaya
Do you see that anything goes?
Buy bunches of greens, a variety of fresh fruits, harvest fresh greens from your own indoor Sprouter, and CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
Discover More
Are you ready for a miracle in your life? The power in you is longing for the power in living foods.
A LIVING food is growing in the moment you eat it! You’ll find all the info on this site, to fly into the sky of LIVE food. Like a bird, you’ll soar free 🙂
- Which Leafy Greens Are Best — page 1 of this recipe.
- Energy Soup Recipe — the sister of Green Smoothies, a must-read.
- Download Free eBooks – to go raw for 6 days, and plant-strong for 6 weeks — everything you need to know, to quickly shift into healthy eating
- Blending Links — see all info on Blending.
- Site Map — see the whole feast 🙂