So... here we go. I've found that whenever I become passionate about something, my tendency is to want to share that passion. Someone told me recently that's what makes me good at my job, which was a nice thing to hear. Sometimes I feel like people probably want me to keep it to myself - but it seems that more often than not I find a willing audience. I think people genuinely like to learn something they didn't know before and if they can learn it from someone who obviously believes what they're saying and is incorporating what they're preaching into their own lives -- walking the talk basically -- they're that much more open to it.
Let's go back to the beginning of the year. Like many people, I tend to make New Year's Resolutions. Sometimes I actually follow through and this year was one of those times. I made a simple resolution this year -- to get more fruits and veggies into my daily diet. I've always known I needed to do that and I thought I (and my family) had an overall pretty healthy diet -- most everything I made was low fat, we rarely ever ate typical junk food and I was always blessed that my two heathen children (it's an affectionate term!) loved vegetables of all kinds. Yep, I thought we were pretty healthy but I knew I could use more fruits and veggies on a regular basis.
Enter my good friend, Patti and my next door neighbor, Kay. Patti has been a co-worker and friend for many years and I've always admired her. She's a marathon runner. Yep, one of THOSE. She's probably one of the healthiest people I know. And to top it off, she's incredibly beautiful - both inside and out. I adore her. Kay has been my next door neighbor only since late last year. She, too, is beautiful both inside and out as well as being a concert pianist. Kay, however, does not possess great health. Kay is sick. Kay has an auto-immune disease called Myasthenia Gravis. MG causes your muscles to not work properly and you become extremely fatigued. If it happens to the muscles that control your breathing, you have an MG crisis that can require hospitalization and can even be terminal. Kay has been on disability from her college professorship job for the last three years and has undergone chemotherapy to battle this disease. I admire Kay the same way I admire Patti.
Patti has been a proponent of green smoothies for awhile now. She saw her step-father lose a significant amount of weight drinking them and gain quite a few healthy benefits. She drinks them regularly, too, and she had told me about them many times. I never bit. I was sure they were great... I just never got on the bandwagon.
One day I dropped by to see Kay and have a cup of tea with her when she asked me if I'd like to try something new she'd just discovered -- Dr. Oz's Green Drink. It looked a lot like a cup of chewed up grass. It tasted good... very, er, uh green. Yeah, that's it. Green. She told me what was in it and said she thought she'd give it a try since Dr. Oz talked about all the amazing health benefits of it.
All of this happened at the beginning of the year and right when I'd made my resolution -- so it suddenly hit me that I could use green smoothies as a way to meet this goal! I emailed Patti and she sent me several recipes and I got the Dr. Oz recipe off the Internet. I started playing around with the green smoothies, making them a little different each day but not really following a recipe. It wasn't long before my heathen son (who is 17) asked if I would start making them for him each day when I made mine. I was happy to do it!
My poor blender didn't know what hit it. Literally. After years of sitting in the pantry with only a couple of uses a year it was suddenly on a daily basis. Within about a two-week period I had to get a new blender. Patti tried to convince me to get the same kind of blender she had just purchased for herself as a Christmas present -- a Vita-mix. When she told me how much she'd paid for it I nearly fainted! There was no way on earth I was going to spend $500 for a blender! Yikes! Was she crazy? :) She tried to tell me how much better the smoothies would be but I just couldn't imagine there being that much of a difference. It wasn't until a couple months later, after she demonstrated her Vita-mix to me, that I resigned myself to having to get one. I really didn't have a choice. It was a no-brainer. :)
After just a couple of weeks of having only one green smoothie per day, I started noticing some things I hadn't expected. First, I had no cravings. None. No cravings for sweets or chocolate, no cravings for something salty. No cravings at all. Second, my fingernails were growing like crazy and they were so thick! I've always had the weakest, thinnest fingernails... never even tried to grow them long and suddenly I couldn't keep them short. It was weird. And then I realized one day that I hadn't had a diet Dr. Pepper in days. I hadn't tried to give them up. I didn't WANT to give them up... it just hadn't occurred to me to have one in five days. I was shocked. I just thought maybe I'd been busy. I immediately went to get a diet Dr. Pepper, took a big sip and almost spit it out. It tasted horrible. I couldn't believe it. I tried again and had the same result. I poured the rest of it out and chalked it up to it just being a bad batch or something. But I didn't want to try again for awhile.
Three of my friends and I took off for a spring-time beach getaway in mid-April. Patti was one of them and she brought her Vita-Mix along. We made smoothies every day we were there and by the end of the trip, all of us were hooked. When we got home, I talked to Kay and told her how good the smoothies were making me feel and asked if I could bring her one. She said she'd love that and that's when more sharing began.
I started making 3 smoothies a day instead of 2 and I'd drop them off on her doorstep each morning and ring the bell. I didn't wait for an answer... just left them like the milkman or something. :) She didn't ask me to stop, so I just kept bringing one each day thinking if she got sick of them, she'd tell me and that would be that. Well, here it is almost September and I'm still bringing them each day. And, the remarkable thing is, Kay is feeling better than she has felt in YEARS! Oh, and I wasn't making 3 smoothies a day for long because my sweet hubby asked if he could have one, too -- so now I make 4 each morning! :) He's been having one each day for about the last 4 months now, too.
I've always posted pictures of my green smoothies on Facebook and have shared the recipes for them so many people from that. I love getting messages from people thanking me for telling them about the smoothies and telling me how great they're feeling. We were feeling pretty good about how healthy we were.
Right up until we saw the movie Kay brought over one night -- Forks Over Knives. Remember when I said something about Patti being a marathon runner? Well, I'd always equated being a vegetarian or vegan with being a marathon runner. If that's what you're into, great. It's not for me. I was a meat eater. Always have been, was happy to always be one. Until that movie. I've never felt so compelled to change something in my entire life. Suddenly, the idea of putting animal products into my body was not something I ever wanted to do again. Heathen son felt the same way. Sweet hubby didn't see the movie but he definitely heard about it.
That was on the 3rd of July. The funny thing was that we were watching the movie as I was preparing a dish to take to our friends' big 4th of July picnic the next day. What was the dish? Bacon and avocado stuffed tomatoes. The smell of bacon was hanging heavily in the air while we're watching this movie about how bad animal products are for you and how sick it's making us. I couldn't get over that irony.
Since we knew what our plans were for the next day and they did NOT include a whole food, plant-based diet of any sort, we decided we would wait until Thursday, July 5, to start eating this way. Thursday came around and we haven't looked back. That was 8 weeks ago.
When I first mentioned to hubby that heathen son and I were going to start eating this way, I didn't really expect him to come along. He is a thin man... doesn't have any weight to spare regardless of what he eats. His metabolism is envied by all who know him. He just jumped right on board though, much to my surprise. He loves ice cream and he loves macaroni and cheese. I explained to him that were going to avoid meats, chicken, fish (he was thrilled to hear that one!), dairy, eggs and added oil. No more ice cream... no more macaroni and cheese. He said he would give it a try - and he has. He hasn't deviated one single time from our new way of eating - but he does find he has to eat more and more often because of his high metabolism. But he's eating more of the food he can eat and finding great satisfaction in it.
Our goal is to get our cholesterol down to under 150, supposedly a heart-attack proof level. I donated blood on Saturday after we started eating this way on Thursday. My cholesterol then was 196. I can donate again next weekend so we'll see where it's gotten to.
Ben has lost 5 lbs. (he can't lose one more pound!), I've lost about 6 and heathen son has lost the most -- about 16. He was in great shape to begin with but after growing up pretty heavy, he's always going to watch that. I would love to lose more but losing weight was not the goal of this adventure -- being as healthy as we can be for as long as we can be is the goal. Plain and simple.
I'll try to chronicle the adventure here on this blog, as well as share some of the great recipes I come across. I've found some good ones and adapted them to our tastes. I'm not sure I've ever actually followed a recipe as it was written. That's half the fun of cooking, isn't it?
I hope you'll come along for the ride... and catch some of the enthusiasm we're feeling for being plant based biased!
