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I whipped this up in the Vita-Mix this afternoon. It has a lovely rich green color and tastes very good, not nearly as “grassy” as other smoothies of its kind – I think this might be the dates adding some subtle but powerful sweetness. I’m going to experiment with dates some more.

In a Vita-Mix container (or your regular blender), put:

• 1 1/4 water (I just eyeball it from the measurements on the container)
• 2-3 large leaves of kale
• 5 dates (see note about sugar, below)
• 1 ripe pear
• 1 banana

Blend the whole thing on HIGH, adding a few ice cubes if it gets warm. Mine makes two full 8 oz glasses. Each glass is about 200 calories, and contains 3.9 grams of protein, 7.6 grams of fiber, and 22 grams of sugar. It also contains 769mg of potassium, and all the Vitamin C you’ll need for the day.

The sugar seems pretty high, especially when you consider I drank both glasses in about an hour, so I’ll try adding fewer dates next time and see if I can retain that delicious flavor.

In the mean time, I suggest you DO NOT subscribe to the “Inner Circle“, unless you’re absolutely sure that you want to give them your money. Their cancellation policy on their website is this:

But to cancel, all you have to do is Just send an email to support@renegadehealth.com with the subject “Inner Circle Cancel” and please include the email address you used to sign up, your nickname here in the inner circle and your full name. This will allow us to easily process your cancellation. We’ll process it right away.

That’s exactly what I did on 9/18/2009, and they charged me anyway on 9/30 (I became a member on 8/31/2009, so my cancellation request was well within the deadline). I’m really disappointed with the site, and the way it’s run. It really feels like a racket instead of a sincere attempt at providing people with good information (I know, many of you are going, DUH, right?).

So you can imagine my surprise when I got email this morning that said I’d been charged $9.99 “per your request”.

I’ve asked them to refund my money, and I sent along my previous email where I’d cancelled. I’ll let you all know what happens.

This is the frustrating thing with recipes that don’t list dehydrating times, yet at the same time it can be really hard to know how long to give when creating a recipe, since everyone’s dehydrator is different. I’ve read of a few long-term raw foodies who don’t even use a dehydrator anymore; apparently a lot of people grow out of them over time. I’m still a complete n00b, and I love mine.

This week I started roaming around Alissa Cohen’s (raw food author) forums, called Raw Food Talk, in search of some raw food community. While perusing the “Before and After” forums, I found some more amazing transformations:

• Dina, who is now a raw food chef, looks years younger and her skin just shines.
• Kimberley, who I’m pretty sure actually reversed her age – the pictures are amazing.
• Pitaya, whose story I liked because her shape is a lot like mine – she has the glow too.
• A user named RawHeaven, who is just beautiful – her shape is a lot like mine too, and after going raw she just looks so healthy and glowy.
• And then a really interesting series of photos from a user named Matthew, who ages in the photos from 17 to 25, yet he looks like he’s actually going the other direction. Wild!

Then there’s Mimi, getting interviewed for Women Go Raw, who recently won an award for being the Sexiest Vegetarian Over 50. She went raw a year and a half ago, and HELLO, HOLY COW, LOOK AT THIS WOMAN, she’s not just 50, she’s 71 years old. Would you like to look like that at 71? Yeah, me too. She’s incredible. Granted, she’s been living a pretty healthy lifestyle for about the last 40 years –  so while I don’t mean to say this is ALL due to raw foods, this should at least inspire us to push away the pastries and go for a walk around the block, right? Are you with me? Let’s go.

Oh, and I’ll get that kale chips recipe up tomorrow. I promise! I’m up too late right now.

No pills, not even aspirin, and certainly no supplements ever enter my mouth — everything I need comes from my fish-vegetarian diet, which incorporates 30-40 different kinds of fruit and vegetables every week. Even though I am Chairman and Owner of Dole Food Company, I do most of my own grocery shopping, and even took Oprah on an impromptu trip to Costco, in a day that included bike riding, exercise in the gym, and juicing vegetables in the kitchen. Oprah marveled at how much I eat, and yet never gain a pound. In fact, I expend a lot of energy in my 50-60 minutes of cardio and strength training every day. Plus there’s the fact that fruit and vegetables tend to be lower in calories, but higher in filling fiber and other nutrients that help you feel satisfied. 

I copied and pasted that from the print version of the article, and all those links came with it – they seem to go to nutrition articles on Dole, so I won’t strip them out.

This guy is 86 years old! I want to be like him when I’m 86! Heck, I want to be like him now. I’m 34, and I’m pretty sure this guy’s body is in much better shape than mine. What an inspiration! Check out the article, because there’s also a great chart listing different produce and their benefits. I’ve printed it out to stick on the fridge for ideas.

I’ve been having this (or a slight variation) most mornings since I got my juicer, and I’ve noticed a few things changing. My taste for vegetables has increased dramatically. You know how in restaurants your meal often has a side of veggies, sauteed with some herbs? Well, I never used to that, and now I frequently do. I’m embarrassed to admit it, and it sounds so ridiculous, but I grew up eating so much sugar that the idea of a side of sauteed zucchini was like handing me a plate of dirt. Drinking fresh green vegetable juice almost every day has really changed that.

I’ve also noticed that if I drink juice first thing, I tend to crave less sugary foods later. An hour after my juice, I’ll be heading back into the kitchen with thoughts of fruit or some brown rice or a salad on my mind. If I eat some Apple Jacks and rice milk for breakfast, an hour later I’m back in the kitchen foraging for a cookie, or some more sugary cereal, or toast with honey.

They key here is not to label JUICE GOOD and SUGAR BAD. The key, at least for my body, is that one thing tends to lead to another. Some days, I just want the Apple Jacks, and that’s okay, and I eat them, and I know that I’ll crave sugar later because of that. But I like knowing that the juice, along with being incredibly good for my body, will give me a head start on making good choices that day. Instead of laying down strict rules for myself, I choose in the moment where I want to aim. This is why I reject diets and eating programs. I think knowing yourself is more important then following rules. As silly as it might sound, juicing fresh vegetables has taught me a lot about myself.

I read a lot of books about going raw, and one that I haven’t read until now, but was looking forward to was David Wolfe’s Sunfood Diet Success System. It’s a $33 tome (I got it for free on paperbackswap.com) that espouses not just raw foodism, but his own philosophy on personal transformation and spiritual development. I’m only on page 31 and I’m already frustrated with statements like:

You are a creator of circumstance, never a victim of circumstance. There is no such thing as coincidence. You are at the cause of all effects. We live in an orderly universe governed by definite laws. Everything happens for a reason. To reach spiritual fulfillment, first you must understand this law.

Not to get all LOLcat or anything, but SRSLY? A person is never a victim of circumstance? The woman who ran a stop sign, who I plowed into, nearly severing my nose off my face – I brought that on myself? My son, who was born half-deaf; that was the result of his negative thinking in the womb? Earthquake victims in China, the people on board the Titanic, victims of terrorism, need I go on? In every case, these people brought their circumstances on themselves?

It goes on (emphasis mine):

If you are suffering from ill health, there is only one person responsible – yourself. Blaming others will not empower you. Concepts such as the germ/virus theory are the end products of efforts to put the blame of ill health on someone or something outside of oneself – to remove responsibility from the individual.

I have no doubt that David Wolfe is human – that he will, in fact, die someday. It’s in the cards for all of us. As my Dad likes to joke, “No one gets out of here alive.” So what does Wolfe think will happen as he ages and passes into the next life/existence? Perfect health into old age? He’ll fall asleep peacefully and pass whenever he’s ready?

His disbelief of germs and viruses is like an axe that neatly hacks of any intellectual authority I might have given him. Does he wash his hands before he eats? Does he wash his produce? The only reason we do that (besides maybe not enjoying the taste of soil) is our senseless pandering to that crazy germ theory.

I find this kind of misinformation so irritating because I think it takes fascinating and useful data to a ridiculous extreme. We know that people who think negatively a lot of the time tend to get sicker than those who don’t. We know that people with heart disease who learn to eat better and practice deep relaxation techniques live longer and heal better from surgery than those who don’t (see the intriguing work of Dean Ornish and John Kabat-Zinn). This doesn’t suggest that any circumstance we would judge as unfortunate (Lance Armstrong, for instance, says that cancer gave him back his life) is always a direct result of our own actions. What it suggests is a powerful connection between the mind and the body, between stress and immune function. This connection is still only partially understood – no one has all the answers.

The universe is fascinating, the body is amazing, and the way the mind and the body interact is incredible; there’s enough mystery in all this to keep us going for some time. For him to make these sorts of pronouncements, based in absolutely no science whatsoever (when he volunteers to get injected with HIV or heck, even the H1N1 virus, I’ll be interested in seeing what happens to his pure body), is so pretentious it shocks me that people take it seriously.

But then, we all want to feel like we have control over everything, right? And I loathe that – the pandering to people’s need to have control. Anxiety is a basic human emotion, based in not knowing what will happen, in fearing the future and its deep abyss of uncertainty. I’m sure David Wolfe knows a lot about nutrition, and certainly he knows a lot more about raw foods than I do, which is why I’ll finish this book. What he doesn’t know is how to never get sick, never have a “bad” thing happen to you, or never die. Pretending otherwise might sell books, but it’s irresponsible. Robbing ourselves of real science, of the mysteries that science is unraveling (and the ones it never will), isn’t worth it.

Except in my story it’s a girl, and she’s just had a whole bunch of fresh green juice after eating sugar for 34 years.

I’m not going to explode, am I?

I think I’ll go do some light aerobics, and yoga, and see if I can lift any cars.

Meet my new baby.

In that period I’ve juiced kale, romaine, oranges, lemons (whole!), apples, cabbage, and ginger, and the Breville eats it all up. Out comes this delicious, pure, colorful juice that I can’t seem to get enough of. Natalia’s book has you drinking this “Green Lemonade”, which consists of an entire head of romaine lettuce, a few leaves of kale, a whole lemon, 2 apples, and some ginger. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be drinking this stuff, I’d have laughed so hard I’d get tears in my eyes, but HERE I AM.

Natalia’s book is about detoxing, learning to eat “fast exit” foods that leave you clean and sparkly, and cleaning out all the junk in your cells. I know at least one person who reads this blog is getting hives at the mere mention of “toxins”, but the more I read about all this and the more I see and feel what happens with regular massage, the more I believe there’s something to this idea.

I should just state for the record right now that while I am not going raw yet, I would love to see if I could someday, even for just short periods. I love raw foods, and the raw food movement. While, like Natalia, I don’t think that everyone in the world should necessarily go raw, I do think that an infusion of fresh veggies and fruits and juices in our collective American diet would be a huge boon to our health.

Breville Review:

So far, this thing is incredible. First of all, it’s just plain GORGEOUS, sitting out on the counter. My Champion looks like some kind of torture device, but the Breville looks like a sculpture. It gleams and glistens in the morning light. It BECKONS you to come have some juice. The feed tube on top, where you stick all your food in, is huge. I can drop whole apples or oranges in there if they’re small, and if they’re large they only take one cut to make it, which explains while every third sentence in the manual is DON’T PUT HANDS IN FEED TUBE. There are some things that shouldn’t be juiced, your fist being one of them.

The amount of juice it makes is amazing, way way way more than the Champion. I got almost twelve ounces of deep green juice from a single head of romaine lettuce. The Green Lemonade recipe yielded a surprising 40 oz of juice, which Sonja and I drank together. Beth even had a little and liked it. The clean-up was easy too; the entire top portion of the juicer comes apart in three easy pieces, leaving a very easy-to-wipe base. I rinsed the pieces and put them out to try on our dishrack, and that was that. Easy peasy.

The pulp is moist but not wet, and there are recipes for it in the juicer manual, including carrot cake and meat loaf, which cracked me up (because after all this fresh juice, the first thing I want is a big baked loaf of ground beef or a pile of cake)/ I’ve been putting my pulp in the worm bin, and I’m pretty sure they like it. I expect tiny slimy little thank-you notes any day now. Worms are supposed to hide when the light hits them, but I’m pretty sure mine are being trained to wiggle to the top like pet dogs and beg for scraps.

So far: A+++ WOULD JUICE AGAIN. I can’t wait to see how I feel after a few weeks on raw juices.

I woke up feeling refreshed, cheerful, and my body didn’t ache. I came downstairs and surprised Greg and Beth, who usually don’t expect me until I float down mumbling and incoherent around 8:20.

The magic of the green smoothie!

Tonight’s remedy: a green smoothie before bed. Specifically about 32 ounces. I began to notice this “medicinal” effect of green smoothies after I’d been drinking them for awhile and then tapered off. I’d start to feel worn down, overwhelmed, and my body would feel achey and slow. If I made a green smoothie before bed and drank a ton of it right before I went to sleep, I woke up feeling like someone sprayed me down with Awesome.

Another benefit is that it seems to calm whatever sugar cravings I’m having. The trick here, when beginning to realize you’ve had a nutritionally bankrupt period, is to actually go make the smoothie, which means getting oneself out of whatever carb and stress-induced torpor you’ve managed to roll yourself into. Often this involves a trip to the store for fresh kale and fruit, which can feel like oh such a burden when you’re already swamped with plays to read, notes to go over, and homework to make sure your first grader does. In the larger scheme of things, these are small problems, but in the moment they can feel like more than enough to send you back to the couch with your Chips Ahoy and your remote control. Just one more cookie won’t hurt, will it?

But I try to remind myself it’s well worth it. If there were a pill they could make that made me feel this good, the side effects would likely be as ridiculous as the cost, and I’m sure I’d stand in line to get it. Green smoothies are available at any grocery store for maybe $2.50 per quart, and are, in my opinion, nothing less than nutritional magic. The one sitting next to me is half of the following recipe:

Recovery Smoothie

2/3rds a head of kale (usually I use half, but tonight I was feeling green)
2 small satsumas
2 T flax oil
2 T lemon juice
2 pears, one very ripe, one still pretty firm

IT TASTES DELICIOUS. I am not kidding. I know people find this blog and they read “green smoothie”, and say to themselves CUCKOO!, but I’m telling you, it’s fantastic. I’ll drink an entire 32 oz jar before I fall asleep, and then let it work its magic. In the morning, before I go to school, I’ll try to drink the remaining jar, or most of it.

Now if I could just get back to drinking them every day, I might end up like Clent.

Joan Pick lives in England, is 67 years old, a former scientist and member of Mensa, and runs wherever she needs to go. She hasn’t been in a car in years. She’s been living on raw food for ages, which I’m guessing accounts for her energy and her glow. Look at those rosy cheeks, and that smile! It’s those last two I’m most charmed with – the idea of never getting in a car again feels more limiting than it does eco-friendly, but I understand where she’s coming from. She also uses her cast-iron pans as hand weights for exercise, and she spends a lot of time hula-hooping!

She follows a raw vegetarian diet. “I had done studies of the food industry – the beef industry and the destruction of the rainforest to fuel it,” she says. “I was at a Mensa dinner, with a vegetarian …” She doesn’t continue this thought. “I’ve always been a natural fatty … I had tried every diet in the book, so I decided to try a raw-food vegetarian diet.” When was the last time she ate a cooked meal? “I don’t know, I can’t remember.” Doesn’t she miss it? A nice bowl of soup, a roast dinner? “Of course not. There’s no mess. Have you seen what I eat?” We go into her kitchen, where the cupboards are bare. She opens a large tub full of mixed seeds and nuts, which forms the basis of her diet, along with fruit and wheatgerm. “It’s very easy to live like this. I couldn’t imagine living any other way now,” she says.

Read the whole article here, at the Guardian.

Jason got me hooked on these. He’s also responsible for finding the best deep fried green onion pancakes in Seattle (VEGAN! HUZZAH!), and no I’m not telling you where, what you think I want a crowd showing up  when I’m trying to get  my fix? I will tell you where you can get a pomegranate: your local grocery store. They are officially in season. They have them at my Fred Meyer right now, 2 for $7, which is good because then you can hold them both up in front of you, and jiggle them around, and make jokes to your husband about how he’s getting these entertaining sweeties at such a bargain.

And then when he walks away from the produce department pretending he doesn’t know you, you can yell, “But I release tension through humor, baby! HUMOR!”

This is what a pomegranate looks like on the inside:

Anal people – of which I know none, really, I mean absolutely none, not a single one, what, am I belaboring a point here? -  will tell you that you have to open it in such a way as to avoid wasting a single drop of juice. Yeah. Good luck with that. For your first time, I suggest you just get in there and hack that baby in half.

Here you have a hacked-open pomegranate. Mmmmmmm. You know what that is? Pure sugar. About 105 calories of energy, and 25 grams of nature’s crack. Along with natural sugar, you’ll find reams of health benefits to drinking this juice, which the nice people at POM are happy to spell out for you, with studies in fact. I only concentrate on the sugar because IT’S SUGAR, it’s something that is sweet and delicious and will remind you of the best candies, if only candies could taste this good, and yet it’s absolutely good for you. Put down that bowl of Halloween candy (if you even have any left – you might be onto the newly purchased post-Halloween candy), and pick up a pomegranate.

I should be clear here: we’re eating the RED SEEDS. Those delicious nubby little ampules of yumminess, known in the pomegranate world as “arils” (I think I just found the name for my next child). The white stuff? Don’t eat that part.

So how do you separate the arils from the white part? Well, that’s actually pretty easy, if a bit time-consuming. Basically, you just push your finger in there and pop them out, one by one, flicking them off their white backing – after a few minutes of this you can get good enough to just slide your finger along the white and flick them all off POP POP POP POP, into a bowl.

To get to more seeds, after you’ve flicked off the ones you can see, just break apart the fruit gently. It’s easy to do.

Eventually you’ll have a bowl full of arils, and then you’ll want to fill that bowl with some water. This helps any leftover white stuff to float to the top, where you can skim it off, and also to rinse the arils in case any of them were dropped on the floor and picked up via the two-second rule. Also good to know: corgis like pomegranates. Just a little bit of trivia there. You’re welcome.

Voila! Delicious pomegranate! Now drain them if you like (or you can leave them sitting in cool water, good for when you stick them in the fridge, assuming you have any left, which clearly means you didn’t invite me over), and it’s time to eat! Grab a spoon. Stick a spoonful in your mouth, and gently chew. Mmmmmm, exploding goodness! There is a small seed in each aril, and I didn’t think you were supposed to eat those so I was spitting them out into a small bowl, but according to the Pomegranate Council (I am SO joining that when I’m done with the Green Onion Pancake Brigade), the seeds are safe to eat, and give you valuable fiber.

Voila! Go forth and eat fruit!

I’m like that when I hear of someone eating raw vegetables at every meal. Frightened, grimly fascinated, and unable to look away.

My Dad, a former television director, was the videographer for the Raw Food Festival that used to take place in Portland, Oregon, and I went with him a couple of years and watched some of the talks. I was impressed with how ALIVE everyone looked. They actually glowed. They look nice in pictures, even super healthy, even beautiful, but in person they are radiant. I wish I were kidding.

I also wish I were kidding about the guy I talked to who tried to convince me if I went raw, eventually I’d be able to stop eating completely and just be able to breathe in my nutrients. I was like, “Dude, aspirating spinach smoothies is so not my idea of a good time,” and he explained that no, I’d be on such a high plane of existence (“Like, DENVER?”), that I’d eventually not need to take in any food at all. I’d just take nutrients from the air.

Yeah. It’s possible his glow didn’t come from raw foods.

So I walked around the festival and tried to find something I could see myself eating. I did find a few things; crackers mostly, and things made in the dehydrator, and that was what got me to purchase an Excalibur a year later. I love that silly dehydrator, I hold it close during all our kitchen-purges, even though I only use it a few times a year. I’m convinced that someday I will eventually use it all the time, you know, someday……when I become a raw-food goddess and start radiating all that happy vegetable energy.

It could happen! I ate a piece of raw pepper the other day and didn’t even make a face!

On that note, I made some raw-food crackers last week. I based them on a recipe in the book, Ironic. And if you’re thinking, “That song was not about irony, it was about unfortunate circumstance,” you are definitely not alone.