Missy Diggs

This morning started out as many mornings do, with me feeling really groggy and already unable to keep up with the demands of one very Vivid Girl. I groaned my way out of bed, swallowed all the pills that go with the morning part of my lifestyle, brushed my teeth (wait! did I brush my teeth? um, well, I usually do brush my teeth…..), poured myself some coffee (many many thanks to Mr. B for getting up before me and making the coffee) and I put some breakfast in a bowl for the Vivid Girl, who was already barricaded on the couch with her craft supplies and her Netflix cartoons. But the Vivid Girl did not want the bowl of breakfast, even though I had carefully selected the items in the bowl to be pleasing to her. In this case, frosted organic tiny wheat cereal squares and dried apricots.
She loves these things, usually. Okay, well, actually, I can’t figure out what she loves usually, but I have seen her eat these very things before, on more than one occasion, and when I brought them home from the store she was excited, and so I foolishly thought that meant that when she was hungry she would eat them.
Because I never learn.
So, because I am the kind of parent who strives for joy more than for consistency or authority or even keeping the food budget down, I suggested that we could leave a bit early for camp today and drive through the fast food place where the Vivid Girl likes to order a breakfast that comes with a toy and that she can eat in the car. This is not something I am willing to do everyday, mind you, but somewhere along the way we came to a compromise in which we, the Worn-Out Parents of the Vivid Girl, agreed that we would do this once a week or so.
This made the Vivid Girl happy and so we quickly scrambled around pulling clothes and shoes on and off until we were both wearing what it seemed like we should wear, and we gathered up our things (my things: purse, keys, cell phone, kindle, wallet. her things: script, dancing shoes, socks, activity with many tiny pieces to do in the car), and we left the house. And we left another thing, too: we left the snack that the Vivid Girl needs for camp and that Mr. B had kindly packed while I was still pretending to be asleep this morning. We left that valuable item sitting on the kitchen counter. And we didn’t realize it until we actually got to camp, about half an hour later.
And by that time we were no longer early for camp, but right on time, which meant that there was no time to go back and get the snack. And the reason we went from being very early to having no extra time is this:
First we went to the fast food drive through that the Vivid Girl likes and she told me what to order. And what she likes to order now is actually a regular menu item, so I have to remember to also order the kids’ toy, for which they probably charge me extra even though they are already charging me full price for low quality food instead of the lower kids’ price for equally low quality food. And then the toy came and it was one that the Vivid Girl already has, from the last time she got fast food breakfast on the way to camp.
And maybe that is why when she unwrapped her food she decided she didn’t like it. She didn’t have to taste it to make this decision. She just looked at it. And she said it looked different. And she wrapped it up and set it aside and began to pout.
So I said, cheerfully and kindly,  “Well, did you taste it? maybe it looks funny but tastes okay?” Because now I was in the position of trying to encourage my child to eat food that I don’t want her to eat. Because that’s my parenting style.
So she tasted it, grudgingly, and then said it tasted pretty okay so she took two teeny tiny miniature bites of her full-sized low-quality fast-food breakfast sandwich, and then she said, petulantly, “But the meat looks kinda gray in the middle.”

She got me on that one. Even I am not going to try to convince my child to eat low-quality fast-food meat that I don’t even want her to eat in the first place if it’s GRAY. I mean, what even is it? Is it monkey or something? Why is it GRAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!

So I took a deep breath and drove in the direction of the Vivid Girl’s camp-of-the-week, and I asked, ever so sweetly, “Well, my darling daughter, what would you like to do about this situation?”

And the Vivid Girl threw back her head and wailed, “I DON’T KNOW!!!!”

So I said I would go to another, slightly higher-quality, fast-food drive-through on the way to camp so she could have something to eat before camp. Because you do need breakfast before camp, you know. Especially if you’re the Vivid Girl, and it’s your first ever acting camp, and you have been cast in the lead of the mini-musical, which is Annie, and which you have to be ready to perform in ONLY THREE MORE DAYS. So we went to the slightly higher-quality fast-food drive-through, which I had thought served breakfast, but it didn’t serve breakfast anymore. If ever. So finally I took the girl to a cafe where she was able to order real food. She chose a giant yogurt granola parfait with berries, of which she ate approximately three bites and then declared herself full.

By which time we were at camp, which is when we noticed that we had forgotten the snack, and she started to cry because now she was stuck either being late for camp or having no snack and what kind of terrible choice is that? So I took another deep breath, yoga-style, and pasted a smile on my tired twitchy face and said, “No, darling girl, light of my life, you go to camp on time and I will go to the nearest store and get you a snack and bring it back to camp so you will both be on time and have a snack.”

Which is what I did.

And so by 9:15 this morning, I had been to four different food sellers and had spent approximately $30 on 3 bites of food for a six-year-old. And I was exhausted. So I came home and did a few low-key things here until suddenly I noticed that it was 12:17 and I was running late for picking the Vivid Girl up from camp. Usually she wants me to have a snack all ready for her in the car when I pick her up, and today that would have been easy to do except that of course I ran out the door and left the snack that Mr. B packed sitting on the kitchen counter again.

And when I got to camp I was two minutes late, and there were three girls left, and one of them of course was the Vivid Girl. And she was crying. Because I was late. And in fact her teacher said she had just started crying, which makes sense because I had just started being late two minutes before. So I sat with the Vivid Girl and kissed her and comforted her and apologized for being late and assured her that I knew how much it upset her to be picked up late and reassured her that I will always come get her so there’s nothing to worry about. Then I dried her tears, and patted her hair, and gathered up all her stuff, including her street shoes, and her dance shoes, and her socks, and her script, and the bag that had contained the snack and which now contained a handful of soggy popcorn, an empty beef jerky package, and a half-full bottle of Vitamin Water with the cap off. The Vitamin Water spilled quickly filled the bag and the Vivid Girl sniffled and told me that when she had opened the jerky almost all the jerky had spilled out of the bag and so she hadn’t really had a very good snack at all.

And we walked out to the car and stowed all the stuff and  got buckled in. When I asked if she was ready to go, the Vivid Girl cheerfully said that she was. But as soon as I started driving, she started to sniffle and pout again. Once again I propped the corners of my mouth up into a sympathetic smile, turned my head, and said, “Oh, dearheart, lovely girl, whatever is the matter?”

And the Vivid Girl screwed up her eyes, opened her mouth wide, and howled, “I’m hungry!”

Okay, so you guys want recipes and all like that. Which makes sense, because it’s hard to take that crazy leap of faith and start cramming a bunch of green leaves into your blender when you are so excited about the otherwise fruity and delicious drink you are about to enjoy.

I don’t really use recipes.

But I do read them for inspiration, and I have also found some resources that have given me a fair amount of guidance about how to do this crazy thing of drinking my greens.

Be warned: many of the people who are inspired enough by the greatness of green smoothies to want to shout it from the Internet rooftops are a little…. well…. enthusiastic is a nice word…. totally wacked out is also fun to say. You’ve probably had some encounters with True Believers before. They’re delightful and informative, as I’m sure you know, and sometimes they can be wildly emphatic and dogmatic. It’s okay, though; it’s just vegetables. Lovely green and organic vegetables. (Though some True Believers claim –and I agree with them actually– that leafy greens should get their very own food group and not be considered vegetables at all. )

The first book I read that really turned me on to the green smoothie situation was Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. She has another book that I haven’t read yet called Green Smoothie Revolution: The Radical Leap Toward Natural Health. She is a raw foodist, and she and her family are not fooling around! They don’t just buy some bag of triple-washed spinach and stick a few leaves in with their bananas and berries: Oh No! They go tramping around in the woods looking for wild edibles, and there are videos on YouTube of her son Sergei doing just that. Anyway, if you do any reading about green smoothies you will definitely run across Victoria and Sergei. Green for Life has some smoothie recipes and is also just a great read if you are wanting to get fired up about going green.

I really like the greensmoothie.com web site too. It is wacky and has all kinds of crazy highlighting and outrageous health claims (which may very well all be true; what do I know?) but it also has good basic information about how to blend fruit and greens together to get a good smoothie. Here’s their basic recipe (note the highlighted title; they love highlighting over there at greensmoothie.com):

Basic Green Smoothie Recipe:

• 2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple or pear – blend first to form a tasty base,
• 1 vegetable fruit or a celery stalk – add next for extra minerals, e.g. summer squash or zucchini,
• One tray of organic baby greens like sunflower or salad mix from my Sprouter, or one packet of pre-washed organic greens, or a handful of farm greens or wild edibles.

And here are the week’s worth of green smoothies I posted on Facebook recently. Like I said, I don’t really measure quantities or use recipes per se, but I usually like the results pretty well. And if I don’t like it, I just drink it anyway and make a yummier smoothie the next day.

• Tuesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, collard greens, frozen cherries, and coconut water. Yum? well, it tastes healthy, for sure. And the rats…. they love it.
• Wednesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, honeydew melon, coconut water, arugula, frozen peaches. Tastes like spring! nom nom nom
• Thursday’s green smoothie: grapefruit, celery, Asian pear, amba hardar (mango ginger, from the Indian grocer), arugula, coconut water. Sweet and grassy! Hardcore and delicious!
• Friday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, cacao pods, banana, apple, dandelion greens, frozen strawberries. Color: scary dark olive green (scary? or sophisticated?). Mostly tastes like banana but has a seriously bitter afterbite. Not for sissies. Me, I’ll drink anything if it’s been run through the blender with a banana, so I’m okay.
• Saturday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, raw cacao powder, cinnamon, banana, frozen strawberries, almond milk, spring mix. OMG y’all this is GOOD! It has a very rich dark chocolate color and a perfectly sweet choco taste. This week’s winner!
• Sunday’s green smoothie: almonds, cacao pods, flax seeds, dates, oranges, romaine lettuce, almond milk, cinnamon. I wish it were colder, but it’s delicious! Very creamy and exotic. Lovely green color. If I want to drink any more of it, I will have to chase away Miss Kattie Rat: she is dipping her paws in and scooping up great handfuls.
• Monday’s green smoothie: honeydew, avocado, matcha (green tea powder), dulse (seaweed), coconut water, romaine. Speckled and refreshing. Tastes a bit like cold California roll soup, if there were such a thing. At first I thought it needed something sweet and crisp, like fresh mint, but now I am grooving on it.

My green smoothies are not always green. Sometimes they are red, sometimes they are brown, and sometimes they are the hideous green color that lies in the totally unappetizing range between red and brown.  For me, a nice color can be a nice benefit, but I haven’t found a real correlation between taste and color or anything like that.

Also! a lot of these green smoothie Internet people love to go on and on about two big lies:

1. you can put certain greens in a smoothie without affecting the taste at all, and
2. if you use those certain greens, your kid will drink a whole green smoothie and beg for more

I can taste pretty much every type of green I’ve tried. Probably the least conspicuous taste is baby spinach, which probably means that’s a good one to start with if you’ve never done green smoothies before. It also means you can put a whole bunch of spinach in there before it really affects the taste much. I read one web site that claimed green cabbage would be undetectable in a fruit smoothie and so I mixed up a big batch of strawberry cabbage delight and I will tell you now that the cabbage was totally detected. (I think it was the horrible taste of wet farts that gave it away.) And I don’t know about your child, but my child does not like to be in the same room with a green smoothie, and she has never consented to actually taste one. She doesn’t actually care much for fruit smoothies either, as a rule, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I am guessing that she is not the only kid who isn’t going to be eating two pounds of greens a day any time in this decade.

I have made a lot of smoothies with spinach, either raw (I buy the big bags of triple-washed spinach at Costco) or frozen. I also love to use arugula, because I love love love arugula. I love it so much I would like to write a waltz for it and dance it around the room. I also buy from Costco those big plastic bins of prewashed organic salad mix and I grab great handfuls of it and shove it down into the blender. Beyond that I have also tried collard greens (fresh or frozen), frozen mustard greens, cress, sprouts, dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, kale, chard, romaine, and various other lettuces. I always have big bags of frozen berries and fruit from Costco and I use whatever fresh fruit or melons we have sitting around as well. Bananas and avocados make things very creamy. To my surprise, cucumber seems to make things creamy as well. I often put in flax seed, cacao pods or powder, cinnamon, or turmeric. Sometimes I throw in some nuts, or sesame seeds, or tahini, or nut butter. I use nut milk, soy milk, water, coconut water, or juice. If I want it sweet, I’ll use dates or agave nectar or honey or molasses or xylitol. Our ice tastes funny to me so unless I use frozen fruit or frozen greens my smoothies tend to be a bit warmish and that’s not always good. If that happens I’ll usually stick it in the fridge and go take a shower or something.

I like posting about my smoothies and sharing recipes because that keeps me inspired and trying new things. Otherwise I get in a rut and the next thing you know I’ve eaten Cheerios for breakfast three days in a row. So, here’s my challenge/request to you. If you read this, and you make a green smoothie, post a comment telling what you put in it and how it was. And that’ll keep me going for awhile and give me time to figure out what I’m going to blog about next, and we’ll see how many posts I end up with this quarter, thanks to the power of green smoothies.

Lately I have been telling everyone on Facebook what I put in my green smoothies everyday. And the funny thing is that I have been getting a lot of comments and questions, and it seems like instead of being freaked out by the whole concept of green smoothies, a bunch of people are actually thinking something like, “Hey, that sounds like something I should get into.”

And so I thought it would be a good topic for a blog post, especially since it does seem to be about time for my quarterly update. (jeesh, where does the time go? well, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post for sure. Look for it in June or so.)

I have always liked greens. My dad grew up in Arkansas and so my sweet midwestern mother would valiantly try to recreate the meals he loved and remembered, with varying levels of success. Liver and onions, with the liver cooked until it is chewy and tastes like the tongue of a shoe soaked in blood: ewww, yuck. Stewed tomatoes and okra, with the okra so slimy that it is almost impossible to spoon out just one serving from the bowl: no, thank you. A mess of greens, cooked with bacon until the fat turns green and the greens are nearly vapor: yes, please, and I’ll eat my sister’s serving as well.

I have also always felt that every truly good day contains a salad. I had a friend whose family liked to tease their mother about how she could not eat a dinner that didn’t begin with a green salad, no matter where she was or who was paying. They bought her a t-shirt that said “Veni, Vidi, Veggie: I came, I saw, I had a salad.” As a salad lover myself, I wanted one of those shirts and I was sure that EVERYONE would want one. Obviously this was the next great t-shirt, the “I’m with stupid” of the 90s. Strangely, I’ve never seen another one. I guess they didn’t really catch on.

But even though I willingly ate greens (and sopped up the pot liquor with my cornbread) and loved salads, I still needed to be clued in to just how much I liked the green leafy stuff. The next clue came from a woman I met in a series of self-realization type seminars I did. One of the things we were working on at some point was figuring out how to care for ourselves so we could get out there and do all the unreasonable and powerful things we were supposed to be doing all the time. This woman said that she felt best when she ate greens at every meal. At every meal, y’all! My first reaction was, that’s weird. My second reaction, right on its heels, was How would you even know that? and my third reaction, the one that stuck, was I bet I’d feel better if I ate greens at every meal too. It has taken me years to even get close to managing anything like that. (There is one other thing that has stuck with me about this woman, and so I have to share it here because I probably won’t have any reason to bring her up again: she said the word “donkey” as if it rhymed with “monkey.” Seriously, isn’t that odd?)

Finally, what happened is that after my cancer treatments were pretty much finished I started wanting to eat the healthiest diet I possibly could. And I read lots of books that seemed at first to take a lot of the joy out of life. And some of these books are pretty fringey and weird, and some of them are pretty mainstream and well-researched, and a lot of them say the same thing. And one thing they say is that green leafy vegetables are the key to health. And this is not just in the yeah yeah yeah I know eat more vegetables way: some of these people advocate eating TWO POUNDS of green leafy vegetables EVERY DAY. And,  basically, because there is no way to really do that if you have to actually chew every bite, green smoothies are the way to go.

But then it turns out that green smoothies have their own benefits, aside from just making it even remotely possible to eat the amount of greens recommended. For one thing, when you blend the hell out of your greens, you take out some of the work of digestion. This is a boon for people who have difficulty digesting vegetables (many cancer patients fall into this category), people who have trouble chewing or eating large quantities of food (hello, cancer?), and people who simply want to absorb as much nutrition as possible from every ounce of their food.

When it comes to nutrition per ounce, greens are the hands-down winner. They have crazy high nutrient density, which basically means that 100 calories worth of green leafies has more nutrition than 100 calories worth of anything else. It is also a relatively large serving size of food so it’s filling and it can be a lot of work to eat. However, stick that stuff in a high-powered blender, sweeten it with fruit, and stick a straw in it, and you can slurp up more nutrients for breakfast than most people eat in a week.

I started making a green smoothie for breakfast almost every day. It was hard at first, partly because I burned out my trusty old Oster blender in the first week. Also because it is hard to figure out how much produce to buy, how to keep it all fresh, and what combinations will taste good. Luckily for me, the taste is not a huge issue because it turns out that I will drink almost anything that you can pour out of a blender and suck through a straw. And there are lots and lots of recipes available, both on line and in books. And, though I still can’t afford a Vita Mix, the rock star blender for the green smoothie lifestyle, I bought a Breville with a glass pitcher and have learned to live with it. (Many green smoothie lovers also advocate the Blendtec but I don’t like it because the pitcher contains dangerous plastics, and the website has a bunch of research claiming to prove that dangerous plastics are safe. I just hate that.)

Here’s the question everybody asks, and that I don’t know for sure how to answer: what benefits have I experienced from drinking green smoothies?

The first benefits were unexpected and totally clear: by the third day of green smoothies, my chapped lips were smooth and soft, and my fingernails seemed stronger. Soon after that I experienced a welcome change in bathroom habits. The other benefits are harder to define and explain, but I believe that drinking green smoothies is the single best thing I am doing for my health, and I would never want to give it up.

Here are some things I have noticed, that I think come from the greens:

• I don’t crave sweets anymore.
• I don’t experience blood sugar crashes like I always did before. If I get hungry, it’s not a crisis. I can wait a while to eat and hunger has become a pleasant sensation.
• I sleep better, and fall asleep more easily at a reasonable time.
• My teeth feel cleaner, my breath is fresher, and my sweat smells clean.
• My mood is more stable.
• I have a much greater sense of well-being.

In some ways, it’s vague. In other ways, it’s totally clear to me. I love the clean and  bitter taste of greens, I love knowing that I have had half my veggies for the day before 9 am, and I love thinking of all the precious nutrients being released from their cell walls and ready to enter my blood stream through my fancy hand-blown glass straw. It’s better than chemotherapy, I’ll tell you that! It’s virtue in a glass.

And the rats, the lovely pet rats, they really do love the green smoothies. And that gives me a good feeling, too, because I remember some study about how rats wouldn’t eat white flour, and I like to think they are attracted to what is good. It’s also just so cute to watch them pull themselves up on the edge of the glass and take a sip!

If you know me, you know that I love to eat. (Even if you don’t really know me, you may have been able to guess.) And what I love to eat is EVERYTHING. Especially if it’s wrapped in bacon, filled with cheese, or basted with its own juices. If it’s a roast turkey, I like to eat the crackly skin. If it’s a roast chicken, I like to break the bones and suck out the marrow. For a special restaurant meal, I love to be taken to the Salt Lick Bar-B-Q, where you can order family style and when you finish your platter of brisket, ribs, and sausage they will bring you another one! Or Fogo de Chao, where they give you a little round coaster, red on one side, green on the other; and when you turn the green side up a seemingly endless parade of gorgeous Brazilian men, each wearing gauchos and brandishing a skewer of meat, approach you and ask, “Would you like sirloin? Would you like lamb chop? Would you like butt roast?” until you are totally overwhelmed and swimming in your own juices and you slam the coaster back over to red so you can catch your breath and savor your meat. (All the while keeping your eye out for the guy with the filet, so you can flip back to green as soon as you catch his eye.)

I also like butter. And cream. And frozen custard. And the whole milk yogurt with the cream on top. I am a regular customer at a certain Indian buffet where I’m pretty sure they put crack in the meat balls. When I buy beef bones from our massage therapist who raises her own meat, I don’t just want the bones, I want the hooves. And the liver. And maybe the heart. (But not the brain, or the tongue…. cause that’s just gross!)  (unless maybe you have a good recipe?)

I also eat vegetables, and fruit, and grains or whatever. More than once in my life I have eaten so many orange and red vegetables that I have turned a bit yellow: once when I was a baby and my mother rushed me to the doctor convinced I had jaundice, and then again as an adult when I saw myself in the mirror under fluorescent lights and gasped at how very yellow I was.

So, up til now, I have not exactly been the poster child for moderation. (Don’t even get me started on chocolate!) Or, you know, healthy choices. Though I have actually always been interested in nutrition, and in supporting local farmers and finding the best organic pasture-raised animal products. And I have also always eaten a lot of salad (with blue cheese! and bacon!) and more collard greens and okra than your average person. I also got through pregnancy with the aid of a smoothie so healthy even my hoola-boola midwife was impressed when I told her what all I put in it.

In other words, I have tried to eat healthfully, more or less, but I have not hesitated to pursue full-out high-fat pleasure when it presented itself. Which was probably more often than it really should have.

And then I got cancer.

And the thing about having cancer, or at least one thing about it, is that at some point you are going to wonder why it happened to you. And you are going to think that maybe you did something to cause it… or maybe you just failed to do something to prevent it…. or maybe there’s something you could do now to prevent it from happening again. And if you’re like me, you’re going to wear yourself (and everybody else) out researching that last part of the question, which to me is the only one that even seems possible to answer or to make any difference at this point. When I was in treatment, I talked a bit about this stuff in my support group, specifically about how to figure out what to eat to prevent cancer from recurring, and my support group leader said that “cancer treatment is the worst time to make major lifestyle changes or major changes in your diet.” And this was kind of hard for me to get, at that point, though now I definitely see the wisdom. (Also, for getting me through chemotherapy with any shred of dignity I would now like to thank chocolate milkshakes. I couldn’t have done it without them!)

But now that I am pretty much out of treatment I decided it was time to find some answers. I had seen a nutritionist during treatment, who advised me to eat low-glycemic-index foods, to eat lots of protein (140 grams a day!), to always always have some protein whenever I had any carbs at all, to eat no bananas or other tropical fruit EVER (or melons), to eat nothing but protein and vegetables the day before chemo and then as soon as they started the drip to eat all the carbs I wanted for twenty-four hours. I went home and researched all the advice he gave me, and it was all based on scientific stuff. And more importantly, when I tried the protein/carb chemo routine I felt much better and had fewer side effects. I also lost some weight during treatment (many breast cancer patients actually GAIN weight, how unfair!) but not enough to be dangerous, and I stayed healthy enough to keep receiving treatment. So I called that a success at the time, but then when I got off chemo I started to gain back some of the weight I had lost (probably a sign of health but not the one I was really hoping for!) and I started to really miss bananas and to be really really tired of forcing myself to eat so much protein.

I also was feeling pretty worried about recurrence, and wanting to do whatever I could to prevent it. Most importantly to me, I was getting tired of worrying about what I was eating. And I was exhausted by the prospect of the cancer coming back and me feeling guilty because I hadn’t done whatever I could to prevent it. I just did not want to find out I had cancer and then spend my precious time thinking, “If only I had stopped eating those ice cream sandwiches!!!!” or whatever. So, basically I wanted some control over the uncontrollable, and I wanted some control over my own future mind.

So I started to research what to eat to prevent cancer. Here is an incomplete list of some of the books that I read:

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Joel Fuhrman and Mehmet Oz

Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler

The Spectrum: A Scientifically Proven Program to Feel Better, Live Longer, Lose Weight, and Gain Health by Dean Ornish M.D.

The China Study by Campbell T. Colin

And now I am tired of listing the books, of which there have been many more, and it’s not like I’m recommending that you read these books, which in many ways have only made me sad. So instead of listing more I will just tell you some of the more interesting things I learned from them.

• When possible, eat organic. It really does make a difference. Organic food is more nutritious. Also, kids who eat organic food have fewer chemicals in their blood, or urine, or something. Seriously, it’s worth it.
• If organic is not available, but the food is good for you, eat it anyway. This applies mostly to fruits and vegetables, and beans and grains I guess. The benefits of the food really do outweigh the negatives of the way it was raised. Good to know, right?
• Eat more fruits and vegetables. You already knew that, right? Actually, here’s the important thing: eat MOSTLY fruits and vegetables, of which most are vegetables, of which most are green and leafy.
• Making small changes to your diet will result in small changes to your health. If you want large changes in your health, you are going to have to make large changes in your diet.
• Nutritional research is notoriously difficult to perform and difficult to analyze. Most researchers do not have enough evidence to prove anything, and they probably never will. If you want scientific certainty to guide your choices, you’re probably out of luck.
• The diet that is best for preventing heart disease is the same as the diet that is best for preventing diabetes, cancer, and other ailments. In most cases.
• And here’s the kicker: there’s plenty of research to suggest quite strongly that the risk of disease goes way way down as people consume fewer animal products. All other things being equal, or as equal as possible.

Well, shucks. Based on all this, I have already made quite a few changes, and I am working on making some more. During some parts of my nutrition reading marathon, I was despondently convinced that I would have to become a raw food vegan or something equally terrible. Moderation has never been my strong suit, remember. But as I read more, and thought more, and tried to gather some kind of consensus from all this information I found a more middle-ish path. On a very successful day, I eat mostly vegetables and fruit, beans, whole grains, some nuts and seeds. I eat some food cooked and some raw, in salads or smoothies. I aim to have more and more days like those. On the other days, I might have some cheese, or even an organic burger! I still have ice cream with my daughter, occasionally. I have been known to eat a cupcake here and there. It has been easier than I thought it would be, and I do feel better most of the time. I’ve lost some weight, and my tumor markers went down a bit.

But even though I am now mostly a vegetarian, and mostly a vegan one at that, I still cling fiercely to the idea of myself as a person who eats everything. I still get to be an omnivore, just not all the time.

We have had a series of lovely beautiful amazing fall days this week, just the kind of weather that people move here for…. even though, ha ha on them, it only lasts about five weeks in the fall and two weeks in the spring. Still, it is glorious. Blue and breezy and gold.

The Vivid Girl and I like to celebrate this kind of weather by making chai and having tea parties. Messy, messy honey-sticky tea parties.

And so I will share the link to my bestest chai recipe so you can round up some Vivid Girls and have a messy tea party of your own. (Also I will reveal that for extra yumminess I often add a few cardamom pods… Divine!)