Missy Diggs

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!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under Day to Day, Living With Cancer, Tasty Goodness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.