The Healthy Green Drink Diet (12 page)

some extra flavor and nutrition.

The Green Drink Diet

Think
Supplement
, Not
Diet

Most diets will have you rummaging through your refrigerator and cabinets looking for “bad” foods to fill

your garbage can with. This won’t. In fact, keep those Twinkies, I guarantee you’ll throw them out of your

own accord once your body adopts the green drink.

Here’s what you do:

Tomorrow morning, before breakfast, try one of the green drinks in this book.

Do it again the next day before breakfast. And again the day after that until a full week has gone by.

That’s it, you ask? That’s it. After the first week of drinking green, if your body doesn’t feel better,

stronger, and crave the nutrition it provides, well then no book or amount of steps is going to convince

you. But I believe in the power of what you can feel, and there’s no doubt that the green drink makes you

feel better than you ever have before.

I often find myself thinking (despite the morbidity) that I eat a particular meal or food item because when

my peers are trading in their walking shoes for bed-pans and suffering from clogged arteries, cancer—

laden organs, and old-age, I’ll be cartwheeling into my golden years, disease-free and alive as ever. This

thinking is not only gloomy but downright wrong in terms of inspiring repetitive healthy eating practices—

I should instead focus on the measurable facts, and so should you. Although living longer and preventing

diseases like cancer are fantastic bonuses to maintaining a healthy diet, they cannot provide short-term,

measurable results—and let’s face it, in our digital world of instant gratification, we want something that

we can see or feel
now
.

Imagine eating an entire head of broccoli, a handful of blueberries, a spoonful of raw almond butter, and

an apple all whipped up into a delicious smoothie… you can’t
feel
your body
not
getting cancer; you can’t
feel
your life span lengthening… but you can feel your energy levels increase, your focus intensify,

your hunger satiate, and your body shift into overdrive—ready to take on any task you can throw at it.

These are measurable, motivational, and gratifying results that you feel almost instantly—and it’s all you

need to make eating healthier a core component of your diet. Best of all, this is easy; gulping down a huge

percentage of your daily nutrients in one fell swoop is a lot less time consuming than trying to put together

and then
eat
an enormous salad.

Making Your Green Drink:

Equipment and How-To

The single most worthwhile purchase I have ever made (aside from my iMac) is my Blendtec Total

Blender; it’s powerful and looks fantastic. I recommend either a Vitamix or Blendtec for the serious

green drinker, and since I’ve owned both I can honestly say the differences are negligible. Although, if for

some reason you need to blend a few golf balls or a brick, go with the Blendtec (www.willitblend.com).

As for juicing, I own a Breville Ikon Juice extractor. It’s a centrifugal juicer, which means it grinds the

fruits and veggies and spins the juice through a mesh strainer at very high speeds. This causes a bit more

oxidation that the purist might scoff at, but since I drink the juice right away, it doesn’t pose a problem for

me. Most juicers on the market are centrifugal.

There are also masticating juicers which chew the fruit and vegetable fibers at lower speeds, causing less

oxidation and producing more enzymes, vitamins, and fiber. The best type of juicer is called a triturating