The Start

A little over a year ago, I was pregnant with my 5th child.  I found myself with an offer from a friend to come over and visit.  It was 7 at night and I was nauseous and exhausted being in my first trimester.  I decided that I needed to get out of the house.  We had just moved and my husband had made a career change which took him to the middle east.  We had moved back home and I needed to start our new lives.  Little did I know that the evening would change the rest of my life.

When I arrived at my friend's house, the conversation was on nutrition.  Through the course of the evening, I heard many claims and theories about nutrition that disagreed with much of what I had learned to this point.  I was most interested in the idea of converting our diets slowly from the standard American diet consisting of approximately 20% protein, where meat was our main course, to a 5% meat  and 60-80% raw diet.  I was baffled about where to start and how to make these changes successful.  However, one big name stuck with my that night... Green Smoothie Girl.

Some months passed and I tried my hand at green smoothies.  I did a little research to try and add green smoothies to my diet.  My friends claimed that 1 qt of green smoothies a day would change my life.  At this point, I was in my second trimester and feeling much better, but the day in and day out of life was very draining.  So, I made the attempt at green smoothies.  I quickly quit that habit.  I found them very gross.  I was at a loss at to how to make them correctly.  At this point, I was just throwing in any green I could buy at the grocery store.  Lettuce, spinach, kale, collards, broccoli, and an apple with a banana.  Oh the combinations were horrendous!  So, I left it at that.

The idea to change the diet of my family kept coming back to me.  I was haunted by the need to provide good nutrition for my children.  I was quickly approaching the worst shape of my life.  I needed to change.  This time, I looked up that name that I remembered from that night so many months ago... greensmoothiegirl.com.  I found that greensmoothiegirl.com offered a 12 steps to whole foods course and I was interested.  I saved for a few months to be able to order the course and take this step to changing our lives.  We have since been changing one thing about our diet a month in order to make a lasting change in our lives.  We are far from perfect though.  Perfection comes with practice though, right?

I have been amazed at the changes.  There have been some uncomfortable side effects but we have also discovered a wide variety of amazing combinations from our plant kingdom!  I hope that here I can document some of the changes we have made.  I hope to add some ups and downs, document the positive changes in our lives and compile a database of "staple" recipes made from whole foods and most anyone will love.