Green Smoothies!

I’ve had so many people ask me about my green smoothies, and ask for recipes, so I thought I should just make a blog post about it. My smoothies are different every day, so it’s hard to just throw out a recipe, but I’ll try. The important thing is to keep adding fruit until you can’t taste the greens anymore. Just keep throwin that fruit in there!

Today’s green smoothie recipe:

2 handfuls of spring mix (or spinach, or romaine lettuce, or kale, or swiss chard, or anything!)
1 banana, peeled and broken in half
8 strawberries
10 raspberries
2 handfuls of blueberries (I can’t grab very many in a handful, so maybe only one handful)
1/3 C water

This is what it looked like

(please ignore my messy apartment in the background)



Blend until it's all mixed and smooth. Add 4-6 ice cubes and blend again.

Eat! (but rinse the blender first-cleaning up after dried smoothie is ridiculously awful)

Alliterations

I have been reading a lot of blogs about interior decorating, restoring vintage furniture, and DIY decorating. Amidst all the different preferred brands of paint, sand paper, and the constant battle between Lowe’s and Home Depot, they all agree on one thing: start with a plan. You can’t just say ‘I want to decorate my home’ and start buying random stuff, you have to have a plan. You have to get some inspiration, do some research, choose color schemes, decide what furniture you actually need; otherwise you end up with a bunch of great stuff that is completely non-functional…

Is interior decorating really any different than eating raw food? No! (Haha actually prolly they’re way different, but whatever, just pretend)

When starting a new diet/lifestyle, you can’t just say ‘I want to eat healthy’ and suddenly you’re started. You have to have a plan. A color scheme. A foundation for your food choices. When my mom had cancer, she spent hours and hours reading about wheatgrass, sprouts, raw food, the Macrobiotic diet, Gerson therapy, and countless other books/articles about health and alternative medicine. She spent MORE hours reading the scriptures, looking for things that Heavenly Father wants us to know about food. The one she read most often was Doctrine and Covenants Section 89, called ‘The Word of Wisdom’.

When looking for ways to start, I decided my mom was a pretty good source, so that's where I started too. This is my foundation for food, my word of wisdom, my body's basic building block of.....I honestly can't think of another good 'b' word....I'm sure you get the idea. I thought of one: Beauty! My body's basic building block of beauty! HA!

The moral of the post is:  Choose your foundation and roll with it!

Changes

I feel a little bit like I should preface the blog change. We’ve been trying to change a lot of things in our lifestyle lately, and even though I know people will think it’s weird, I feel like I might as well blog about it. I also don’t want to be one of those pushy people who is always confrontational, attacking other people’s lifestyles simply because they’ve chosen a different one. Mostly this is just becoming my place to write about what I want. That’s all.

Since I was probably 14, I’ve had this vision in my head of what my life will be like 50 years from now. I will travel, grocery shop, cook, taste food, fly planes, ride horses, shoot guns, climb mountains, hang glide, sky dive, ride in hot-air balloons, wear pretty shoes, have a garden, take road trips, spring-clean every month, go to the temple, say prayers at night, argue about the Sunday School lesson, go walking, people-watch, sleep with the windows open and a fan on, listen to the birds in the morning, listen to thunderstorms at night, and more, all with my best friend in the whole world.

Even though I know it probably sounds a little bit crazy, I just want to be like my grandparents, who did EVERYTHING together. I never saw them without each other, and I remember once my mom talked about them and how they were such good friends, they did everything together just because they could. They went grocery shopping together, went walking together, travelled everywhere together, made food together, and talked to their grandchildren together. I think the only thing my grandpa did by himself was fix electrical appliances.

Laying aside the difficulties of actually trying to be friends with my husband now that I have one (they always say the first year is the hardest, so maybe as of Saturday it’ll be easier…) when I picture myself and my best friend in 50 years, we’re still both able to walk, able to travel, able to think quickly, able to move quickly, and alive. I want to live as long as I can, and I want to really LIVE until I die. And I want to be with my best friend until I die.  I really don’t want to spend any lengthy amount of time without him. Ever.

My family has a history of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. I have watched several family members come face to face with death, and have to dramatically change their lifestyle in order to stay alive. Usually, their wives are the driving force behind their lifestyle change. I decided a few months ago that I don’t want to wait to change my lifestyle until I have to do it out of fear. I want to do it now. I want to keep my buddy around for as long as possible, and I want the time to be fun, active, and full of life.

When we got married, Jubal and I both gained weight. I haven’t gained a lot, I can still fit in my old clothes, they just don’t look quite as good. Jubal gained a lot over our first summer, but lost almost all of it during the winter when he started exercising. But I worried. If we have a hard time keeping off weight when we’re only 22, it is gonna be ridiculously hard when we’re older, especially as our lives get crazier, as I have kids, as we spend less and less of our time running up the stairs to our apartment when we forget things, and walking across campus as fast as we can while looking idiotic because we’re late for class. I took a hard look at our lifestyle, and identified the things that are really keeping us from being the best bodies we can be.

And together, we are changing. It’s not about losing weight, it’s not about being attractive, it’s not about moving to Oregon so we can be around people who are more ‘environmentally aware.’ It’s about wanting to be around, get around, and stay around. Ya know how you always see people with super nice cars, or super nice houses, and think ‘doesn’t that suck, that we have to wait to have the things we want until we’re old and can’t even use or clean them anymore?’ Well, since with our line of work, I KNOW it’ll be a long time til we can have anything nice (if ever) so I’d better just try to be in darn good shape when that time comes.