Sarah's "Extreme Green" Challenge

I have an announcement to make. I am about to embark on a nutritional challenge that I feel in my bones will be life-changing.

I am about to go WAY outside my comfort zone around eating healthily, and commit to staying there for at least a month.

But first, a confession.

I'm not proud to admit this and it's not clever, but...

I am a REAL baby when it comes to consuming anything dark green.

Sure, I can eat a mountainous spinach salad as long as it’s liberally adorned with guacamole or something similarly creamy and highly seasoned. I've long been adding a token handful of greens to my staple cucumber-celery juices. Thanks to these virtuous nods to the importance of mineral-rich foliage in the diet, I used to think I had the greens base fully covered.

But I recently discovered that what I considered to be copious quantities of greens was far from that. I first wrote about this topic here (it’s near the bottom of the entry), and ever since then the idea of experimenting with extreme amounts of green has been in the back of my mind. 

It all started when I was introduced to the work of the amazing David Rainoshek, promoter of the concept of juice feasting, and one of the world’s leading authorities on that and other super-nutrition-related subjects. David advises juice feasters to consume at least 2lb of leafy green vegetables each day.

That’s 900g, folks!

Bags of green leafies that you buy in the supermarket or grocery store are generally around 100g-200g. My “mountainous” spinach salads? Anything from 100g-150g. And that, bar the odd sprinkling of herbs here and there, would be it for the day.

Since I heard about this I have upped the green ante, but I am still getting nowhere near David's target on a daily basis. And I can't help wondering how different it would feel to reach it consistently. So....for the next 30 days I will be experiencing life on extreme amounts of green, by committing to meeting David's target every day (or at least having a darn good shot at it and getting there most of the time!)

So, to put this in context, you know the ginormous bags of spinach they sell at your local store? They're probably around 200g, so I'll be consuming the equivalent of 4.5 of those every day.

To do this will be to leave my comfort zone far behind.   

Like most raw food fans I habitually go heavy on the sugar and fat and light on the dark greens.

But my energy levels have been heading south in recent months, together with my concentration, plus I've been suffering from killer cravings. I can identify reasons for all of this, which I will go into in a later post, but for now, the point is: this is a GREAT time to experiment with the super-green, super-nutrient-rich way of eating.

I will be reporting on my experiment here as frequently as possible. As well as documenting what I'm eating/blending/juicing and how I'm feeling, I also have a fount of info to share on why dark greens are so great for you and the role of optimum raw nutrition in helping YOU reach your potential. 

For now, THE RULES. I'm not great with rules, but that changes right here, right now as I check myself into my very own extreme green boot camp : )

1. I will consume at least 900g of green leafy vegetables a day (more on the definition of "green leafy vegetable" below).

2. In order to make this doable, every time I have a meal or a snack, it will need to involve AT LEAST 100g of green stuff, and...

3. ...any time I plan to consume something that is foliage-free (like my SubLime Green Mousse, which I couldn't possibly bring myself to degrade with half a blender full of leafy matter) I’ll need to get the green goodness in FIRST.

4. Since this is about leafy green vegetables, such things as green peppers and courgettes (zucchini) do not pass muster. After some deliberation I have decided to count lettuce of all kinds, for the sake of variety. (I am unsure whether David Rainoshek would approve, and I will ask him as soon as possible and take his advice on that). I have also decided to include sprouts in my 900g (as they are, if anything, more nutritious than leafy greens), as well as seaweed (ditto). All of these are alkalizing, mineral-rich, protein-rich, low-fat, low-sugar superfoods. 

5. Seaweed is a dried product, so I will be counting the rehydrated weight. A quick bit of Googling today revealed that nori seaweed, which I ate at lunchtime, increases in volume by ten times when rehydrated. Meaning that - joy of joys - my duo of nori sheets at a barely registering 5g going by the dried weight, can be counted as 50g : )

The experiment began this morning and despite feeling I have consumed nothing but green goodness all day, at 6:30pm I am only half way to my daily target. Yiiikes. I am going to have to make the most monstrous (in every sense of the word) of juices before I go out this evening...

But maybe, just maybe, by the end of this month I will find this easy.

OR will I never want to look at anything green again?   

Call me crazy, call me obsessed, but I LOVE experiments like this.

Why? Because our bodies are the vehicles through which we experience everything around us, on all levels: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. And there is so much we can do to influence how it feels to exist in our bodies, on all of those levels. 

Socrates was not wrong when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

In my book, never to experiment with giving your body and mind the fuel they need to truly thrive is to live a truly unexamined life, and also to live way below your potential. It is to short change yourself and to settle for less, way less, than you're capable of.

First daily diary entry coming soon!