Juice Feasting™ | The Preparation Course
The Four Means to Get Your Greens by David Rainoshek, M.A.
Those who think they have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness. — Edward Stanley (1826-1893) from The Conduct of Life
ACCESSIBILITY is the foundation of our approach to the transformative practice of eating Deep Foods, nutrition, and cuisine. For the last two decades we have eaten, studied, and taught tens of thousands of people about whole foods, vegetarian, vegan, raw/live vegan, and integrated nutrition and food preparation. Through this experience we have developed the Four Means to Get Your Greens.
What you are about to access is a real-world green baseline for any dietary approach up and down the Spectrum of Diet that can be made with no culinary expertise, only using a knife, cutting board, high speed blender, and a mesh bag.
There is an immense amount of nutritional science, technological innovation, superfood nutrition, trial and error, and years of experience behind what may seem on its face to be a simple and straightforward way of eating.
Many conscious eaters beyond ourselves had to experiment and make do with less than the best information, equipment, and foods before we reached the incredible point we are at now where we can eat a Four Means to Get Your Greens approach with joy, confidence, and ease.
You may not have a lot of time to be in the kitchen, but you want stellar health, and you would rather take time to eat life-affirming cuisine than to suffer the personal or planetary effects of eating anything less than your full nutritional potential. You know what your nutritional needs are, and after hearing about all the nutrient dense superfoods available, the essential fats you want to include, the 1-2 lbs of leafy greens you will eat each day, etc., you may be looking for a way to do all of this that takes minutes instead of hours, the flick of a switch instead of a culinary degree.
You are in luck. Eating the best nutrient-dense live plant-source only cuisine that will feed you for your whole life is embarrassingly and brilliantly easy. It honors the best nutritional research from Whole Foods, Vegetarian, Vegan, and Raw Vegan perspectives on health, and simultaneously allows for your own intuition about what you need in your cuisine to individualize your diet.
The way to understand how to do this is in terms of the 1-2 lbs of leafy greens you need to eat each day, which until a few moments before reading this chapter may have sounded impossible.
The Four Means approach can be done with basic kitchen utensils such as a knife, cutting board, spoon, spatula, nut mylk bag, and a high speed blender like a Vitamix.
Preparation and clean-up takes minutes, does not involve complicated recipes, is infinitely variable, nutrient dense, super delicious, and completely portable for those of us with active lives, which is everyone.
One to two pounds of green leafy produce is the fundamental groundwork for a low-glycemic, nutrient-dense cuisine that will help you eat fat and fruit in amounts that will not create hypoglycemia or constipation, two major challenges to most people new to eating a living plant-based diet.
In my nutrition practice, I have found that all people need at minimum 1 pound of leafy greens each day, and many do well with as much as 2 pounds or more. This amount can vary based on whether you are a slow or fast oxidizer, or how new you are to eating a plant-source only diet. If you are new to plant foods, you may do well getting most of your greens using one of the blended/liquefied Means. Determining the appropriate amount of greens for you will be a matter of personal circumstances such as your age, activity types and levels, time of year, health challenges and goals, and where your Center of Gravity is on the Spectrum of Diet.
It is important to understand that by eating 1-2 lbs of nutrient-dense leafy greens each day in your diet, you ensure that you do not eat too much fat, or too much fruit, either of which, or the two in excess as a combination, will create poor blood sugar balance and control. Let’s get into this balanced, fast food approach to eating the best cuisine your body, mind, spirit, time constraints, and busy schedule have ever experienced.
ONE: SALAD
(You can eat your greens)
TWO: SOUP
(You can make Blended Green Soups)
THREE: SMOOTHIES
You can make Blended Green Smoothies)
FOUR: JUICE
(You can juice your greens into Green Vegetable Juice)
This food travels easily in a Tupperware or Quart-sized glass jar, can be taken on the go just about anywhere, and all Four Means can be prepared in advance at home, ready for you at every point in your day. Before we outline what a day of eating using the Four Means approach looks like, let’s briefly look at the Four Means themselves.
ONE: SALAD
EATING YOUR GREENS
This is the age-old way of eating a plant-sourced diet. Make yourself a large salad with all the fixings, including kalamata olives and powdered dulse sea vegetable. Also add crackers, perhaps a raw or cooked soup, a side of fish, and you are good to go. Eating this way, you can realistically expect to eat ½ lb of leafy greens at a meal.
The trick here on individualizing your diet is to really eat at least ½ lb of greens, and to add to the fullness of this meal with the best salad dressing ever: GUACAMOLE. By making guacamole, you get a guaranteed fresh fat, every time, that always tastes fantastic.
TWO: SOUP
BLENDING GREENS AND SAVORY VEGETABLES
Soups are infinitely variable, and their great advantage is the possibility of adding things in that you would never consider eating on their own, such as whole ginger root and multiple cloves of garlic. Also, because the entire meal is blended, it is more bioavailable (the blender pre-chews it for you) as long as you chew your soup as you eat it. This form of blended salad travels well, and can be made in the morning before heading out for your day. We are not necessarily recommending that all of your meals be blended as chewing has been shown to significantly increase serotonin production and eating whole foods helps to exercise the strength and fire of the digestive system. Therefore, when eating blended soups, chew! This goes for smoothies and juices, as well.
A blended green soup made in a high speed blender has at its base a fat, such as sesame tahini, olives, and avocado made by hand into guacamole (make this on the side, add your blended Green Soup to the chunky guacamole). Then you are adding in everything that you would have in a plant-sourced salad: leafy greens, cucumbers, celery, tomato, peppers, etc. Next we include sea vegetables such as dulse, arame, wakame, sea palm, and hijiki. Finally, spices such as whole garlic, whole ginger root, cayenne, Himalayan crystal salt or celtic sea salt, mustard, and fresh or dried herbs of your choice. Add about ½ cup of water to your blender full of nutrient dense green soup ingredients, and make your soup. As you eat it, know that the nutrient dense nutrition you are getting out of this one bowl of soup is immense. During the winter, you can gradually heat these soups by setting your stove on the lowest possible setting, stirring constantly, and measuring the heat of your pot until it reaches 105 degrees F. Pour and serve immediately. Eating greens this way, you will find yourself with about ½ lbs of greens in your bowl!
Here is my best Green Soup Recipe. It’s basically a hearty salad blended and added to a bowl of guacamole!
Leafy Greens, your choice (I like spinach and parsley)
Kalamata Olives, pitted
Hemp Seeds
Raw Garlic Cloves
Raw Ginger Root
Kelp Sheet or Granules
Rib Celery
Hot peppers or Tabasco to taste
Water
BLEND for 20-30 seconds
Then add to a bowl of chunky, hand made guacamole, and enjoy. Don’t blend avocado, it gets too frothy... make the chunky guacamole :)
Optional items: other veggies, Spirulina, whole cashews or hemp seeds on top...
THREE: SMOOTHIE
BLENDED GREENS AND FRUIT
The key to Green Smoothies is to achieve a sweet taste with ample amounts of leafy greens.
Generally speaking, you are blending 1/2lbs of leafy greens of your choice with fruit, spirulina and chlorella, a green superfood powder complex such as Vitamineral Green, a cup of water or coconut water, and you’re good to go, as this recipe travels well in a quart-sized canning jar.
Smoothies for Diabetics and Former Diabetics. The key to anti-diabetogenic green smoothies is to achieve a sweet taste without the use of high glycemic index fruits. For the purposes of maintaining proper blood sugar as a diabetic or former diabetic, this means using super-low glycemic chia seeds with your greens, in conjunction with sweet spices such as cardamom and stevia. On a moderate-gylcemic index cuisine, a low-glycemic fruit such as blueberries can be added in limited quantities. The way to make a blended green smoothie with chia is to add one cup of chia seeds to a blender of greens, add water to desired consistency, and blend a smoothie. For great recipes, see the Rainbow Green World Cuisine recipe section which follows the Four Means.
Green Smoothies make an excellent morning or evening meal or a snack in between any of meals. Like every one of The Four Means to Get Your Greens, they are very versatile in your diet.
FOUR: JUICE
GREENS AND VEGETABLES
It is easy to juice a full pound of leafy greens into a quart of Green Vegetable Juice, combined with celery, cucumber, lemon, Jerusalem artichokes, garlic, ginger, cayenne, and many other delicious juiced ingredients. Green Juice travels, and makes for a great breakfast, mid-morning snack, afternoon pick-me-up, or even a hydrating, nutrient-dense dinner that won’t put you to sleep, or keep you up at night with indigestion.
You can afford to miss the fiber on this juice, as a cuisine of living plant foods will supply your digestive system with adequate fiber throughout the day, provided that you are also practicing the first three of the Four Means.
Equipment needed is your high-speed blender, knife and cutting board, nut mylk bag, and a glass quart-sized container to carry your green juice. Drink within 8 hours for optimum freshness.
