Humans are instinctively driven towards instant pleasure and away from instant pain. For this simple reason, it’s pretty hard to make raw green veggies a permanent part of life. 

They’re not exactly painful to eat, but there are tons of other foods that are way more fun. And even though these other foods may be vastly inferior in their offers of vitality and life expectancy, we prefer them because of our primitive drive towards instant pleasure. 

That’s the challenge we must overcome to make raw green veggies a permanent and natural part of our diet.

Let’s talk strategy

Recall that permanent adoption of a healthy food requires only three elements: great taste, high practicality and reasonable cost. 

In this case, taste is the key challenge. One effective strategy for getting around this problem is to combine these veggies with very delicious foods. Yes, drowning a few spinach leaves in an enormously rich cheese sauce will erode most of the benefits, but there are plenty of other options. 

My personal favorite is having raw spinach leaves with lasagne. These leaves work just as well with scrambled egg. Get a pack of spinach leaves and try them with various good meals. You might be as pleasantly surprised as I was 🙂 

But the most effective strategy for getting a regular fill of raw green veggies is the green drink recipe given below. This drink is a very practical way to regularly consume a variety of raw green veggies and it tastes at least reasonably good.  

It’s very important to make the drink in bulk as outlined below. Expecting yourself to go through the process of making a fresh green smoothie every day borders on self-delusion. The green drink needs to be waiting for you in the fridge to be consumed with minimal effort. 

Green drink recipe

This recipe takes about 45 minutes to make enough green drink for three months. The green drink is frozen in small plastic containers that can be defrosted on demand. Once defrosted, it will keep in the fridge for about 4 days. 

Equipment:

• A smoothie maker with at least 1 liter capacity
• About 15 plastic containers with a capacity of about 300 ml each 

Ingredients:

• 400 g of spinach
• 200 g of kale
• One bunch of celery
• Six cucumbers
• Six apples
• One medium size ginger root
• Turmeric, cayenne pepper or any other spices
• 1.2 liter 100% orange juice with fruit pieces

Guidelines:

1. Wash all the ingredients.
2. Chop up the celery, cucumbers, apples and ginger into large chunks.
3. Separate the chopped ingredients, spinach and kale into six equally sized and evenly mixed piles.
4. One by one, put the piles through the smoothie maker with 200 ml of orange juice and some spices according to your taste.
5. After each batch, pour the resulting green smoothie into the small plastic containers for freezing. Only fill each container about 80% to avoid a mess from expansion of the liquid in the fridge. 

That’s it. For 15 minutes per month, you can have a permanent supply of highly convenient green goodness 🙂 I’ve been doing this consistently for the past eight years and some family members also found it quite easy to incorporate into their lives. 

I dilute the final product with more orange juice before drinking, but if you can drink it straight up, so much the better. 

Give this a go and see what happens 🙂