Believe me, I’ve tried not to talk about this.

But for the past month or so, I’ve been drinking a green smoothie every day…and I have become somewhat addicted, I’m afraid. I hate talking about it because–well, I’m all too aware that people (and by people, I mean family members) are rolling their eyes at me. I know what they’re thinking: this is just the latest of my little obsessions.

Okay, I admit that I do have obsessions. A few years ago, for five straight months I woke up every morning and ate half a can of pineapple. I can’t remember why this was a good idea, but it had something to do with getting enough chromium, so the pineapple had to come out of a can. Fresh pineapple, delicious though it might be, wasn’t an option. We had stacks and stacks of cans in our pantry. One day I decided I didn’t want anymore.

I’ve also had some hair issues (read: obsessions) from time to time. I’m the only person in our family with blond hair, and as anyone with blond hair can tell you, the color is NEVER precisely right. It’s always either too gray-looking (hairdressers call that “ashy”) or else it’s too gold (“brassy” to the professionals), and sometimes, defying all logic, it can be both at the same time. You can have ashy hair when you catch a glimpse of it in the rear view mirror of your car, and then the most horrifyingly GOLD hair in the bathroom mirror. When that happens to you, you NEED family members to assess and report on what THEY see. It’s difficult to keep them from backing away from you, though, when you attempt to explain what’s going on and impress upon them the importance of their evaluations. At times, they will run out of the room to escape your questioning.

And I’m not even scratching the surface of my health interests. For instance, I was once told by my yoga teacher that I am totally misaligned in ways that were going to lead to pain, bad knees and sloping shoulders–and so he recommended that I perform an exercise which involved lying motionless on the floor for forty-five minutes a day with my legs at right angles on a chair, and my head perfectly forward and my arms at my sides. Forty-five minutes of motionless lying about! I wasn’t even permitted to fall asleep, which would at least be a good use of the time, because then I would collapse myself into my old misalignments and grow even more crooked! And I couldn’t use the time to make phone calls or even watch educational things on television, because all you can really do when lying motionless on your back is stare at the stains on the ceiling.

But I did this–for a while, at least. My family members were quite amused. But no one joined me in this attempt to become a better aligned person. And now that I have quit doing it, they are polite enough not to bring it up again. It’s been filed away in the catalog of my oddities, I’m sure.

But this brings us to green smoothies. Despite what you might be thinking, green smoothies aren’t green TEA smoothies. They are green because that’s the color of the smoothie itself, since it it is chocked full of green vegetables. Like handfuls of baby spinach, to be exact.

What you do is take some frozen strawberries–a lot of them, but this is not exact science, so just put as many as you like–and two bananas and the handfuls of fresh baby spinach and you put all that in a blender along with some water, and then you turn on the blender to its best ICE-CRUSHING setting, and then watch as the whole thing turns a slightly horrible-looking green color.

A warning: You will not look at it and think, “Wow! I have GOT to drink that thing, because it looks so good!” But when you taste it…wow. It tastes mostly like strawberries, with some creaminess due to the bananas, and a kind of fresh, crisp taste from the spinach. It definitely does not taste like spinach, so you don’t have to worry about that. But when you drink it down–I have two large glasses of it every day–well, you can’t believe, frankly, that anything that bad looking tastes so WONDERFUL.

The best part of it is that just this blenderful of goodness contains, like, a bazillion servings of vegetables. You know how recently they decided that it wasn’t enough for us to get five servings each day, like they’d always been recommending, but that now we needed, oh, at least NINE? And I remember thinking, “Well, THAT’S never gonna happen!” But now I think I get nine servings just thinking about the green smoothie each day.

No, no. Here’s the really, really best part–and now you’re going to think I’m just bragging. The other day I went to the doctor, and of course they always insist on weighing you at the doctor’s office, no matter why you’re really there. Usually I try to ignore this aspect of doctorhood, because it’s just a quirk that they can’t help. But–holy smokes! I had lost FIVE POUNDS without even trying. Honestly. I still eat all the food I normally do, whenever I’m hungry. I’ve just added this green smoothie to the mix–and five pounds has somehow melted off without me noticing. (I feel that five pounds that leaves in April is worth about ten pounds any other time of the year, because this is the time of the year when a person is starting to think about the bathing suit problem coming up.) AND! I can take my jeans off without unbuttoning and unzipping them. In fact, I have trouble getting them to stay up! I’m actually going to have to buy a belt. I found out I lost two full inches in my abdomen, just from drinking green smoothies for five weeks. My stomach is flatter than it’s ever been.

So you can see why I can no longer keep quiet. Thank you, bloglily, for telling me about green smoothies being practically the National Beverage out there in California. And, by the way, does my hair seem ashy to you?