12 Steps to Whole Foods

Introduction
How Will I Find the Time? The GreenSmoothieGirl Law of
Physics
On this site, and in my book, I often preach to the unbelieving a certain principle. It can be an uphill battle to
get anyone to buy into my counterintuitive principle of physics until she gives it a try. And that
GreenSmoothieGirl Law of Physics is that an expenditure of energy yields more energy.
People are always saying to me, “I just don’t want to spend any time in the kitchen. I’m exhausted at the end of
the day and don’t have the energy for it!” Many folks have gotten in the “energy conservation” habit of
carefully doling out their limited energy for just the most basic of life activities (sleep, eat, work, start over), all
while watching with great horror that energy pool ever shrinking.
Readers of GreenSmoothieGirl.com know what I say, and I will repeat it here. A minute of kitchen time, eating
the way I teach you to prepare food, yields two minutes of newfound energy. Time freed up that you used to
spend in a depressed funk or, worse, oversleeping. Eating a GreenSmoothieGirl diet gives you quantifiable
gains in energy that open up a whole new world of service opportunities, goal achievement, fun, the ability to
invest in new and old relationships, and the disappearance of “energy conservation.”
And I say that, as with spiritual faith, if you can’t believe that, then just experiment upon the word. Simply try
it and tell me if I’m wrong. Don’t do it for two weeks, where everything is new and at first things take you
longer. Commit to making my recipes for several months, because the learning curve flattens and you’ll finally
understand what I’m talking about (as many have attested to in GreenSmoothieGirl.com blogs). For anyone
who begins this journey seriously ill, you may need to give this experiment a full year to see the gains clearly.
You think that the idea of spending a resource causing that same resource to double is simply scientific
falsehood? For the sake of the semantic debate, even before you put it to the test, let’s compare it to three other
arenas in life, to lower your cognitive dissonance.
First, are you a parent of at least two children, or are you close to someone who is? Many first-time parents are
so smitten by their firstborn that when they begin to consider bringing another baby into their family, they fret:
“I’m not sure I can love another baby as much as I love this one.”
Our concrete, finite minds not used to “abundance thinking,” sometimes can’t at first bend around the principle
that spending can yield dividends. That is, there’s more to be had, good things multiply, scarce thinking breeds
actual scarcity, and abundant thinking breeds actual abundance—in relationships and the world. Give some of
your love and your capacity for love multiplies.
And so parents take the leap and find, virtually universally, that they can, in fact, love another child as much as
the first. So much love that it makes your heart nearly burst sometimes.
Second, consider Olympic athletes. We all love swimmer Michael Phelps, of course. But Dara Torres is my alltime
Olympic hero: because she is my age and she silver medaled three times in the 2008 Olympic Games. She
did this all while nurturing her competitors and chasing a toddler and proving to all the disbelievers that she
achieved her athletic prowess and physique naturally. She had earned a few Olympic gold medals before at
least one of her 2008 competitors was even born.
Do Olympic athletes have less energy because they give so much energy to their sports? No, they are fireballs
of energy because energy begets energy. When they turn their attention to other things—volunteerism, media,
26 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw