Eat your GREENS Eat your GREENS vs drinking them

EAT YOUR GREENS. Ok, here is my take and experience on the oh so popular Athletic Greens green drink that is all the rage in the wellness space right now. A disclaimer, I am NOT a nutritional expert by profession nor do I claim to be. What I share here are my thoughts based on my experience over the course of six weeks of using it.

After seeing so many fellow bloggers/influencers enjoying it and touting how great they felt I immediately had a case of FOMO. Who doesn’t want to feel amazing right?! I followed that feeling instead of being logical about it and signed up! With the “special deal” you get a storage canister, a shaker bottle, a “1 drop” VitD supplement and a box of travel packs. Win, win, win all over the place!

I got all signed up and began! I started guzzling it down every morning. Initially the taste was, let’s say “interesting” and nothing that wasn’t a deal breaker. I don’t mind stevia, which I believe is one of the main sweeteners. Morning after morning after morning, I filled up the shaker bottle, added ice, a little dairy free creamer and shake, shake, shake.

Around the four week mark, was I feeling AMAZING? I dunno, was I? Did I really feel that much different? Meh, can’t say with 100% accuracy that “yes, I for sure was feeling better than ever!” Some signs I missed that my body was trying to tell me though, I’m embarrassed to admit to. Swollen itchy lips, itchy eyes and eyelids and my bowel movements…ahem, oh so loose.

I should back up here, I am a label reader. I’d say an AVID label reader. Ever since our family’s health journey began, I’ve been that person in the aisle of the grocery store backing up carts because I’m standing there reading EVERY label. Did I do the same with Athletic Greens before I started to consume it, nope! Ya, that’s a red flag right there.

Ok, back to my experience. I continued to guzzle AG for a couple more weeks. My lips are now peeling, but now it’s not just on my lips. Now the swelling and peeling is also around my mouth and pinkish red. I looked like I’d had some kind of lip enhancement that had gone very wrong.

Full stop! One morning after guzzling away, it’s like a lightbulb finally went on in my head. I held that shaker bottle in my hand, looking at it after drinking about half of it, and suddenly it all hit me. I stopped that day and after a few days, my lips returned to their normal size, my eyelids felt so much better and my bowel movements returned to their normal state. Of the bazillion ingredients/supplements included in the AG powder, clearly there are some that do NOT agree with my body.

Now, this is not to say that everyone will have the same experience. I know some folks drink it and feel GREAT! I’m happy for them, honestly. If it works with their physiology, super! If I’ve learned anything over the course of the last seven years, it’s that we are all metabolically different, so our bodies, while similar, are literally nothing the same.

I’ll list a few of my thoughts and points below, but I’ll say this, AG’s is a NO GO for me. Hard pass for so many reasons now that I look back at my experience. There are many bloggers/influencers getting plenty of cash for sharing a link and getting folks signed up. I got contacted as well, so I know what the program is. Whatever works for them, good for them. For me, nah. I’ve always wanted to be totally transparent about products and brands that I use and talk about.

In fact I wouldn’t even be making a post on the blog if it weren’t for the many, MANY followers that wanted to know more about my experience. So, it will live here on the blog as part of a lesson learned for me and yet another experience for me to remember to listen to my body! It rarely gives me misinformation! Which I’m so grateful for, I just wish I would have listened earlier.

My takeaways:

Supposedly, each serving of AG’s is the equivalent of 12 servings of fruits & veggies? I wonder, would you EVER sit down and eat 12 servings of fruits and veggies in one serving, let alone in the minutes it takes to drink it? Probably not, so why would we drink them when our bodies aren’t really equipped to manage that much at one time?

Chewing your food triggers all sorts of digestive enzymes to aide your stomach to let it know that food is on the way! When you simply “drink” your food instead, the natural process for digestion isn’t truly working properly, right? Maybe this is why my bowel movements gradually got looser and looser? Side note: this is also why I really don’t chew gum. When you chew gum the signal is made to your stomach that food is on the way, generating digestive enzymes, for basically no reason.

For those previous two points, logic tells me to “eat your greens” the way nature has it laid out for us makes more sense. There are so many choices for getting your greens in via food that occur naturally. Did Mother Nature get it wrong, probably not. This is not to say that taking supplements isn’t necessary. Given that much of the food we have available has been depleted, over time, of its original properties, yes, sometimes supplementing is necessary. Taking supplements is very “individual” and should be approached as such. Each of our physiological make-up varies vastly. So AG seemingly comes across to me as a “shortcut” to getting supplements, but since we’re all so different is there really a one size fits all when it comes to supplements?

Price. Ya, not much more to say there. It’s pricey. When you consider the actual “greens” you could buy/chew/digest with the same amount of cash, enough said.

Product says it’s made/formulated in New Zealand. On Reddit, there were comments suggesting it was actually from Las Vegas. Maybe it’s made in NZ then shipped to Las Vegas for packaging and shipping? The contradictory chatter about this raised my eyebrows. I’m normally a trusting soul, my gut tells me otherwise here.

That age old saying “If it sounds to be good to be true, it probably is” – for me, this thought kept pinging my brain. So, along with all the other points I’ve made, AG is not for me.

There ya go friends, if you’re still reading to this point, cool. Let me reiterate, this is MY EXPERIENCE with AG. Everyone has their own insides to wrestle with, and I mean that both physically and mentally. We’re all so unique. If AG works for you, great! You keep doing you and carry on. I just wanted to be open and transparent about my experience in the event it might help someone else. Tip: EAT YOUR GREENS!