A little bit of intro info: Weekdays, I do one green smoothie for the day. They're big smoothies; I drink half in the morning at about 9:30, and the other half in the afternoon at about 3:00 or 3:30. This kind of helps me straddle the fence between eating every few hours, which I know is effective for me in terms of weight loss and blood sugar control, and wanting to keep my calories down so that my three "regular meals" can be a bit larger. Depending on the smoothie, one-half generally averages about 200 calories, so that leaves around 1100 to divide among the rest of the day. Also, these are incredibly nutritionally-dense calories.
On weekends, since Scott has been warily joining my smoothie kick when he's at home, I'll make two smoothies so we can share one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I've been making essentially the same smoothie pretty much all the time (variations on banana/strawberry/apple combinations with baby spinach or maybe some romaine if I'm feeling adventurous) but have been branching out a little lately.
Today I decided I'm going to start shaking it up a little. I want to do three different smoothies each week, which would mean I'll do each smoothie twice. I want to work in some variety (the whole point of this is to be able to get in a lot of different fruits and veggies that I would never force myself to eat by themselves) without spending a thousand dollars at Whole Foods or filling the entire fridge with different forms of produce. (As much as I love a fridge full of produce, I have to be practical about this.)
So today's smoothie is kiwi, pear, banana (banana goes in pretty much all my smoothies as the base; I'm a big fan of bananas), radish greens (I thought they sounded gross too but I don't even taste them, as promised by IncredibleSmoothies, and romaine. I didn't manage to get home with cilantro (long Whole Foods story, which I'll spare you) so I used romaine instead and I know that changes the flavor somewhat, but honestly, I'm fairly obsessed with this as it is. It is absolutely amazing. Kiwi turns out to be an amazing "cover" fruit that I will be using a lot. I even gave this to the 12-year-old to try and she liked it. [She adores fruit but does not do vegetables, other than green beans, and particularly despises green, leafy ones. So that's quite an endorsement, right there.] I would like to experiment with kale as it is evidently very strong, and see if the kiwi will cover it, but haven't quite worked up the courage yet.
Anyway, this is a fantastic smoothie with roughly a third of your daily calcium requirement and massive amounts of vitamins A and C (follow the link to Incredible Smoothies for exact nutrition info), which is great for those of us with compromised immune systems.
Tomorrow I'm going shopping armed with a list of ingredients for my Smoothie Trifecta for the coming week, and I'm looking forward to trying some new stuff. It's amazing how much healthier, stronger, more energetic and alert I feel since starting the smoothie regimen. I'm very excited about this!
*A note - I'm using strictly organic produce for these smoothies, as leafy greens in particular will hold pesticides rather badly. That does make it a little more expensive, but for me it's worth it. YMMV.
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