Glowing Green Smoothie

I PROMISE this is not gross. It's not even remotely gross. In fact, it is delicious!

This is what I am having for breakfast tomorrow:

please don't make fun of my hot pink copco cup

I have been making smoothies for breakfast for the past few weeks. Not necessarily every day, but I try to make them ahead of time (for the whole week if I can, keeping them refrigerated, which I just learned may not be advisable...) then just portion it into my reusuable iced coffee cup each day. Most are under 300 calories, usually about 250, entirely or almost entirely made from whole foods, and, in my humble opinion, quite good for me!

I actually love breakfast and would eat a big huge plate of one of every breakfast food every morning if I could - if my waistline could afford it and if I wasn't such a lazy, sleepy bum who never wanted to get out of bed in the morning! Of course, neither of these things are true, so I had sort of gone to the other extreme -- skipping breakfast except for my coffee and possibly a yogurt or banana I grabbed on the way out the door or at the store.

This is the first smoothie recipe I tried: Real Simple Kale-Apple Smoothie

Me being me, I had to make some adjustments and add some stuff. Now that I have become a bit more familiar with smoothie making, I think I might actually simplify things a bit. This was getting to be a lot of work and sometimes messy. I think I like to make things more difficult especially when I cook, trying to add this and that and make little changes and see what happens. I'm such a nerd. And an overachiever.

After that first experiment I thought, this is a great idea! So I started just throwing any old fruit like thing into my smoothies, got some yogurt, some agave nectar, some supplements from the health food store... see what I mean about making more work and things more complicated for myself?

This weekend, I was perusing my pins, and stumbled across this Green Smoothie for Weight Loss that I never tried. I decided to stick to the recipe to a T with the tiny exception of the fact that my frozen mangoes are mixed with frozen pineapple (she says that's okay -- I had a bag of frozen mango, pineapple, and strawberries, but picked out the strawberries to preserve the green color, as instructed). Oh, I also added freeze-dried wheatgrass powder and organic raw maca powder -- two of my health food store finds that I like to add to juice or smoothies making me feel even more healthy and awesome. I'm not going to lie, I'm not entirely sure what they are for or if it's working. I'll get back to you.

I figured I better give it a little try so there were no unpleasant surprises in the morning. Oh my gosh, it's delicious. I honestly, cannot taste the spinach at all. It's sweet and yummy and light, and using the app I have for keeping track of calories & exercise (Lose It! - it's free) we are talking 200 calories for how I made it (only 1 banana, that has the most). I know the woman says calories don't matter with fruit/veggies/whole foods like this, but that's how I'm doing my thing right now, so I put it in anyway.

Back to the smoothie, I know it tastes good, the test will be does it really fill me up and for how long. I rarely get to lunch before 2 PM (and that's on a good day) ... and I'm a snacker throughout the day... oh, and Tuesday is staff meeting day which means munchkin day.... those are doughnuts, in case you didn't know. Little ones, but doughnuts nonetheless.

That's all for tonight, folks!