Green Smoothie

Hello everyone! This week for Food & Fitness Fridays, I decided I wanted to talk about the green smoothie! Green smoothies are something that have been getting quite a bit of attention lately. Whether they've been mentioned in the news as the new hit way to loose weight fast, or the new trend among celebrities for cleansing. Either way, the green smoothie is something that I've been incorporating into my diet for about a year now. For me it all started as a way to get more protein and nutrients into my body when I decided to try veganism and it just sort of stuck ever since. Partly because they're just so friggin' delicious and  partly because they're so quick and easy to make. Now, don't confuse the green smoothie with juicing! Juicing is quite a different thing, and there's a bit of a controversy over which method is better: juicing or blending (green smoothies are blended). Neither one is technically better, they just serve different purposes. Juicing takes away certain elements of the fruits or veggies you're juicing while magnifying others and vice versa with blending. If you ask me, though, I like blending better. Sometimes I drink a green smoothie for breakfast and lunch, and other times I'll just drink one green smoothie for breakfast. How many you drink a day in place of meals is really just up to you and your tolerance for drinking meals rather than chewing them. The recipe I'm going to show you guys is one of my own invention that I put together after making green smoothies for so long, and it's a pretty good one for beginners. It has enough fruit in the mix to give it a fresh sweet taste. Some of the more nutritious and hardcore green smoothies have very little fruit and lots and lots of greens so the taste can be a bit overwhelming if you're not used to it. I personally think the greener the better...but I've had a year to get used to and fall in love with the taste of greens like spinach and kale! One important thing to mention before showing you guys this recipe is that if you intend to incorporate green smoothies into your diet a lot, the first and probably most important rule of thumb is to ROTATE your greens! Don't just always use spinach or kale, experiment with other greens! Leafy greens contain elements that if you ingest too much of by eating large quantities of the same green you could inadvertently end up poisoning yourself, so rotate, rotate, rotate! Experimenting with greens can be fun!

Spinach & Berry Medley
Makes 2 servings!

1/2 banana
2 cup spinach
1/2 cup fresh or frozen strawberries
1/4 cup raspberries
1 cup blueberries
1 cup water
1 cup fresh squeezed orange juice (or if you don't have time, you can use store bought orange juice!)

The end result: A nice, rich, red violet smoothie! The more greens you add the greener the smoothies will be!

If you want more recipes and information on green smoothies I definitely recommend reading this book, Green Smoothie Revolution by Victoria Boutenko! It's the book that helped get me started and helped me get to a point where I know what fruits and veggies go well together and I'm comfortable concocting my own recipes for green smoothies! It gives you great recipes for smoothies that help with a variety of different things like detoxing, stress relief, weight loss, and much much more!