We, at the Science and Strength house, enjoy a green smoothie as a daily evening tradition. At times, we utilize this recipe as a light meal on the go and even for dinner. The macro and micro combination within this meal works well whenever you’re running behind, eating a late and calorie rich lunch.
For the upcoming holiday season, most of us are likely to enjoy larger lunches, a few extra cocktails and canapés in the late evening. One way to offset some of the damage done to our overall systems is to cut down on calories at dinner or even substitute them with a healthy, vitamin and mineral rich green smoothie.
But, if only green smoothies tasted good so we could easily add them into our daily schedules?
This is precisely where this recipe takes shape with or own struggles to find a solution to the above problem.
We started the green mixture journey back in 2012 when we bought the Vitamix 6300. The reality is, we bought this beast of a blender for our kids after sampling a spinach and strawberry ice-cream at Costco, which our eldest daughter enjoyed. And, over the years, we’ve experimented with various type of foods in order to add more greens to the kids as well as our diets.
The smoothie habit evolved into a daily 16-20 oz of green glass for Victor and Dupi, and a 10-12oz glass for the kids. The recipe below is the initial step of how we steadily introduced more fruits and vegetables to our lifestyle. Over the years, we played around with overall content of produce as well as vegetable to fruits ratios. However, at the beginning we slowly progressed our taste buds of blended greens from standard palatable preferences of overly sweet, salty and fatty.
The secret towards any long lasting healthy lifestyle is consistency of change. Steady and slow progress builds stable foundations that carry us to success. No fads can replicate continuous persistence. Most of us enjoy fruits but are not accustomed to the taste of kale. If you start out on a kale and broccoli smoothie the taste buds will eventually boycott the whole “eat more vegetables” idea, as getting used to such distinct tastes can be difficult. But, starting with a mostly fruit smoothie and adding few mild tasting vegetables like baby spinach and sweet carrots is an excellent way to get your vitamin and minerals. With time, you can slowly work on introducing more vegetables or different types of vegetables to already acclimatized recipe.
Green Smoothie for Beginners Recipe
Total 60oz or 4 large 16oz portions
2-3 cup baby spinach
1 carrot
1/2 avocado
1 large apple
1 cup fresh or frozen fruit (frozen mixed berries, mango and pineapple work best here)
1 banana
3-4 cups water
A powerful blender is highly recommend for this recipe. We use a Vitamix 6300 which handles this job smoothly (pun intended).
Add the above vegetables, fruits and water in that order. Blend and drink it immediately. Many of the desired micros (vitamins) begin to quickly break down, so don’t delay and consume your glass of green in order to maximize on nutrient intake.
Once you have developed a habit of making and drinking this daily for a few months you can move on and introduce 1 cup of kale and cut down on the spinach. It’s substitutions like these that will eventually lead to our current green smoothie recipe of: Kale, spinach, broccoli, cilantro, grapefruit, apple and banana. Be sure to stay connected with us for this and more upcoming recipes!
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