Smoothies – the Lazy Way to Improve Your Diet

Smoothies to the rescue…

A week of smoothies will do me some good. It really is the lazy way to improve a diet.

I’m sat writing this in a coffee shop at 7.15 in the morning. I’m on the back end of a weekend of indulgence – curry and cider on Friday, a family wedding (read: food, booze late night) on Saturday and a carvery and cake on Sunday.

That’s called ‘real life’. I’d love to tell you that I exercise every single day and eat a 100% clean diet, but I don’t. I do that most of the time. You can’t live that way all of the time though, you have to enjoy yourself a little.

This weekend was an exception – it’s not normal for me to be quite so indulgent in such a short period of time, it just fell that way because of circumstances (it was a bank holiday, a family wedding and a night out with friends all on the same weekend, so not a normal occurrence).

The downside of these indulgences are evident. I’m not feeling my sharpest, I’ll be honest.

I’m not ill, I just feel heavier than I should, less motivated than usual and a lot more tired. It’s what happens when you try to run your body on crap.

I trained yesterday and felt weak. I even injured a muscle, which sent my mind back to the Matt Lovell interview where he mentioned that you often see a higher incidence of soft tissue injuries in people who eat a crap diet.

All of this indulgence needs some sort of pay back, so I’m going to spend this week ‘cleaning out’ a little. I’m going to drink a lot of whole food smoothies. I’ll be drinking a lot of water and eating a lot of vegetables. This isn’t any form of detox (I don’t like that word), it’s just giving my body a helping hand my feeding it well again.

It’s made me think about convenience of all of this as well. I can think of fewer quick ways of consuming a lot of fruit and vegetables than smoothies. It really is the lazy way to improve your diet.

Chuck ingredients into a blender. Add a liquid of choice (water for me). Blend for a few seconds. Pour into a glass and consume. You can even chuck in a little protein powder if you’d like to up the protein level.

Even the laziest cook in the world can’t argue with that.

I’m adopting a strategy of a smoothie per day as a meal replacement. I think probably as a lunch replacement (I often don’t eat a breakfast), it also means I’ll have extra time in my day now as I’ll be carrying lunch with me rather than having to find something.

Probably save a few quid as well, come to think of it.

What should I put in my smoothies? Well, here are a few recipes…

• Handful each of strawberries, raspberries, spinach. Throw in a few mint leaves and a glass of water. Blend.
• 1 apple, 1 passion fruit, 1 banana. Add a glass of water and blend.
• Handful of blueberries, an apple and a carrot. Add a glass of water and blend.
• An apple, a handful of kale, a handful of raspberries, a peach and a glass of water. Blend.
• A couple of kiwi fruit, a handful of spinach, a handful of kale, a little apple juice and some water. Blend.

It’s important that you see these smoothies as a meal replacement – they aren’t supposed to be super low calorie so simply adding these to your diet without any reductions is simply going to add to your daily calorie intake. Too often people add smoothies to their diets without removing anything and wonder why they gain weight! Calories from smoothies still count you know…

To make the process even more convenient my blender will live on the kitchen top meaning I won’t have an excuse to stop me throwing a few ingredients into it and making my smoothies.

I’m a couple of days in and enjoying it!

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