Quest Completed: 31 day Green Smoothie Challenge

First off a big THANK-YOU to Dominique over at Thick.Fine.Healthy for guest posting last week. That EIT exam was rough. When I got out I felt like James Brown singing "Please Please Please" y'know the cape act...

...Dominique's dramatics are rubbing off on me. Anywho. Back to the topic. A good friend and I decided to do a 31 day green smoothie challenge. N  We started out with pretty simple rules: 1 green smoothie a day with 1 serving of greens and at least 1 serving of fruit. Very quickly into it we realised that we had to lay down some game rules.

1. - no added sugar/honey/agave etc: Instead we used fruit like figs,dates. In general the regular fruit we add sufficed but sometimes you get a batch of fruit that's not so sweet or a batch of greens that's extra grassy
2. - 5 ingredient limit: I had to lay down this law after this smoothie happened: kale, beetroot), beet, sweet potato, blackberries, ginger, flax, almond milk,. Yea I'm totally calling you out on that one. I'm still astonished by that one. But with a 5 ingredient limit still gave us room to play without going over board. 
3. - Drink plenty of water

I have to admit this is probably the first challenge that I saw to the end. I only missed one day about midway through and I felt it. I was so lethargic and cloudy-minded.  Throughout the month I definitely saw the positives of the green smoothie.

• - More energy I had so much more energy and I can already get my hyper states. Thank you ADHD. 
• - Focus Speaking of ADHD I definitely noticed that I had better at focus at work. And sometimes my job while awesome, can involve allot of banal data entry. So that was a big help
• - Lower appetite: In case you didn't know: Green smoothies are frigging HUGE! I don't think I realized this when I agreed to this. Every day I faced around 16oz of green goodness. And as a WLS patient that's about 1 and a quarter of what my stomach can hold at one time. It took me about 2 hours to drink it. Sometimes I had to split it up Breakfast and afternoon snack.
• - Craving more veggies/less junk: I tend to be a snacker at work. And sometimes it can be hard to avoid the little packets of yoghurt raisins, dark chocolate covered coffee beans and other snackage that find myself at work. But I found myself be much less tempted to that and more drawn to fruit salad. Maybe it was the smoothie, or the fact that I know that eating that stuff too much just screws up my mood. 
• - Something for everybody: Remember that crazy smoothie from above with sweet potato!? Yea...I tried to do sweet potato (roasted) and it did me in way too filling. Switching it up every couple days was cool

We used different methods for making our smoothies. He used a good blender I mostly used my immersion blender (aka boat motor). I love my immersion blender. Could make my smoothie right in the cup.

Here were some of our favourites

• -green tea,Cucumber, Pear, Ginger, Kale or Mustard Greens (my absolute favourite)
• - Almond milk, roasted sweet potato, Ginger, Greens, 
• - green tea, cucumber, apple, mint, Greens
• - Water or Almond milk, green powder, banana, carrot juice (the travel drink)
• - Almond milk, avocado, cocoa protein powder, mint, greens (apparently this was a kinda Chocomint smoothie)
• - Green Tea, Strawberries, Peaches, Ginger, Greens 

I'm finally convinced homemade green smoothies are nutritious and filling, a great way to your daily greens. I'm not sure if I'll do a green smoothie 7 days a week. But it's November 1st and today's smoothie? It's almond milk, kale, greenfood powder, peach, and ginger. Good stuff.