Liquid Lunch

So I went to the gym and did a lot of running around this morning, and came home around lunchtime feeling very hungry and craving some vitamin c!

I have been experimenting lately with smoothies (mostly just with putting greens in them), and thus, liquid lunch seemed like a great idea.

Here's what I did:

2 cups chopped, rinsed kale
1/2 cup frozen mixed berries
1 banana
1 small-to-medium orange, separated
1 scoop protein powder, if you have it (I use Heartland Gold Brown Rice Protein)
Water (or milk, soymilk, etc if you don't have protein powder)


Put it all together in a blender (kale at the bottom, followed by protein powder, berries, orange, banana, and just a bit of water - you can always add more later) and whiz away! (I can't believe I just said 'whiz away'). You might find that you have to stop blending and push the fruit down a bit. Just don't do this while the blender is running (TRUST ME.) and you, and your smoothie, will be fine.


Now the great part - I get to tell you about all the fantastic things in this smoothie!

First off, I want to point out that this smoothie packs 2 servings of vegetables (kale) and 3 servings of fruit (orange, banana, berries). That's almost all your recommended fruit and veggies in one meal! Best of all, you get your leafy greens in a highly digestive format (blended) and you can't even taste them with all the other yummy stuff in the smoothie.


Second, I discovered this website that calculates the nutritional info of recipes. I plugged in this smoothie's contents (minus the protein powder, because they don't have it on their list). Here's what came out:



Nutrition Facts
Calories 280.8
Total Fat 1.7 g
Saturated Fat 0.4 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 0.6 g
Monounsaturated Fat 0.2 g
Cholesterol 0.0 mg
Sodium 69.9 mg
Potassium 1,309.3 mg
Total Carbohydrate 67.1 g
Dietary Fiber 12.9 g
Sugars 8.8 g
Protein 7.6 g
....plus a whole whack of other vitamins, including
Vitamin A 7 16.3 %
Vitamin B-6 56.9 %
Vitamin C 339.3 %
Vitamin E 12.6 %
Calcium 28.0 %
Folate 26.0 %
Iron 18.0 %


My protein powder adds 80 calories, 2g fiber, and 16g protein. So my smoothie had roughly 360 cal, 15g fiber, and almost 24g protein. Not bad!