Green Monster Power Smoothie

No pretty pictures, I know, but healthy and yummy none the less 🙂

There are great benefits to eating lots of greens, yes, you all heard it before, but some days it is hard to fit all that healthy stuff into your food chain between running from work to get the kids or whatever your busy life dictates. Well for days when you don’t have the time to sit down to a hearty spinach omelet you can, even if you don’t have a juicer, make yourself this amazing tasting green power smoothie. Having a juicer can be a great addition to your healthy diet, as long as you’re aware of he fact that you’ll be missing out on all the healthy fiber that you would have consumed eating the veggies. I also want to caution you on juicing fruit, you definitely want to stay HEAVY on the vegetable side. Fruit juice no matter if store-bought or homemade will affect your blood sugar level drastically, much more so than eating the whole fruit would have done. From a weight loss and even a ‘having even energy all day’ point of view, not a good thing. And if you are borderline pre diabetic, just plain BAD idea.

So in this Smoothie you’re not only going to get your greens (without feeling like a cow on the pasture) but all the healthy fiber is still there, hurray!

Added benefit when you’re maligned this with spinach: the lemon juice in the Smoothie provides vitamin c which is essential for your body to absorb the iron from the spinach!

Ingredients

2 handful of Spinach leaves (or stemmed lake or collards, chopped)
1 ripe banana
2 cups water
Juice of 1 large lemon
2-3 tbsp coconut/palm sugar, or honey or agave syrup (add more if you like it sweet)
(Optional: 2 tbsp egg white powder or protein powder)
You could also add a peeled Kiwi

Directions

Place greens in the blender and add the two cups of water, pulse a few times to get started, pushing down the top layer of leaves if they don’t incorporate.
Add the banana, lemon juice, sugar and if using protein powder. Pulse and blend until smooth
Serve. Makes about 4 cups

Note: you should drink this right away, don’t make it in advance, first the Smoothie separates into solids and liquid pretty quickly (I just re-blend for the second glass) but secondly the nutrients that were happily stored inside the leaves are now exposed to the air and will start oxidizing and therefore loose potency.