Healthy Smoothie

A Healthy Smoothie

I’m not a health nut or a crunchy hippy type, but I really am interested in how adding a healthy smoothie or two to your diet can really help improve your overall health. I’ll explain why in a minute. As I started to read about raw food and healthy smoothies I noticed a lot of people with really interesting alternate lifestyle beliefs writing about healthy smoothies, and that’s great, I have no problem with that. I just thought maybe another voice could be heard coming at this from a different angle.

So I have an engineer’s view of health and fitness. I want real, logical, research-backed strategies to use to reach my health goals. I won’t be talking to you about manifesting anything out of thin air. I just don’t think reality works that way. Based on my experience, and what I’ve researched, fitness and weight loss are not that complicated. Those with complicated systems that require a book to explain them are usually trying to sell you something.

This can make me unpopular in some areas. People like to believe that it is harder than it is. Failing at something hard is easier to take than failing at something easy! I’ll be writing a lot more about this. I’m big on a healthy smoothie lifestyle for one main reason, drinking a healthy smoothie every day helped me accomplish a goal that had eluded my whole life:

I wanted to be able to see my abs.

Sounds like a silly goal for a grown man, hey I’m 56 as of yesterday. But I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be fit and look fit. As you get older, there can be this huge disconnect between how you look and how you feel. To look old and yet not feel old can have a negative impact on how you view yourself and how you feel about life in general. Happier people are healthier; there is plenty of research that backs this up. And for me looking good helps make me happy.

Technorati Tags: appearance, fitness, health, healthy smoothie

I’ll admit to being a blender snob. But even I won’t say that you have to go out and buy and expensive blender before you can start to see the benefits of drinking a healthy smoothie everyday. I made my whole first year of healthy smoothies with a cheap blender. Well two cheap blenders. Once the second one died I decided to upgrade. But by then I know I was hooked and that I would be making many smoothies, hopefully for the rest of a long life.

So rather than buy two cheap blenders a year, i decided to take the plunge and buy and Blendtec blender. I couldn’t be happier. Some of my friends have a the Vitamix which is great also.

For me, deciding between the two blenders came down to one simple thing: the Vitamix is just too tall. It is too tall to fit under my cabinets when sitting on the counter top. The Blendtec slides right to the back of my counter with no problem. OK, it also has more horsepower and a larger blending jar

Here is some more information about blenders:

• How Can a Blendtec Blender Benefit Your Kitchen? | FourPx Articles – Have you considered how a Blendtec Total Home blender can improve your kitchen appliance collection? This is one area that many families tend to neglect in.
• Blendtec New York | Blendtec| Buy Blendtec | Blendtec Blender – Image via Wikipedia Blendtec Blender – Simply the Best The blentec blender is probably the fastest and the most powerful ice blender that is available.

• Purchase The Vitamix Blender Online | TipTravel.info – Whether I have been visiting the mall or other public spaces or choosing to stay at home much like the bump on a log I tend to be, it’s been extremely hard for me to stay away from the growing trend of having some sort of blender.
• 3 of the Best Blenders for Your Home – The jar is very similar to the Vitamix blender in make and size. The Waring professional blender offers two speeds as well as pulse functionality. The Waring loses a few points for a lack of digital technology in the controls. …
• How much better is a Vitamix blender than a regular blender? – About this blog: I found out about extremely healthy eating and how I can try to incorporate more raw fruits, vegetables, green leafy vegetables, sea vegetables, nuts, seeds, sprouts etc… into my diet. No, I am not a vegetarian, …
• VitaMix vs Blendtec Blenders – health · food · eating · kitchen · blender · green smoothies · vitamix · vita-mix · vitamix blender · blendtec · blendtec blender · tamper …

In addition to getting a week’s worth of green veggies in one sitting, you can also add two ingredients to your healthy smoothie to take it to the next level.

Cinnamon
I add a tablespoon or so of ground cinnamon to my smoothies. It tastes great and has a number of reported health benefits. But even if it did nothing for my health, it just makes the smoothie taste better.

Research has sown that it can reduce bad cholesterol as well as regulating blood sugar. It has proven to inhibit the growth of yeast infections and some kinds of common bacteria. One study showed that even just smelling cinnamon improves your cognitive function and memory.

Best of all, cinnamon has very few calories, only about 17 per tablespoon.

Bee Pollen
Another great thing to add is bee pollen. Long touted as a way to help with plant allergies by improving your resistance to local pollen, it also has some interested other health benefits. Almost everyone who takes it has an increase in energy and endurance. And most also report improved sexual function as well. Add to that reports of weight loss, cancer fighting abilities, and anti-aging properties and it seems like a cheap thing to take a chance with.

Be sure to start out with a small dose to see if you have a reaction. Then add a little every day.

Probably nothing says more about how popular healthy smoothies have become than the fact that McDonalds has now added two flavors of smoothies to their menu. They offer “Wild Berry” which is a blend of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and some other flavors and the always popular “Strawberry Banana”.

The ingredients of these two new menu items are not as bad as you might suppose, but they are very typical of modern food produced on an industrial scale. The “Wild Berry” flavor is concocted with: “strawberry puree, water, sugar, blackberry puree, blueberry puree, concentrated pineapple juice, concentrated apple juice”. Complete ingredient information can be found at nutrition.mcdonalds.com. The “strawberry banana blend is much the same but uses banana puree instead of blueberry and blackberry. And it leaves out the pineapple and apple juice as well.

Nutritionally, neither of these smoothies is too bad. For the Strawberry Banana flavor a 16 fluid ounce cup (medium) the information is:

• 260 calories
• 1 gram of Fat
• No saturated or Trans fat
• 5 milligrams cholesterol
• 40 milligrams sodium
• 60 grams Carbohydrates
• 3 grams Dietary Fiber
• 54 grams Sugars
• 2 grams Protein
• vitamins A and C
• minerals Calcium and Iron

The Wild Berry Smoothie has much the same nutritional information. Again complete nutritional information can be found at http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com.

McDonalds is to be commended for adding these two fruit smoothie items to their menu with such a reasonable nutritional make up. When compared with other items on the McDonalds menu, these smoothies stand out as beacons of restraint.

The other benefit to these smoothies being offered is that it will increase the popularity of smoothies overall. More and more people will become interested in fruit smoothie recipes as a very healthy food choice and begin to make them at home as snacks and desserts instead of eating higher calorie choices like sweets and junk food. There are many places to find smoothie recipes and you might well be surprised at how many different possibilities there are to make a very tasty smoothie with a huge variety of ingredients.

You will find hundreds of delicious fruit smoothies by visiting Best Fruit Smoothies.com. We post a new, 100% free, healthy smoothie recipe each and every weekday.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jesse_L_Moore

http://EzineArticles.com/?Fruit-Smoothie-Popularity-Is-Growing&id=4805502

Interesting article in the Guardian about a couple who had great success using healthy smoothies and raw foods to lose weight, increase energy, and stay healthy.  Since they began changing their diet to include a healthy smoothie in the morning and raw foods when they can, they have both lost significant amounts of weight, and while both are over 60, neither is on any kind of medication. Their philosophy sounds a lot like mine:

“We believe that eating raw foods helps with digestion and energy,” Dee said. “We’re not raw foodists, in the sense that we only eat raw food. We’re just people who are interested in adding more raw foods into our bodies.”

Promoting health benefits of raw foods

They also include some interesting recipes in the article, many of which as far beyond my abilities! But one to definitely try is the raw apple and carrot salad. I made it and it was great! Another item to add to my personal menu of healthy raw food options.

Have your own list of healthy smoothie and raw food options that you know you like and enjoy eating is the key to making this all work. When you are hungry at mealtime is not the time to try and think about finding something healthy to eat. You are much better off having a list of things that you know you like and that you already have the ingredients for on hand. I have a core of for or five meals that I enjoy and eat regularly.

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A Heathy Smoothie has a Ton of Raw Fruits and Veggies

There is a lot of talk about eating raw, whole food these days. Science aside, I don’t know of anyone who thinks that Americans should be eating more, cooked and processes food. Until recent years, raw food made up a large part of our diet. So my thinking is that anything that helps us get more raw food, especially raw whole vegetables, into our diet is a good thing.

The thing that I love so much about raw, whole foods is not so much the reported health benefits (which I believe are significant, but still up for debate) but the fact that they take up space that would normally be filled by food that is not so good for you. You can only eat so much in a day, so any time you are filling up on healthy food, you are not eating fatty junk food. That’s a huge plus right there.

So, no I don’t advocate a complete raw vegan diet, I think that’s an over kill and frankly too technical for most of us to maintain in a healthy fashion. Getting all the required nutrients from a strictly raw and vegan diet is not easy and takes more thought and planning that many of us have time or energy for.

But drinking a healthy smoothie every day is an awesome and easy way to get a ton of raw whole foods into your diet. Each raw, healthy smoothie I make has 10 to 12 servings of raw, whole fruits and vegetables – the amount many Americans eat in a whole week! Longer than that if you remove french fries as a vegetable.

Do I think that raw foods are better for you than cooked foods? Yes I do, I agree with many whole claim that the heating process destroys enzymes and micro-nutients that are very good for us. But to be honest, there are scientists on both sides of this issue and very little transparency about who is funding whom.

But if you replace a burger and fries dinner with a big healthy smoothie made from raw fruits and vegetables with no added sugar, that has got be good for your health.

Technorati Tags: health, healthy smoothie, raw foods, raw smoothies

In light of the recent article in Time Magazine that describes a, by all accounts, well-done study, should we think about adding booze to a healthy smoothie every now and then?  ”Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers?” – http://bit.ly/bKcIvz

I’m not one of those people who is an absolutist about many things. I like to have a drink at the end of a long day, and I have no problems with others who do the same. Sure you need to know how many calories that is adding to you total, but life is meant to be lived, not avoided.

So if having a drink or two every day is now shown to be a good thing (obviously in moderation) then I’m wondering if there is an interesting way to make a green healthy smoothie with some alcohol added!

Rum sounds like a good idea, maybe I’ll try spiking my after-workout healthy smoothie with a shot and see how it tastes. Sure, something fruity with a shot of rum… that sounds great to me!

I’ll try:

• Spinach
• Carrots
• Bananas
• Strawberries
• Rum
• Ice

Enjoy life and live longer.

When I first started looking into ways to lose weight and improve my overall health, I read a LOT of crazy claims about healthy smoothies. I clearly remember one post on Green Smoothie Girl Robyn Openshaw’s blog about how a boyfriend’s kids made fun of her claim that drinking a raw green healthy smoothie every day would improve their vision. She fed them a great green raw smoothie and they ran out the door screaming, “I can see! I can see!”

I laughed too, I thought that was one of the more extreme claims and I never expected to see any change in my vision. I started wearing glasses when I was ten and my vision has gotten a little worse every year since then.

So last week it was about time to get my yearly eye check up. It was still another month away, but my vision was definitely getting more blurry and I could barely read even with reading glasses. So I went in early.

It turns out that my vision had improved one whole step, from 7.5 to 6.5 in each eye. I was being over corrected! Once my doctor fitted me with new, weaker, lenses I could see great.

Can I say for sure that drinking healthy smoothies caused the improvement in my vision? No. But I can say for sure that 8 months after I first started drinking a green healthy smoothie daily my vision improved for the first time in 45 years.

You be the judge.

Technorati Tags: healthy smoothie, vision

Obviously, when I talk about health, I’m talking about good health. And as someone with a science and engineering background, I’m interested in a definition of health that I can accurately measure. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Before you start a big lifestyle change like adding a healthy smoothie to your diet or anything else, you need to find out where you are now. Otherwise, how will you measure progress? To get started, here are the things that I would measure:

• Blood PressureBody Mass Index (BMI)
• Resting Heart Rate (beats per minute)
• Cholesterol Levels
• Weight
• Waist to Shoulder Ratio – This one is a measure of attractiveness. Research has shown over and over again that for men, a waist-to-shoulder ratio of 1.61 is the most attractive to women all over the world. I’ll be writing more about this and how healthy smoothies can help.

Notice that I didn’t say anything about what these measurements should be. When starting out, the most important thing is to measure improvement, progress in the right direction. Don’t focus on a specific number yet. Just start the process of getting healthier.   So before you start adding a healthy smoothie to your diet every day, or working out, find out where you are now for these measurements. Getting your cholesterol measured is the only one in the group that will even force you to leave the house. Your doctor can do it, and there are also easy walk-in places that will do it as well. Any Lab Test has offices in most cities.   Set your baseline first, then measure again after a month of healthy smoothie lifestyle changes. You will be surprised!

Technorati Tags: fitness, health, healthy smoothie, raw smoothies