Goin' GREEN! Part 1 -- Smoothies RULE!

OK, everybody, I'm here to let you in on a magical miracle.  And since I'm me, and not some kind of Billy Mays infomercial person, you know it has to be for reals.

(although I have been known to give the 'thumbs up' from time to time)...

So I guess it all started quite by chance back at Christmastime (I know, sooo long ago, right), when I had several family members over at my house to open presents & visit together.  I decided to put out a platter of veggies (baby carrots, celery sticks, broccoli, and cauliflower) with some ranch dip for everyone to enjoy.  It was yummy, and everybody ate their fill.  But of course, I had leftovers (after all, I had bought the honkin'-sized bag of veggies to make sure I had plenty enough for everyone).  And me, being the anti-waste person that I am, decided it would be a shame for all those veggies to just sit in the fridge and literally rot.  So I mildly-semi-reluctantly began nibbling on them each day to get rid of them.  First, I ate them with the ranch dip.  Then when I ran out of ranch dip, and still had veggies left over, I just ate the veggies plain.

I check Amazon almost every day to see if they have any cool new free books for my Kindle Fire.  I suppose now that it's the New Year, and lots of people's Resolutions are to lose weight & exercise, etc. there seems to be a trend of a wide variety of weight loss/diet/fitness/health books being available for the Kindle right now.

I curiously perused the Paleo/Caveman diet books, just to see what all the hype was about.  Then I came across the Raw Foods diet books.  And the million different Smoothie books that seem to be all the rage right now.

Growing up, I was an EXTREMELY picky eater.  I did NOT like ANY vegetables...except, strangely, if they were completely raw.  But who eats like that?  It's not normal, right?  We're civilized; you gotta cook the food, right?  (Well, I have never been known for being 'normal', but that's beside the point).  

The thing is, I have stumbled upon THE KEY to losing weight, getting healthy, and feeling good, all WITHOUT doing any hard work, starving, or exercising.  You can actually eat as much as you want, and whenever you want, just as long as you eat the proper foods.

I know, man, I totally feel like some kind of sketchy infomercial right now.  "DEANA MAYS HERE WITH A TRULY AMAZING LIFE-CHANGING PRODUCT"!!!  Ha!

Seriously, though, the key is to eat whole foods.  Raw foods in their natural state.  No overly-processed, fake, factory-made, packaged, preservative-filled, chemical-y stuff.  Just eat mostly fruits, vegetables, and make sure you get 64 ounces of water in you each day.  Real nutrition.  Real hydration.  It's what your body is designed to run on.  It's as simple as that.

Eating all those leftover veggies from the veggie tray I had at my little Christmas get-together was fine.  But it can get a little old chewing your way through all that crunchy roughage.  I became a little intrigued with the idea of the smoothie.  So I got some free books for my Kindle and read up on them.

With smoothies, you can blend a LOAD of fruits and veggies together at one time, and they taste good and sweet (believe it or not).  You don't have to worry about 'all that sugar' in the fruit, because it's natural.

So I decided I wanted to give this whole Smoothie thing a whirl.  Pun intended, LOL.  First of all, I didn't have a blender.  So I went on Wal-Mart's website, and lo and behold, they had one available in my local store for the unbelievably low price of only $15.92, and it had a 4 & 1/2 star rating, with 495 positive reviews:

So the next morning after I dropped Lilly off at school, I swung by Wal-Mart on my way back home and purchased one.  I took it home and tried blending together my very first smoothie.  I had a can of pineapple chunks in the cabinet that had been there for months, and I had some ripe bananas (they were just starting to get some dark spots on their skins, and that's a little past the point that I like to eat them).  But it's fine for smoothies!  I think I also put in a little water, too, so that it could blend, and maybe some ice cubes too.  I took a drink...not bad!  Plus this particular blender is awesome because it's kind of small, and you can take the part that holds the drink with you anywhere; it will fit in your car's cupholder, and the lid has a spout that you can drink straight from (or stick a straw in, like I do).

So I'm sold.  I have officially hopped on the smoothie bandwagon.  The best thing is that you don't even have to have a recipe; you can experiment, and just dump in whatever you like, or have on hand, and make it work.  And it's completely healthy!  It seems more like a milkshake kind of treat than something healthy for you!

This morning in my blender I put in a frozen banana, 1/2 cup of rolled oats (oatmeal), and the equivalent of 1 pear and 1 peach (the pears and peaches came out of cans, which is fine; if you don't have fresh fruit, eating canned or frozen fruit is better than eating no fruit at all, as long as it is as natural as possible, with no crazy additives & chemicals such as high fructose corn syrup in it), and half a cup of fat-free milk, to help it blend together.  Believe it or not, it kept me full until well into the afternoon!  It's a whole lot easier to drink a bowl's worth of oatmeal, and eat a banana, a peach, and a pear all combined together than to sit down and chew up all that stuff one after the other for breakfast!  Not to mention being a lot more convenient and much less messy!  You don't even need utensils or a bowl!  Yesterday I put in 2 tablespoons of natural peanut butter and a teaspoon of honey in my smoothie, along with the banana, oatmeal, milk, and some vanilla, and let me tell you, THAT was really good, and very filling!

The thing about eating processed convenience foods is that they truly are empty calories.  Not to mention being high in salt, sugar, bad carbs, bad fats, bad chemicals, etc.  So not long after you eat processed food, your body still craves the proper nutrition that it needs to function, so it causes you to get hungry again.  It's a vicious cycle.  What your body is really asking for is real food -- real nutrients so that it can run properly.  And if you give it what it's asking for, it will shut up, and on the upside, you will feel a lot better, look a lot better, get healthier, and begin to lose a lot of weight.  Without even exercising.

It's like this.  Sure, you could continue to eat whatever you want, and then bust your @$$ in all of your precious spare time to try to exercise it off, but why do that when you can nip it in the bud and eat the right things to begin with, so you never have to exercise if you don't want to!  An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure!  Not to mention the health factor of it all!

Back around Christmas, I weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of about 138 to 140 pounds.  Not really too bad at all, but according to the BMI chart, I was almost in the "overweight" range for my petite height of 5'2".  Since I have started eating mostly natural foods in these past few weeks (mostly fruits and veggies) and making sure I get 6 to 8 cups of fluid in me a day (yes, the smoothies count toward that -- you don't have to drink 8 cups of water in addition to the smoothies), my weight is currently 132, and dropping.  And I feel great.

I drink 2 cups of black coffee first thing in the morning, and a little while later, I have a 2-cup fruit smoothie (with or without oatmeal mixed into it) for breakfast, sometimes with a couple of boiled eggs (without the yolks), and I snack on whatever fruits & veggies I want throughout the day (like sliced apples, baby carrots, celery, broccoli & cauliflower; sometimes with a little natural peanut butter) -- although lately just drinking the smoothies themselves have been satisfying enough for me.  Then in the afternoon, I'll make a green smoothie with 1 packed cupful of baby spinach & whatever fruits in it that I want.  Trust me, although the smoothie looks like a cow had explosive diarrhea in it, spinach has a very mild flavor, so the taste of the fruits cover it up.  You can barely detect the presence of the spinach at all.  I've read that romaine lettuce is another good mild leafy green for smoothies as well. I plan on picking some of that up to try next time I go to the grocery store.  Then for supper, I'll fix whatever me and Jamie and Lilly want to eat, and I usually have another smoothie or some more water in the hour or two before bedtime.

It's also a lot cheaper than you might think to eat more healthily.  Packaged, processed, preservative-laden foods, and fast-food are really just expensive garbage that makes people fat, unhealthy, and feel bad.  That's not to say that it's not OK to indulge once in a while.  But eating that kind of food every day as part of your normal routine really isn't good for you at all, and it will show in your body, and make you feel bad mentally as well.

Cooking real food from scratch is also a good way to go.  Think about it -- many years ago, when most people lived on farms, sure, they worked doing hard labor; they had to.  And they had hearty appetites to match.  So they ate well from the fresh and natural bounty of what their farms produced; meats, eggs, butter, milk, vegetables, fruits, homemade breads.  Yet everyone was healthy. It's because every bit of their food was prepared completely from scratch the way it should be; not fake and processed and packaged with preservatives and chemicals that have no nutritional value at all.

Sure, it can be hard to find the time to cook things from scratch all the time.  But there are easy ways around it.  Crock pots are a lifesaver.  You just dump in all the goodness the night before and put it in the fridge, get it out and turn it on in the morning, and 8 hours later, your delicious, hot, healthy, hearty meal is ready & waiting for you.  Recipes don't have to be complicated and expensive to fix.  I've found that the easier the recipe is, and with the fewer ingredients, the better it turns out.

Here's my Crock Pot recipe for Beef Stew that I absolutely LOVE:

Deana's Rockin' Crock Pot Beef Stew

1 & 1/2 to 2 lbs. stewing meat, cubed

1 medium onion, diced

1 cup chopped celery

1 cup sliced carrots

1 large potato, diced

1/2 Tablespoon sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

a 10 & 3/4-ounce can of tomato soup

1 & 1/2 soup cans water

Layer meat first and then vegetables in Crock Pot.

Sprinkle with sugar, salt, and pepper.

Combine soup and water and pour into Crock Pot.

Do not stir!

Cover, and cook on Low for 6 to 8 hours.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy, and it's SO GOOD!  I don't usually care too much for leftovers, but this recipe makes enough for us to have 2 nights in a row, and I ALWAYS look forward to these leftovers!  You just warm it back up, and it's as good as new!  :)

Here's another recipe that I LOVE.  It's for meatloaf, which is usually unappetizing and kind of gross, but THIS meatloaf actually ROCKS, and it's so easy!  The secret is the BBQ sauce.

Deana's Rockin' Meatloaf

1 pound ground beef (I always buy the leanest)

1 egg

1/4 cup finely diced onion

1/4 cup milk

3 Tablespoons Italian bread crumbs

Salt & Pepper to taste (I use about 1/2 tsp. & 1/4 tsp., respectively)

1/2 cup of Sweet Baby Ray's Sweet 'n Spicy Barbecue Sauce

Mix the meat, egg, onion milk, bread crumbs & HALF of the BBQ sauce all together.  Add salt & pepper.  Mix until thoroughly combined.  Form into a small pan, and top with remaining BBQ sauce.  Bake at 375 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.

I'm gonna make this meatloaf for supper tomorrow night -- I'm super-pumped about it because I ordered a fat-draining meatloaf pan & it came through the mail today:

WHOOP WHOOP!

And I'll probably fix some green beans & mashed taters to go along with it.  YUMMM-O!

Here's a picture of the green smoothie I made earlier this afternoon.  It has 1/2 cup of fat-free milk, 1 packed cup of baby spinach, canned pineapple chunks, and frozen blueberries in it.  It totally looked like I scooped my cup in a mudhole that a cow had taken a spluttery dump in, but it tasted sweet and fine!  You just ignore the color & drink away!  :D

I'm still in the experimental stages of figuring out which fruits go best together, but I haven't made anything undrinkable yet!  :)

The moral of the story:

Eat to Live, not Live to Eat.

and TASTE THE RAINBOW!!!

(which all of the colors of the rainbow mixed together is, ironically, brown, but don't look at it, and just DRINK UP)!  :D