Fitness
We drank a green smoothie every day, here’s what happened
As much as we love talking about eating healthy, many times we feel like a failure when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet. And by many times we … Read more
As much as we love talking about eating healthy, many times we feel like a failure when it comes to maintaining a healthy diet. And by many times we mean – this entire last year. It’s been frustrating, so we decided to change a couple of things in our diet and in our life, and we feel like we're on the right path now.
We actually started doing this before the 66 Day Challenge.
And one of the things we did was: we committed to drinking a healthy smoothie more often. We bought the cheapest blender, because we didn’t like ours. And we must say – until now, it works perfectly. Which, well we're a peaceful person, but we've used and abused this blender during the past few months. If that blender could talk, we'd be in trouble.
We started with a banana strawberry smoothie, then we discovered the peach smoothie, then the peach strawberry slushy smoothie and then we slowly but surely found out we can drink green smoothies as well. Well, we didn’t LOVE them, but they made us feel SO good, so it was worth it.
And then, some magic happened: we found a reliable green smoothie (at least for us) and we decided to try and have one green smoothie every day for a week.
What Happens When You Drink a Green Smoothie Every Day For A Week
Unfortunately, contrary to our expectations, We didn’t lose 10 pounds the first day. We repeat: DID NOT LOSE 10 POUNDS THE FIRST 24 HOURS. Also, shocking, but our skin didn’t tighten up and start glowing in the dark either.
However, here’s what happened the first week.
1
We felt more alive and had more energy. Right after we had our green smoothie, we would be more awake, alert and would have this rush of energy – something we have only after doing a dance or cardio workout.
2
We could go without that much sleep. The other thing we noticed was that we needed only 6 hours of sleep. Maybe it’s other factors as well, but we noticed we wake up earlier without feeling exhausted. Which, honestly, 6 hours of sleep isn’t something we'd recommend, we're working on going to bed earlier and sleeping more myself.
3
We started craving green smoothies in the afternoon. Can we only say: It’s 2pm. That’s the time we'd want to take a nap, but would usually eat some chocolate bar instead. Sometimes pizza. Now – it’s green smoothies. We are obsessed with them at that time of the day. And this is probably the biggest benefit of this challenge – because it’s long-term and it has influenced bad behaviors we had before. Like drinking coffee after 3pm. Now we seriously crave the smoothie, we sound annoying and we know it.
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4
And we started craving salads.
5
We could work better than after having a coffee. So something we've observed about our relationship with coffee is that it doesn’t wake us up or make us more alert. In fact the way it makes us feel is nervous and scattered. Something you don’t need when you’re sitting down to work. The green smoothie though – our thought is clear, we're able to focus and don’t feel nervous, but more present (we guess focused is the same thing). Hard to describe, but it helps us work quicker and better.
6
We learned how to make green smoothies we actually like. What we like might not be something you like, but this is what we found out. We need less banana, less water/fluid and for sure frozen fruit that isn’t overly sweet (so berries, apple, kiwi). Also nut butters in smoothies – not a fan. A tsp of ginger? It’s a good addition. But could also do without it.
7
We would daydream about them. You know when you’re sitting at your desk and dreaming of all the things you’re going to eat for lunch or dinner? In the past that happened to us especially during meetings. Yeah, usually we dream about cupcakes. Now somehow those green smoothies smuggled themselves into our dreams. Damn it.
We're not sure whether this happened…
We don’t know if our skin actually improved because we never had skin problems. However, we like to believe we look less tired. Maybe our skin isn’t glowing, whatever that means, but it’s definitely more hydrated.
We don’t think we've lost weight. We didn’t weigh myself prior or after this challenge, because it’s not something we do, but we haven’t noticed any change in how our clothes fit. That’s something we expected, because other than the green smoothie – we hadn’t changed anything about our diet at that point.
A reliable part about this little challenge is what happened after.
It’s been 2 weeks since the end of the smoothie challenge and now we have a green smoothie every day. Without making myself crazy, putting pressure on myself and feeling bad we didn’t actually eat anything with fresh fruits and vegetables today.
That smoothie is a part of our day now. It’s become something we just do. Without even thinking about it or going into a lot of drama of preparation and what’s healthy, what’s not. We've hoped so much for this to happen, you have no idea.
Mostly, as we mentioned, we have our green smoothie in the afternoon – we're not that brave to start our morning with a green smoothie yet – we need something warm with breakfast.
Overall we feel good about this challenge. It helped us change something we've been struggling for over a year now (eating enough fruits and vegetables). Believe it or not that past year, there were days we didn’t eat ANY. And we mean – not even tomato sauce or ketchup (we hate ketchup!).
Join The Smoothie Challenge
Anyway, if you also want to do a 1-week green smoothie (or any smoothie) challenge to get more fruits and vegetables into your diet and to feel better – we put up another blog post earlier about that. We talk about how to prepare for the challenge + some smoothie recipes, make sure to check it out!
