The Smoothie Challenge is over. I can’t believe I got as far as I did! Did I manage to get through the full month? For those of you following on Instagram, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting smoothies lately. Tuesday of last week we rolled into the in-laws’ place and I just found it a lot harder to put together a smoothie there. I technically ‘won’ if you count a week’s worth of Bolthouse Farms Smoothies, but I’m pretty sure that’s missing the point a bit.
How did it go?
It went like a lot of 30 day challenges do: fun at first, and then around day 10-15 it got hard. Some days I was doing them at 9:30PM just to say I did it for that day. But hey! I managed to get pretty far that way. In the end, I did 22 out of 31 days. Not too bad!
Some days the smoothies were super good. Other days, my concoctions were revolting. I learned I should never put apple or cucumber in my smoothie. It makes it thick and chunky. All in all, I think I had more good smoothies than bad smoothies and I learned some good things about hiding greens in a drink.
What did I learn?
1. I think I actually felt better when I was having the daily smoothies. This last week my gut has been less happy and a bit stiff. Like I’ve said before, I wouldn’t win the Olympic medal for vegetable consumption. As you can see from my Lift progress, I don’t even eat them every day! So basically I should keep doing smoothies because they’re a good way for me to get fruits and veggies.
2. They’re pretty easy to put together. Spending 5-7 minutes on a smoothie is pretty reasonable when I consider that it’s a pretty easy way to get a range of fruits/veg into my body.
3. It doesn’t take that much planning. Once it becomes normal, you can get it done pretty quickly, especially with an immersion blender which is what I used every day. It makes it easy for clean up. I mostly used spinach, beet greens and kale for my greens and a mixture of fresh oranges and various frozen fruits.
Got recipes?
I managed to save my recipes and pictures as I went on Evernote and early on people started requesting recipes. If I remember correctly, most of them I randomly put together (except for the Sun Kissed Smoothie, which was probably THE BEST. There’s a link in the note) although some of those recipes are so easy to put together there’s no way I can really claim intellectual property on them.
You can get the recipes here. Some of those recipes are not that great. Just a warning.
