Your Best You is Just Around the Blend

07 Jun Your Best You is Just Around the Blend

What if I told you that many of the products they’re selling on TV today to help with various health problems or to assist in cosmetic corrections can be treated or addressed by improving your diet.  Would you believe me?  Well, it’s true.  The things you’re eating are controlling not only how you feel but also how you look.  You can literally go from stopping pain in your joints to re-balancing your face like eliminating lines around the eyes and forehead, strengthening your smile, and shaping your chin all with food.  Your best in how you look or feel literally depends on how your circulatory, respiratory and digestive systems are working, and those systems can’t work properly without vitamins and minerals from healthy foods.

If you’re like me, you vividly remember the day when your mom came home with the brand-new juicer thrilled to try it out.  The juicer was the new trendy thing in the health-world back then and she beamed with excitement in expectation of the beautiful skin, the more vitamins, and just a general healthier glow from a more nutrient rich diet the juicer promised.  The juicer was hailed as the perfect tool for getting great vitamins from fruits and vegetables without having to actually eat them. Because let’s face it, some of the healthiest foods for you don’t taste that great.  Being able to skip the bitterness or unsavory pulp from a fruit or vegetable by juicing and drinking it or mixing the juice of a bitter green with that of a sweeter fruit was right up many peoples’ alleys.  But there is something many fail to realize.  When you extract the juice out of a fruit or vegetable, you are indeed getting some of the vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients therein.  But guess what?  Yep, there’s a catch.  You are also getting a much higher concentration of sugar and losing rich fiber and antioxidants.  Integrative Medicine dietitian, Robin Foroutan, puts it this way: “You do lose fiber in fruit and vegetable juices, and that results in juices having the ability to spike your blood sugar in a more dramatic way than if you ate the actual fruit or vegetable”.   So, what is a more favorable way of getting ALL the great nutrients, minerals, vitamins, fiber, and antioxidants into our body but minus the unhealthy concentration of sugar? …Blend!

Blending is the process of taking those same fruits and vegetables that you were juicing and mixing them together to create a drinkable form that keeps the fiber and nutrient rich pulp.  We also must add that blending is not difficult.  It just takes a little time to peel or chop your fruit or vegetables before placing it all in the blender and turning it on.  If you don’t have a blender, invest in a good one (Amazon: https://amzn.to/2Wmv5iy).  You’re investing in yourself.  For me, blending has almost become ritual.  I want it to become that way for you.  As you start, let me know how it goes for you and how you feel; I’d love to hear.   I keep my blender in the same place in the kitchen after each use.  I put my fruit and vegetables in the same place in the kitchen and in the refrigerator.  So, when I want what I call my ‘veggie drink’, I know exactly where everything is.  Kingston knows what I call it as well so sometimes I’ll tell him to ‘please leave dad an apple so that he has one for his veggie drink.’  This little guy loves apples so I have to make sure he leaves me some as well.  The apples are not only an important healthy ingredient to the drink but it’s also great for making the drink more palatable which helps in the desire to drink more of it. It’s just a fact of life that people love things that taste good, right!  So, if we can make something that is supremely healthy for us acceptable even delicious, then we’ve done our potential overall health a humongous favor.  The apple and the lemon are great for cutting the bitterness of the greens out of the drink and they are both nutritious in themselves.  Now before I give you a few suggestions on things to blend, let’s consider a few reasons why blending is most beneficial:

1. Blending is pretty quick – It doesn’t take long to whip out your blender and chop up some fruit and veggies to go in it.
2. Blending is satisfying and filling – Mixing nourishing fruit and vegetables will feed your body. It can totally serve as a substitute to one or more of your meals.
3. Blending doesn’t spike your blood sugar as much as juicing – As we mentioned earlier, blending is like eating the fruit or vegetable because you are still getting the pulp and fiber that just the juice leaves out. You’re actually lowering the glycemic index by blending verse juicing.
4. Blending creates less waste – With blending you’re using all or very close to all of the fruit or vegetable instead of throwing vital parts away.
5. Blending makes it easy to get superfoods into your body – With blending you have an easy way of combining very healthy vegetables and fruit that will give you needed vitamins, minerals, and fiber that you’ve been missing out on.

Now, let me share a couple of blended drinks I love to make, and I swear I can literally feel my body smile when I drink these and I bet yours will too.  I encourage you to not only grab these ingredients and throw them in the blender but take the time to research these and see what they do for your body.

Healthy Blended Drink #1 (Blend these raw organic ingredients together with 3 ice cubes and about 2 to 3 cups of pure water. Not tap water. I usually use Fiji):

1 cup – Mustard Greens or substitute Chard

2 cups – Collard Greens

1 cup – Kale

1 cup – Spinach

1 cup – Chard

1 medium Gala apple

1 medium to large Lemon (no peel and remove the seeds)

Healthy Blended Drink #2 (Blend these raw organic ingredients together with 3 ice cubes and about 2 to 3 cups of pure water. Not tap water. I usually use Fiji):

3/4 cup – Oatmeal (use fresh steel oats)

1 cup – Dried Figs

Once you start to put in your body what it truly needs and uses to carry out vital bodily functions, it will thank you.  We always hear about the need to eat more green leafy vegetables but how much do people really do that?  Sure, we will eat a salad here and a salad there, with dressing mind you. Or sure we’ll have an apple here and wait another 5 days before having another.  What has conditioned us to think that this is okay, and that our bodies can sustain such neglect without having serious complications?  To actually be in the ball park of the amount of servings of vegetables the body requires, you’ll need to have 2 of Drink #1 a day.  When I tried an organic diet for 6 months, Drink #1 was among the types of drinks I was having twice a day.  It changed my life profoundly for the better.  If this guy that ate hamburgers and fried food all the time can do it, then I know you can too.  If you try it, even in small steps like one of these healthy drinks once every 3 days or every other day it’s still probably better than where you are now.  With these types of healthy habits, you are bound to find a new you – a healthier you.  That the best you is not far off at all; it’s indeed just right around the blend.