Why I've eaten the exact same thing every morning for the last 6 years.
Every morning for the past 6 years, I have the following for breakfast: a blueberry and spinach smoothie. It may seem silly or simple, but I really I believe this practice has made my life noticeably better and I figured I'd share why.
1) Choice fatigue.
Every choice we make in a day wears down our will power and critical reasoning abilities. That's why it's so easy to start off a day making healthy choices, but by the time the evening comes around, junk food seems to so much more harder to resist.
By removing my choice of breakfast every day, I have lightened my mental load. I've made the healthy choice without having to think about it. It just is.
2) A healthy diet means eating lots of green things. This is an easy way fit more greens in.
A few of my favourite health books (How Not To Die and Transcend: 9 Steps for Living Well Forever) can largely be summarized with the following advice: eat mostly green things and you'll live longer.
A spinach smoothie is a painless and tasty way to follow through with this by introducing green, healthy veg into a meal that doesn't usually have veggies in it. You also get all kinds of anti-oxidants from the blueberries and seeds.
3) It's really quick.
I love sleep. I don't love mornings. This smoothie takes less than 2 minutes to prepare and can be drank on your commute to work. As I work from home, my commute is non-existent so my colleagues can usually see me drinking my breakfast casually when we dial on for our 9am Skype meetings.
Pro tip - if you have a crazy day ahead of you, prep your smoothie the night before and leave it in the fridge. Don't blend it till the morning though.
4) It tastes better than your average salad.
It's blue, creamy, and cold. It's like eating healthy ice cream for breakfast. You don't have to put up with all that annoying chewing that goes with salad. What's not to like?
5) It keeps me mostly full until lunch.
This wont be true for everyone, but I'm not a very large person, so one magic bullet tends to work for me. If you're bigger, do a bigger size! Around 11:30am-12pm I tend to start to feel hungry which is perfect timing for lunch.
6) Going for brunch? Great, this smoothie works as a great late afternoon snack.
Despite the headline, I've definitely missed plenty of days in the last 6 years. The most common comes from going out for breakfast or brunch with friends. Usually in this case, I just make my "lunch" this smoothie. Brunch is usually a big meal, so you don't really need a full sized lunch in the late afternoon, just a snack to hold you over to dinner.
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I encourage you to figure out your own variation on your go-to smoothie. Just make sure it has tons of greens and healthy berries in it. The whole point of this thing is to sneak in a healthy meal to start your day.
My Recipe
Pack your magic bullet 2/3 full of Spinach. I buy 1kg bags from Super Store
Add a few scopes of pro-biotic yogurt (any brand or flavour, right now I'm liking vanilla)
Add a spoon full of flax seeds, hemp seeds, or green powders (you can get them at health food stores, they're essentially just dried veggies, anti-oxidants, and vitamins). I buy mine in bulk at Superstore. I'm not too picky about what I ad, sometimes I'll buy other healthy seeds/ingredients if they're a good price. Don't really focus too much on this step, it's kinda a bonus.
Optional Add - Protein powder could be added here to support whatever workout regime you're on.
Fill the remaining room with frozen blueberries. I prefer frozen because it chills the whole thing and makes it easy to drink.
Fill Magic Bullet with water, juice, or mixture of the two. Now you may say that jucies are too sugary, but you can find bulk green juice at Costco for really cheap. I figure it's just another way to jam pack veggies into this thing. Water works fine if you don't have juice.
Blend.
Total time to prepare is about 2 minutes. I personally like the taste, but others have claimed that it's a bit of a frankenstien concotion