When helping people improve their health or physiques, I tend to emphasize those lifestyle changes that yield the biggest bang for the buck. Sure you COULD go to the gym and spend three hours a day on the elliptical machine in the futile effort to control body fat… or you could spend 30 minutes a few times a week following a properly designed fat-loss program. It seems like a no brainer to me.
When it comes to overcoming body fat struggles, two of the most significant issues facing many people are:
- they eat crap for breakfast (if they eat breakfast at all)
- they don’t eat enough vegetables
Obviously it’d be great if everyone took an hour every morning to prepare and eat a nutritious breakfast; but that’s just not an option for most people. It’s either wolf down a bowl of cereal or grab a bagel and head out the door.
Likewise, it would be awesome if more of us considered vegetables to be the focal point of our diets. Unfortunately, asking most North Americans to eat more vegetables, particularly at breakfast, is akin to suggesting they perform root-canal surgery on themselves.
Any solution that tackles both of these issues is going to have to be: 1) time efficient, 2) easy, and 3) taste reasonably appealing. An impossible task you say? I say, “No problem”. Here’s a solution that requires thinking outside the box, but yields huge benefits to health and the way your body looks: Spinach Berry Smoothies.
Yup, a breakfast shake that focuses on spinach. If you haven’t ever tried putting spinach in a shake, you are probably thinking “ewww, gross!” But baby spinach has a remarkably mild taste that is easily masked by berries or cocoa. As a bonus, the berries and the cocoa both mask the green colour of the spinach so no one is the wiser!
If you’ve got 60 seconds, an interest in radically transforming your health and a decent blender, here’s a recipe to get you rocking.
N.B. I recommend the Magic Bullet for ease of use and clean up. You can pick one up for $40-$50 at many department stores.
2 cups baby spinach
1/2 cup frozen mixed berries
2 tbsp flax seeds
1 – 1 1/2 scoops protein powder
1-2 tsp unsweetened cocoa
3 tbsp coconut milk or 1/2 cup almond milk (if you want a lower-fat version)
ice and water to taste
Throw everything in your blender, blend for 30 seconds or so and you are done. Nothing more complicated than that. Toss it in a travel mug and you’ve got a meal that you can take in the car and consume on the way to work. Quick, easy, delicious. A recipe that even the most vegetable-phobic child would love (obviously a child sized portion might only be half of this recipe).
Try this recipe for yourself and with your loved ones. Just don’t tell them that that what they are drinking is jammed packed with critical nutrients like vitamin A, vitamin C, iron, calcium, fibre and protein… that’ll stay between us 
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