Glorious green smoothie bowl – your 5 a day in one

So, as promised, here is the first Monday in May recipe to help you get your 5 a day. And this one is a corker. It’s creamy, it’s tasty and so freaking good for you it deserves a halo.

I love smoothies – whether they’re in a glass if they’re liquid enough to drink, or in a bowl or jar to eat with a spoon. They’re super easy to make, and unlike juicing, you do get the whole goodness of the fruit/veg because you’re not discarding the goodness containing pulp. But it’s also very easy to turn smoothies into sugar bombs that will blow your healthy eating out of the water and bring on cravings and love handles. So how do you avoid that?

Well, first off, don’t too many sugar-laden fruits – we’re hearing a lot of scaremongering about fruits being full of sugar and how we need to avoid them. I am NOT going to start off down the ‘don’t eat fruit’ trail, because I think it’s a load of tosh. Tosh, I tell ya! I think it’s FAR better to eat an apple or banana than a Mars Bar. So if you’re craving something something sweet, fruit is definitely going to be a waaaaaaay better option than chocolate that will stick to your innards and fatten you up. But I will give a little warning that with smoothies, something different happens – firstly, you’re squishing the fruit up, so you tend to eat more of it than you necessarily would if you were picking it out the fruit bowl. And secondly, the process of squishing changes the sugar structure of the fruit, so it’s not held intrinsically in the cells but becomes an extrinsic sugar… which basically means that it acts more like refined sugar that you’d find in the sugar bowl. So when you’re blitzing up fruit, you want to make sure that you’re choosing the slightly lower sugar fruits like berries and be careful that you don’t overload.

The other thing that you should do with smoothies, especially if you’re using slightly higher sugar fruits, is to combine them with some form of protein. Protein helps to slow down the digestion of the sugars which, as well as keeping you fuller for longer, will also keep the blood sugar spike under control. I use protein in all manner of forms – whey protein powder, Greek yoghurt, nut butter, chia seeds… they will all help slow down digestion, but also taste awesome too! Cinnamon is also good at controlling blood sugar spikes, so is another good addition to your blender.

Glorious green smoothie bowl

So let’s look at what goes into my glorious green smoothie – and how to get your 5 a day in one hit…

Ingredients: 

Ingredients for the 5 a day smoothie bowl

• 1 cereal bowl of kale leaves, chopped, thick veins removed (use spinach if kale is too scary for you)
• 5cm chunk of cucumber (you will hardly taste this)
• 1/2 avocado
• 1 small banana
• 80g (about half a cup) of frozen mixed berries
• 1 scoop vanilla why protein powder
• 1 tbsp milled flaxseed (for added protein and fibre)
• 1/2 tsp spirulina (for added vitamins, minerals and protein) – optional
• 1 cup almond milk (or whatever milk you’d prefer)

Simply chuck all the ingredients into the blender and blitz for a minute or so until it’s properly smooth and silky. The avocado and banana will make this super creamy, while the berries and protein powder add a sweetness to make it taste gorgeous. Add more milk or water to yours if you’d prefer to drink it, but I ate this one out of a bowl, topped with fresh strawbs and pumpkin seeds. YUM. And a great way to kick off the day with a bowlful of goodness! Halo is firmly intact. 🙂

Bowlful of goodness

Let me know if you try this! What other breakfasts do you have that pave your way for a good 5 a day?