Smoothies for days

[breakinglight11]

I have been on my smoothie diet for two week now, and it has worked FAST. I switched to it from my previous one because I felt I had plateaued, and this definitely had the desired result of shaking things up. I am getting nicely lean and defined from it, with no loss of muscle mass or feeling of being lower energy like I feared.

This diet entails eating two smoothies a day from a particular recipe book associated with the protein powder I’m using, Biotin, plus a large low-carb, low-sugar dinner at night, plus one cheat day. They are based around this casein-derived protein powder, a diary product, and almond milk, plus a variety of fruit and vegetable flavoring ingredients. The first is high-carb, the second is low-carb, and there’s a snack variety that’s just low calorie, though I usually just have the two. I make mine using sugar-free vanilla Greek yogurt and unsweetened vanilla almond milk. They’re fairly calorie-dense, certainly high in protein, but I’m still in the process of getting used to them.

I’ve been trying lots of different ones to see which ones I actively enjoy and which ones I can stomach. Unfortunately I don’t love smoothies in general. I make mine with a little less almond milk than is prescribed because I want them thicker, so they feel more substantial and there’s actually something to chew. Drinking meals never really satisfies me. I’ve also been experimenting with putting them in the freezer to firm them up. Still working out how far in advance to take them out, though, so they get a nice texture without being hard as a rock. If I can hit the sweet spot, it becomes like eating ice cream, which is nice. The only smoothie I really love is the one with three different kinds of berries along with the yogurt and the almond milk, but there’s a few that I like okay, including a cinnamon strawberry and a chocolate peanut butter variety. They’re not the most fun things you could possibly eat, but I find I’m sticking to them okay.

Still working through the adjustment period of feeling hungry most of the time. Especially since a quirk of this diet is that it has you limit your eating to an eight-hour period when your metabolism is supposedly highest— which unfortunately doesn’t start until 12 noon. That is fucking hard for me, as I’m an early rising and it means I’m ravenous for the first part of my day. Also I admit I’m a bit suspicious of a diet that tells you not to eat a breakfast as soon as you wake up, but it seems to be working, so I’m suspending judgment until I’ve been on it a while. The “always hungry” period on the previous diet lasted about a month, so I doubt this will be any different, and I want to see what happens once that passes.

This week I’m getting back into my serious exercise routine. I wanted to ease in slowly, as this diet is pretty strict. But I’m already firmer and more cut without much extra physical work on this regime, so I’m excited to see what happens once I phase real exercise back in.