- Everyday for about the past three months, I have been replacing either my breakfast or my lunch with one of these smoothies. It takes me literally less than five minutes to make this, including cleanup, it's super nutritious and nutritionally complete and it actually tastes pretty good. And ever since I posted about it on my Instagram a couple of months ago, people have been asking me to go through the process of making it and asking me what's in it, so that is what I want to do for you guys today.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself this isn't a nutrition channel, this is a channel about how to do better in school and how to be more productive, so what's a video like this doing on the channel and you're right, I don't talk a whole lot about nutrition, but I would like to change that because this is a channel about enhancing your cognitive performance and becoming more productive and I think the foundational level of doing both those things is improving your health and when it comes to improving your health, there's kind of a trifecta of sorts, so you have your sleep, your exercise and your nutrition, and on this channel, we've talked a good bit about sleep, we've talked about how to get up early in the morning if that's what you want to do, we've talked about how to get to bed on time consistently and we've also talked about how to improve the quality of your sleep. We've also done a video or two about how to build an exercise routine and to become more fit, but we haven't done a whole lot about nutrition and I'd like to start changing that. Now, when it comes to nutrition, I am an anti-perfectionist, I'm a lot more concerned with building a consistent routine that you're actually going to stick to rather than building the perfect diet.
And I'm also looking for ways to, on a consistent basis, cut down the time, energy and effort required to follow a good diet and as I've found over the past few months, making this smoothie every morning is a great way to do that. So, without further ado, I'm gonna guide you through the process of making it and then we'll come back here to answer a few quick questions about it. (upbeat music) Welcome to my kitchen.
There ar many like it, but this one is mine. Here we have all the ingredients. I'll just quickly go through them and then we're gonna make this.
So, we got, back here, some strawberries, I have a spinach and kale mix, got some blueberries, which we are almost out of, raspberries, blackberries. Also, flax seed and chia seeds, these both have a lot of nutrients in them, I'll talk a little bit about that later. Silk, unsweetened vanilla almond milk.
You got your plain old gold standard optimum nutrition whey protein to get that, I don't know, to get swole, right? Natural Jif peanut butter, I know I could do actual natural peanut butter, but I like this stuff quite a bit. We got our Quaker oats.
Last, but not least, good old bananas. So, like I said in the intro, this does not take very long to make, so let's go ahead and make it and the blender that I'm using to make this guy is the NutriBullet 900 series. If you have a regular blender at home, that's gonna do just fine.
The main benefit of a NutriBullet, in my opinion, is that you can drink right out of the serving sized shaker cup here, which I do and that really reduces the cleanup that I need to do afterwards. But, if you have a regular blender and you want to just dump it into a yeti rambler or a glass or whatever you have laying around, then no need to buy this thing and I'm probably gonna have to replace it in the future anyway 'cause I put a lot of ingredients in my shake. Alright, so the first thing I always do, get my self a spoon and do what I think is roughly a cup of the spinach and kale mix.
So, I just kind of spoon it in until it's roughly at a point that looks pretty good, around a cup's worth. So, about that much, you can do a lot less, this is how much I do. And then we'll move onto the strawberries.
I know you can open it from the bottom, it's kind of like a life hack I've written about before, or read about, but I just do this. (crunching) And that works pretty well, too. This is not very ripe, but it will work.
And the nice thing is if you have ingredients that aren't perfectly ripe or you have things that don't necessarily taste amazing on their own, they're pretty good in the smoothie, so I do about half of a small to medium sized banana. And then, strawberries next. Usually four to five strawberries, they're a big volume item, so I don't try to go overboard on those guys.
And then we'll do other berries. So, blackberries, generally about four to five of those, raspberries, pretty much the same story and finally, our blueberries. So, we have the fruit base, we have the veggies, now let's do the rest of it.
I like to do a single serving of flax seed, which is two tablespoons. The one thing I would warn you about is that flax is high in fiber and a lot of people don't get enough fiber and if you introduce a whole ton of fiber into your diet really, really quickly, you're gonna have some gastrointestinal difficulties. So, maybe start with like half a tablespoon of this stuff and work your way up slowly.
I've gotten to the point where I'm pretty used to it. Chia seeds. I don't think there's as much of a warning I have to put on these guys, so I usually do two tablespoons of these, as well.
Both the flax and the chia contain omega-3 fatty acids, they contain a lot of vitamins and minerals and they also are decently calorie dense and also add some protein to the shake, so if you're an athlete or you like to work out and you're trying to put on some weight or gain some muscle, they're pretty good sources of protein and calories. For calories, I also put in Quaker oats, I don't really think that there's a whole lot of other benefits to the oats that you couldn't get from other ingredients, but again, I'm trying to make this like a true meal replacement and something to give me a lot of energy when I go to the gym, so I will do just like four tablespoons of oats in there. That is only half a serving, so it adds maybe 75 calories, but you can't get this shaker cup too full and some, not naming names, but some would believe that I already make it too full.
But, hey. So, with the NutriBullet, there is, as my camerawoman is explaining, there's a max line on the cup here and I'm using the bigger cup because I'm a monster and eat a thousand calorie shake every morning. You want to fill it up to the max line with liquid.
You can do all kinds of liquids. You can do regular milk, you can do almond milk, you can do soy milk, you can do water, I like doing the almond milk. I found that it tastes really good, it is not as high calorie or sugar dense as regular milk and it still tastes really good.
And then, this is the real calorie packer here. So, if you wanted to make a lower calorie shake, you would probably just want to leave out the peanut butter or do a lot less of it, but again, it's almost like a mass gainer for me, so I will do probably about two servings of peanut butter in there and I love peanut butter. This is the guilty pleasure in here and I guess maybe the flavored protein shake is, too, but it's so good.
And finally, we got our standard optimum nutrition whey protein. This is the vanilla ice cream flavored and I'm just do a single serving of that, plop it in and we are good to go. You want to make sure that your lid, which is also the blade, is on real tight and then it would probably be a good idea if I plugged the blender in.
Now, this is really loud, but luckily I have the magic of editing, so it won't be for you. (upbeat music) Probably good. Oh yes, check out our delicious cup of pinkish grayish slop.
There it is. I don't have to put it in a cup because this is literally a cup. I think it's best to drink it through a straw and because plastic straws are horribly bad for the environment and you throw them away all the time, I got just some glass straws from Amazon.
There are also stainless steel straws, but I've heard that those can get a lot colder and be bad for sensitive teeth, so I got the glass ones, I think they're a bit thicker, they don't transfer that cold quite as much, could be bro science, but these work for me, so. Bon appetite, my friends. Let's answer a few questions about the smoothie that the whole process of making it probably didn't answer.
First and foremost, how does it taste? I actually think that this smoothie tastes really freaking good, especially given the fact that it has a ton of ingredients in it and I kind of almost feel like I hit upon a really good recipe really early on because I didn't have to do a whole lot of experimentation with this and compared to a lot of the smoothies I've gotten from places like Jamba Juice and like grocery stores that make smoothies, I actually like the taste of this one better. It's probably a lot of the fruits mixed with the peanut butter, you kind of can't go wrong with that combination, but the fact that it tastes really good and it tastes good enough for me to look forward to drinking it every single morning is a real benefit because it's nutritionally complete, but it's not something that I dread in the morning.
Now, of course we have to answer the questin could you make it healthier? Yes, of course you could. I'm sure there are gonna be plenty of people down in the comments suggesting changes or telling me that I am completely idiotic for including ingredient X or ingredient Y in here.
But, yeah, you could totally make it healthier and if this is something you're gonna start doing, making smoothies in the morning, I would encourage you to experiment with different ingredients and to try to make it healthier and try to vary it up from time to time. Now, to get specific, the peanut butter that I put in my smoothie is, number one, peanut butter and peanuts aren't the healthiest nut out there and also, it's Jif peanut butter, so there's a little bit of added sugar in there. So, if you wanted to make things even healthier, you could go to completely raw peanut butter, literally just peanuts and salt, or you could switch it out for something like an almond butter.
You could also, instead of using a flavored protein, use a non-flavored protein, just pure whey protein or even go to a vegan protein or you could use a different protein source all together. And, of course, you could change up the fruit to vegetable ratio, putting more greens in there and less fruit if you wanted to lower the sugar content even more. But, again, and I really want to emphasize this, sustainability is the name of the game.
I'm not aiming for perfection here, I'm aiming for something that's a lot better than I would otherwise eat, but that I really want to eat on a daily basis, so I'm consistent in my good diet. Now, because some of you may be curious, I do want to dig a little bit into the actual nutritional profile of this smoothie. Now, I don't claim to be an expert here and there are probably ingredients and vitamins and minerals that aren't listed on the nutritional facts of each ingredient, but I did do a little bit of research by looking at the nutritional labels for the things that have them and then using a site called fooducate.
com to look up nutrition content of the fruit and vegetables that didn't have labels on the packaging and I came up with some data and I'm gonna have a link to a Google sheet that I created in the description below, which I will start flushing out in the future to add different smoothie recipes to over time, so you may want to bookmark it. Though, I do want to mention that drinking one of these, no matter what you put in it, is not a panacea, you also need to worry about the other parts of your diet. So, if you're just thinking that you can create a nutritionally complete smoothie every single day and then eat nothing but Nabisco crackers and pizza rolls for the rest of your meals, then you may want to rethink that plan.
And on that note, I would love to explore different nutritional ideas in the future, particularly ideas that cut down, again, on the time and energy required. So, I want to dig into to things like batch cooking, like slow cooker cooking, things like that. Things that give you meals that you can just put in the fridge and have for days on end instead of having to cook every single night.
And I would love to hear your ideas on that front, so definitely leave some ideas down in the comments below for videos that I should do on the nutritional front in the future. But, until then, if you haven't tried making a smoothie like this before, definitely give it a try. Again, it's super quick to do, the cleanup is minimal and once I've made it in the morning, it's really easy to just sit down and read a book or watch a video or do something that helps me learn something new.
And while we're on the subject of learning new things, if you enjoy my channel and you're looking for more educational content here on YouTube, you may also want to check out the Cheddar channel. I just finished watching one of their videos on how one bad business decision completely tanked Sega's hardware division back in the 1990s and I found that to be a really fascinating video. And beyond that, they have lots of videos and topics like business and technology without all the boring parts.
So, definitely go check out that video by clicking the link in the description down below and if you like that, consider checking out some of their other videos and subscribing to their channel. I want to give a big thanks to Cheddar for sponsoring this video and being in support of my channel and as always, guys, thank you so much for watching. If you liked this video, definitely give it a thumbs up and I would love to hear your recipe modifications to my smoothie in the comments below if you do happen to change things up.
Otherwise, you can subscribe to this channel to get new videos every single week right there or click right there, you'll get a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades. Thanks again for watching and I will see you in next week's video.
