Healthy Changes, Day 6: Berry Protein Shake

Day 6 Overview:
Weight:  211.9 lbs (-5.1 total)
Weekly Measurements:  Waist 49in., Upper arm 14in., Thigh 28in.
Exercise:  45 min of Wii Yoga & 1 mile walk after the rain.
Recipe:  Berry Protein Shake

I'm down 5 pounds already and have been exercising every day!  Woo-hoo!  Go me! 

Leftovers lunch.

I wasn't looking forward to lunch at all since it was the leftovers of the Three Taste Noodles recipe from the other day.  Blah.  I did, however, figure out what it is that I really don't like in it.  It's the olives.  Olives are to me, as mushrooms are to Henry - gross.  I love olive oil and love how olives flavor things but I cannot stand to eat olives in their normal state.  I'll suffer through them on a pizza and can tolerate them in some dishes, but even though I had chopped them up quite a bit in this dish I still wasn't able to eat them without triggering my gag reflex.  Gross, gross, nasty. 
However, the "noodles" had mellowed out quite a bit from the other day - not so crazy curry land anymore - so combining that with a little bit of brown rice made for a good meal (sans olive pieces, of course!).  Like I said, I'm planning to re-do this dish in the future, just with different flavors.  It was good to have the brown rice as a side - makes it more like the healthy fare at an Asian cuisine restaurant instead of random mushy squash noodles.

Yoga Wii me & the rest of the family.

I had big plans of going to the farmer's market and then on a long walk this morning, but was thwarted by the arrival of a note that they would be replacing the stairs to the second floor in our apartment building (the stairs are outside) and I wouldn't be able to come or go most of the day.  Because of that, I decided I would stay put and work on things from home, but then the torrential rains came and prevented even the stair replacement from happening today.  So, I decided to pull out the Wii and do my long yoga workout since I wasn't going to go on a walk.  After it finally stopped raining, I went out for a short walk around the neighborhood instead of in the park.  I'm getting up early tomorrow to see if I can knock out my walk and get back before they rip off the stairs.  I'll plan on cleaning and cooking tomorrow while I'm stranded - how very 1950's of me.  ;-)

The rain that prevented my walk.

 For dinner, since I'm on the "real" plan now on the Clean Program, I picked out one of their shakes.  I'm supposed to have a shake/smoothie for dinner and one for breakfast with a 12 hour gap in-between, and a meal off the regular food plan for lunch.  I can have whatever "clean" snacks I want, too, but I honestly haven't been hungry at all since I've been eating this way.  That's quite a change from the carb munching monster I've been in the past.  I've been drinking a lot of water (but that's no big change) and tea with a little bit of fruit/veg juice in it and will usually have an apple or a couple of dried apricots before or after my walk, but that's it really.

Ingredients for the dinner shake.

The recipe I picked is the Berry Protein Shake and I'm not using the "Clean Kit" (that'd be how that site makes their money, I assume) so I used a tablespoon of ground flax seed I ground in the coffee grinder.  They say that flax seed doesn't do any good if you eat it in seed form and that it can loose a lot of the nutritional benefit if it isn't ground immediately before use (i.e. if you buy it ground, not as good, or if you grind a bunch of it and save it, not as good).  I've also used a mortar and pestle to crush it, but the coffee grinder is much faster (though it does scare the fur-babies).  Here's some more info on flax seed.

Here, too, is the recipe for the Berry Protein Shake, below.  I didn't have any raspberries, so I just upped the quantity of blackberries instead.  I used almond milk and frozen berries and had to pit the dates that Henry got for me, but that's no big deal. It took a while for me to find something big enough to hold all the shake, but I got a coffee mug and filled it up and was thinking it looked like a lot for one person but drank it down.  Then I got on their website and looked at the recipes file and saw where it said most of the shake/smoothie recipes were 2 servings.  Oops.  It'd be nice if they put that on the individual meals!  So, I've added that to the recipe below.  Luckily I hadn't had the apple I was going to eat earlier today, so I just considered that my snack.  Next time around I'll be making 1/2 of the requested shake since I hate leftover smoothie.  I'd rather wash the blender twice then have a nasty re-blended mess.  But that's just me...

BERRY PROTEIN SHAKE
1 cup nut/rice/hempseed milk of your choice (either homemade with 1/2 cup nuts and 1 1/2-2 cups water, or unsweetened from the health food store)
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries
1/2 cup fresh or frozen blackberries (optional)
3 pitted dates
1 teaspoon vanilla
If using the Clean Kit, add 1 scoop each of the Nourish (any flavor) and Move. Otherwise, add 1 tablespoon flax meal powder or 2 ounces aloe juice

1. Blend all ingredients until smooth.
 Serves 2. (I added that important info.)
The whole pdf file of smoothie recipes is found here.