Shaking It Up

Now that I’ve gained some clarity by writing about my problem (see my last post), I now feel I can return (at least partially) back to me. For the past month, almost all those healthy habits I have talked about have been thrown out the window. I sporadically still sprinkle food with flaxseed, and try to remember to drink copious amounts of water, but the truth of the matter is that it’s enough to remember to iron my clothes some days, much less keep healthy habits. Luckily, this lapse in habits has not caused me to regain those five pounds I worked so hard to lose, so I am encouraged to least try to get back on track.

My latest ally in the War on Weight is the smoothie/shake option. At the beginning of the year, two people in my office invested into the Nutri-Bullet shake maker, replete with the booklet. And while I struggled to remove five pounds, in about a month, they had managed to lose twice as much apiece.

In theory, this shake idea seems great, and at times, I’m almost tempted to give and try it out. But in practice, I know that the fifty-dollar investment will be a fad, because I have neither the time nor the inclination (mostly the latter), to go to the store every week or two days to buy all the fresh ingredients, toss them in a blender and take them out of the house each morning. To put it plainly, I suffer from an acute bout of kitchen laziness. After I get home from work, my closest aspiration to vegetation is to become a vegetable, preferably the couch-potato sort, or if you want a green leafy, to “lie like broccoli” ala Pretty Woman. Maybe this will change as the semester ends and I am no longer going to work six days a week and coming home after ten on Mondays and Wednesdays, but for right now, making a shake from scratch is not my idea of fun.

But I still like the idea of the shake and the whole liquid diet formula. The end result of the smoothie is a portable convenience for the busy lifestyle, which I undoubtedly have in spades this semester. It is for this reason that I keep six-packs of V-8, both veggie and fruit, in my self-made pantry at work, and the reason that I have invested both in Special K protein shakes and Naked Fruit Juices. I can grab and go, still get my nutrients, and not feel quite as run-down during the course of the day.

For instance, I am trying the Naked Green Machine; it was $4.99 for a 32-ounce bottle. Of course, you do not drink the full bottle in one sitting but I have drunk it throughout the course of the day, and I have to tell you, man I feel full! I did actually eat today as well, but not enough to explain feeling stuffed. I can tell that the juice had a lot to do with it. And while I still feel slightly sleepy from the beatdown the allergy season has been giving me, along with the nightly torture of not sleeping that my son has been giving me, I have every confidence that I’ll make it through the rest of the evening relatively well.