- 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.