Healthy, Tasty, High Protein Meal Replacement Smoothie for Weight Loss

When it comes to losing weight, the formula is quite simple. The amount of calories your body burns each day must be greater than the amount of calories you consume each day.

Calories Burned – Calories Consumed > 0

Calories are burned as you  go about your day to day and if you exercise (primarily cardiovascular).

Calories are consumed when you eat.

You have three options for satisfying the above formula:

  1. Eat as you normally do but exercise A LOT so as to burn more calories than you consume
  2. Don’t exercise at all but eat very little or very low fat / low calorie foods
  3. Do a combination of the above

Option 1 is too hard and takes too much time and most people will just give up.

Option 2 is easy but if and only if you can find healthy, affordable, tasty, low fat / calories foods that also make you feel sufficiently full.

From my experience, the best approach is to exercise not to lose weight but to stay fit and to eat in such a way that your total calorie intake is less than what you burn. The hardest part of all of this is finding the right kind of food to eat. You can try juicing as suggested in the documentary “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead” but the problem with that is

  1. the fruits and veggies you juice are expensive
  2. you throw away a lot of the pulp and fiber from the fruits and veggies which is wasteful
  3. fruits and veggies quickly go bad if you don’t use them soon enough
  4. cleaning a juicer is too much work
  5. it’s pretty much impossible to come up with a juice recipe that tastes very, very good

 

Recently, I stopped by Fresh ‘n Easy and picked up a protein smoothie by Naked. While it was healthy and tasted really good, it was too expensive at $4.00 for a small 15 fl oz bottle. So, I tried to copy the recipe to save money and see if I could use this as a meal replacement for one of my daily meals. The back of the bottle shows the ingredients as follows:

ingredients2

Since the goal is to make life as simple as possible, I bought pre-juiced ingredients where available. Here’s the ingredient list as shown in the picture below.

  • 1  banana
  • 1/2 cup of real orange juice (not from concentrate)
  • 3/4 cup of real apple juice (not from concentrate)
  • 1/8 cup of pineapple and coconut juice (available at Fresh ‘n Easy)
  • 2 scoops of vanilla-flavored whey protein (available at GNC)

 

You can use a regular blender but I recommend the Magic Bullet blender as it is much more convenient for this purpose.

ingredients

To make the smoothie, put all ingredients into a blender and blend away. As you can see from the picture below, the color is quite close to that of the Naked smoothie. After tasting both drinks, I actually found mine to taste sweeter and have a stronger banana taste. I liked mine more and was able to gulp it down very quickly and actually enjoy every bit of it!

comparison

Currently, I eat cereal for breakfast (blueberry granola with flax seeds), have anything I want for lunch, and this smoothie for dinner. I’m currently only doing 30 pushups (non-stop) every weekday morning. I’ve just started this program which I think is balanced, nutritious, and easy enough to turn into a lifestyle habit. This should work.

UPDATE 3/18/2014:

I’m finding the recipe to be too sweet. Instead of 3/4 cup of apple juice, I’m doing

  • 1/2 cup apple juice
  • 1/3 cup of carrot juice

 

It’s better, but still a tad too sweet.

UPDATE 4/6/2014:

The previous recipe is still too sweet and it doesn’t seem right anymore. The vanilla protein powder doesn’t taste good and is too sweet. The apple juice is also too sweet. I have a better recipe as follows:

 

This protein has 0 grams of sugar. The result is much more like a smoothie and tastes much, much better!

UPDATE 4/20/2014:

It’s still a bit too sweet so I updated the recipe as follows:

 

Now it’s PERFECT!!!! Not too sweet. Super tasty. Just like Jamba Juice but much cheaper!

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