This is a very long-winded post.

There are two things lately within the realm of health and fitness that have been quite helpful to me, and I've decided I'd like to share them with you, my very dear walking friends.

First, in regards to this business of eating a balanced, healthy diet (which can be so tiresome for me that sometimes I'm driven to eat an entire container of cream puffs in the span of two days...): I'm almost always concerned about whether or not I'm eating enough vegetables. Leafy green vegetables, to be exact, because I'm always reading about how they're "nutritional powerhouses," blah, blah, blah. I really like vegetables, even leafy green ones, but I get sick to death of eating salads day in and day out. Actually, if someone would make the salads for me, I wouldn't mind eating them so much, but ripping up lettuce is one of my least favorite things to do in the kitchen, so I like to avoid it as much as possible. It's quite a dilemma I have, isn't it?

Fortunately for me, however, I have a mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law who are the queens of drinking green smoothies, and with their help, I think I've found the answer to my terrible leafy green crisis. Green smoothies are just a mix of greens and fruit tossed into a blender with water. I think the recommended ratio is about 60% fruit to 40% greens, but I don't think it's super necessary to be a stickler about that. (I'm not, anyway.)

It's fun to play around with different combinations of greens and fruit, and I especially, especially like that every ingredient is a whole food. No awful processing, no fruit juice or added sugar, and not one drop of high fructose corn syrup. My favorite concoction so far is a cup of fresh pineapple, a cup of frozen mixed berries, a cup of spinach, and however much water strikes my fancy. (This makes enough for a regular-sized glass. And it's purple instead of green, but nevermind the small details.)

My sister-in-law Sara says it's a good idea to rotate the greens, and so instead of spinach, I've tried mustard greens (which I will not eat ever again, in a smoothie or otherwise!)and romaine lettuce. I didn't care for the romaine very well, either, mostly because the fruit didn't mask the flavor of the greens and it tasted like liquid lettuce. Some of the other greens Sara suggested are kale, collard & beet greens, and Swiss chard.

In terms of fruit, I've also used frozen peaches and fresh strawberries, and this week I'm going to try something with fresh mango. My mother-in-law likes to throw a lime or two into her morning smoothies, but that is a little bit too sour for me.

Besides having peace of mind about vegetable deficiency, I also seem to be less hungry throughout the day when I drink a smoothie in the morning. Sara says when she drinks them regularly, she loses a lot of cravings for other junky food (and also loses a lot of weight). There's a book called Green For Life by Victoria Boutenko that has lots of good scientific information about green smoothies (and recipes, too).

This is much longer than I thought it would be, and so I'll write later about the second thing that has been helpful to me. No one should have to read more than one blog-essay in a day, after all.