my new(ish) favorite way to start the day

This summer, I have found the secret to bright-eyed mornings, refreshing and healthy yet delicious food, easy weight-loss, and general happiness and well-being. I've also found the meaning of life. Excited yet? Perhaps I exaggerate a bit... but seriously, I've found a breakfast to end all breakfasts. In my opinion. Of course... I kind of detest breakfast so I guess my opinion isn't much to go on.

I'm sure half of you are gasping in shock and clicking the unfollow button- for how could one not like breakfast? People are serious about their breakfast, man... some people even eat it for dinner. I don't know. I can't explain it. I've never really been into eating mountains of doughy or bready stuff sopping with sugary syrup that early in the morning... and eggs have always kind of been meh. As for sausage and bacon... I just never really fell in love with it the way the rest of the world seemed to. maybe it's the vegetarian thing. I can appreciate a good eggs benedict though, provided the meat is substituted with sauteed greens or grilled tomatoes or artichoke hearts or something and they use real hollandaise sauce. Because seriously, how can anyone dislike something that's smothered in hollandaise sauce?

I'm getting off topic. Not liking the typical breakfast food can be difficult in a grand-slam kind of world. I did oatmeal for a while, then chocolate protein shakes, then cereal, then fruit and granola and yogurt, and then just fruit. I like eating fruit for breakfast because it's refreshing, delicious, and low calorie, but it still wakes my body up and gets my metabolism going. This summer though, I decided to mix it up. Enter my parents' blender.

Yep. That's my super awesome secret to everything wonderful. Breakfast smoothies. You're free to go.

Seriously, though! Breakfast smoothies are freaking amazing. The ones I make range from 150-250 cals each and fill pint sized glasses with some usually left in the blender. They are soooo delicious, take a while to consume since you sip it slowly (usually while doing something else, like blogging for instance...), give you an awesome boost of energy, fill you up for hours, AND they're super duper healthy, being low fat, low cal, and chock full of fresh fruit and vegetables and all.

I've been drinking these every day this summer... except for when I went to Greece for 5 weeks. Breakfast in Greece, by the way, made me pine for a big ol' stack of that bready syrupy nastiness. It's bad. Like really, really, really bad. Most times it consisted of shitty coffee, one type of cereal which was the same at every place, room temperature milk, and about 9 types of breads and random pound cakes on which to spread unsalted butter and individually packaged jams. If you were lucky there might be some hard boiled eggs, greek yogurt, or sliced cheese and processed bologna like meat. But fresh fruit? Oh hell no. You're going to eat bread and bologna for breakfast and you're gonna like it.

I hated it.

But now I'm back, and the age of smoothies has begun again!

also, not to like, toot my own horn or anything, but I've lost about 12 pounds this summer. Not saying that it's all to do with drinking smoothies in the morning, but yeah, it totally is.

so whip one up and have it for breakfast tomorrow. It will give you super powers and you will feel like the most amazing person on earth!

Here's what I've been drinking lately:

1 cup frozen blueberries (get the giant bag of them at costco, they will last FOREVER)
1 cup spinach or kale (you can't even taste or see it in the final product, but it's so good for you!)
1/2 a banana
1/2 a fuji apple
1/2 cup water, or soymilk if you're feeling frisky.

dump it all in a blender, turn the blender on. done. total cals: 169, or 214 if you use soymilk.

here's what I'm drinking right now:

1 cup frozen blueberries
2 cups diced watermelon
1 cup spinach
1/2 cup soymilk

total cals: 217. It's so creamy and sweet and light and delicious. and a kajillion times healthier than jamba or robeks!

Tomorrow I'm going to start posting greece pictures. Prepare to be wowed! Or bored. we'll see :)

love you all! happy monday, by the way :)

<3
Ems