Green smoothie is a cleans?! This is my daily routine: 1.5 lbs of spinach, 6 cups of water, 4 frozen bananas liquified in my Vitamix. (The greens change from time to time actually.) This makes about a gallon of green smoothie. (You have to make this in three batches) Lately I have been throwing in a tomato or two as well. I drink that all day at work. At night I have something I have to chew like chopped romain, bunch of celery, red cabbage, and maybe lentel sprouts or avacado if I am particularly peckish. Sometimes I have raw corn on the cob as a comfort food while I curl up with a movie. Most of my calories for the day are from the smoothies though. It is quick, convenient and gives me the energy to workout three times a day. EDIT: One word of warning. Drinking this much green smoothie in the day has a very undeniable Viagra type effect. So that may not fit with your current life-style/situation. EDIT 2: EDIT: A quick search just now revealed that one cup of spinach has 5 grams of protien. So let's say a lb of spinach is 6 cups, probably a low estimate. That gives me 30 grams of protein? Okay so I am still curious so I look up the profile for one gram of spinach protein: Tryptophan 13mg Threonine 40mg Isoleucine 49mg Leucine 74mg Lysine 57mg Methionine 17mg Cystine 12mg Phenylalanine 43mg Tyrosine 36mg Valine 53mg Arginine 53mg Histidine 21mg Alanine 47mg Aspartic acid 79mg Glutamic acid 113mg Glycine 44mg Proline 37mg Serine 34mg Hydroxyproline~ (I guess that means zero?) Now I have no baseline for comparison, so I want to put that side-by-side with chicken, right? One thing is clear right away, 42 grams of protien in just a single cup of roasted chicken breast. So you need to eat way less to get to 40 grams. Interestingly it takes 200 calories to get to 30 grams of protien with spinach OR 260 calories to get to 40 grams of protien with chicken. That seems pretty similar. I didn't expect that. One gram of chicken protien is broken down as follows: Tryptophan 11.5mg Threonine 42mg Isoleucine 51mg Leucine 74mg Lysine 83mg Methionine 27mg Cystine 13mg Phenylalanine 39mg Tyrosine 33mg Valine 49mg Arginine 62mg Histidine 57mg Alanine 57mg Aspartic acid 90mg Glutamic acid 149mg Glycine 58mg Proline 45mg Serine 35mg Hydroxyproline~ That is astonishingly similar. I guess that makes sense that greens have so much protien. How else do elephants build muscle? The trick is getting enough greens in you then chewing it well enough that you get the protien out of it. We only have the one stomache, and all that cellulose would be hard to break down and utilize fully. Luckily I have that Vitamix. I feel better about my diet already.
