Diet Makeover – Green Fruit Smoothies

Green Fruit Smoothies. They’re all the rage and there’s a reason why: They’re fantastic. Why have we waited so long to start drinking them and using high-powered blenders to do so?

We are now consuming 2 cups of spinach, a handful of kale, 2 cups of peaches, 1 cup of pineapple and two bananas a day.

It’s a bona fide diet makeover. Our bodies are happy. We are happy. The guilt is gone. They are delicious. And, bonus, there are great side effects:

The checkout line

Do you know how good it feels to check out with four pineapples at once? You can’t help humming to yourself, waiting for the world to notice the amount of goodness on sale 2/$4 this week. Especially if you’ve spent the last five years at one store in particular buying bag after bag of chocolate. The checkout ladies try to hide their surprise; you’re dying for them to comment on it.

The guy ahead of you

You explode with pride when the guy ahead of you checks out with just a brown, waxy pastry bag. When the cashier asks, “How many?” he replies, “Two fat pills.” You giggle. Of course you can. Your own bag of fat pills is being smashed by four rolling gargantuan tropical fruits with thorny points sloughing off on the conveyor belt.

Note: Drinking smoothies has not stopped us from eating sugar, frosting, cookies or donuts. It has, however, alleviated our guilt of doing so.

The freezer section

Have you seen the “Farm to Freezer” fruit at Tom’s Food Markets? Fresh sliced peaches from Smeltzer Orchard Company in Benzonia, flash frozen in time just for us! Buying peaches feels great. But buying local peaches with a label dated by a human hand with a Sharpie marker? You feel like you grew them yourself.

The greens

You find yourself marking out a few goals. Can you eat two bins of this organic stuff before it turns into wet, lacy slop? Can you fill your blender until you regret it? Can you stomach a handful of kale drowned in fruit? How about two handfuls? (Answer: no) It’s a glorious feeling to eat triple-washed spinach by 8 a.m. seven days a week.

The prep

Line up four of those fancy SpongeBob things on your counter and you’ll finally use that Ginsu knife you got last Christmas. You feel like Barefoot Contessa.

You are slicing and dicing when you hear one of the children exclaim, “You got four of them?” You almost shout in response but, when you turn, you see they are looking at something else, the 4 bags of chocolate chips you also bought. You go back to your work because it feels good and right, and those chips feel very, very wrong.

Enjoy the slice of the knife as it sections the yellow fruit. The pineapple juice will flow off the cutting board and onto the counter and, eventually, down the front of it. Curse it, even as you rejoice in its existence. For you have cleaned many, many drips of ice cream and this, this is long awaited.

The straw

Every straw you’ve used in adulthood has been one of three:

1. A Burger King straw. You’ve just consumed a Whopper. A Double Whopper. Regret is heavy and so are you.

2. A milkshake straw. Good God, you’ve just had the world’s best chocolate shake at Don’s Drive-In. There is no regret. Life is short. We give an all-out pass to ice cream. Always.

3. A mixed drink straw. The perfect conduit and stirrer of vodka over ice. It is tiny and thin, trying to stop you. But you persist, never a quitter. This straw holds a place of honor as it is always the first step to very fun bad decisions.

Finally, we have No. 4: The smoothie straw, the world’s first guilt-free straw. They come in neon yellow, bright pink and life-affirming spinach green. With these straws, you are responsible and pure. No wasted calories or surprise hangovers. And when a wedge of kale gets stuck in them, it’s satisfying. The nutrition is so huge that it can’t fit.

So there it is, the biggest diet makeover ever to happen to the chocolate-chip-loving twins. It’s a great start to the New Year and we wish you a smoooooth 2015!