My diet these days is, if we’re being completely honest, a bit of a mess. On the plus side, I take vitamins (and yes, I 100% feel entitled to medals for this) and generally enjoy balanced-diet-type foods. But these small wins are massively outweighed by the fact that much of my food consumption comes via whatever is left on my children’s plates.
Why? For two reasons. The first is that like all moms everywhere I am busy, and sitting down to eat a nice, solid meal ranks very low of my list of priorities, somewhere underneath “locate hairbrush so as not to scare FedEx guy” and “check Instagram feed.” And the second is that my children do not like it when I eat, because they view my choice to sustain myself as a simultaneous choice to deprive them. In other words: If they see me eating, they take my food away from me, because it looks more delicious than theirs. (I totally get this; my poor, long-suffering husband has not been able to eat a meal without “someone” picking at it for years.)
So okay, it’s basically disaster management at this point. One major tactic I’ve started to use is trying to get in a bunch of good stuff first thing in the morning, before the distractions pile up and the day gets away from me and now oops, it’s 5PM and all I’ve consumed are three Cheetos, fourteen cups of coffee, and the half of my son’s Lunchable that he didn’t think looked good that day.
For the past couple of months, I’ve been making a smoothie almost every morning, because it’s suuuuuch an easy way to get in extra protein and calcium – and because the smoothies I make are (ahem) so very delicious that I wake up craving them and am totally willing to do things like shriek “LOOK OVER THERE IT’S THE FULL CAST OF THE BUBBLE GUPPIES!” at my children so that they don’t see my smoothie and take it away from me. (Ok, ok, I have been known at times to make some extra for them as well. But only if they’re willing to share their silly straws, because nothing ups the yum factor of a smoothie like a silly straw.)
This smoothie is my current (and perhaps all-time) favorite, because it uses fairlife ultra-filtered chocolate milk. If you recall, this milk has somehow enraptured my entire family to the point where we literally never permit ourselves to run low on it. Our kids drink it warmed up as “hot chocolate,” I drink it in smoothies – we’ll get to that in a sec – and Kendrick drinks it all the time, in honestly stunning quantities. As obsessions go, this is a pretty solid one, because fairlife is real milk filtered to concentrate its goodness, so it has 50% more protein, 50% less sugar and 30% more calcium than regular milk, plus no lactose and no artificial growth hormones whatsoever.
CHOCOLATE MILK & BANANA SMOOTHIE
What You Need:
- 1 cup fairlife ultra-filtered chocolate milk
- 1 banana, cut into pieces
- 1/4 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp hemp seeds
- 2 ice cubes
What You Do:
- Blend.
- Serve.
- Freak out over deliciousness.
This post was created in collaboration with fairlife. Photography by Sue Hudelson.
