Green smoothies - Healthy hair from the inside out.

The green smoothie mania is upon us. Every where I go I can't seem to escape it. My instagram timeline is flooded with images of mysterious looking smoothies of varying tints and shades of green captioned 'breakfast smoothie", "brunch smoothie", "post workout smoothie".  At the gym,  the same mysterious liquid seems to be peeking out of everyone's gym bag. As an equal opportunity health fad experimenter, I decided to get on the bandwagon already.

 So I began searching for recipes. First off, you have to pick your greens: ugwu, bitterleaf (if you can stand it), kale, spinach... basically any leafy green vegetable will do. Then you could add some fruit: apples, pineapples, bananas, mangoes... healthy additions to improve the taste because let's face it, who wants to drink blended spinach? Then there are the super foods, and this is where the fun (or confusion depending on how you look at it) begins. Superfoods are foods of very high nutritious value, beneficial to health and well being while having little or no negative properties. There's maca powder, goji berries, chia seeds, msm, blueberries, cacao powder etc. The list goes on and determining which ones to put in your smoothie can be headache inducing. Your best bet is to decide what your goal is: it may be to slow down/reverse signs of aging, prevent or cure heart disease/diabetes/high blood pressure, improve your skin/hair/nails, aid weight loss etc. Once you have decided, pick the corresponding superfoods. I went with chia seeds (good source of fibre and calcium), msm powder (for skin, hair and nails), camu camu powder (vit c, helps with absorption of msm) and blueberries (antioxidants). So all in all, my recipe was:

- A handful of Kale
- A handful of spinach
- 1 apple
- 1 heaped table spoon of Chia seeds
- A handful of Blueberries
- 1/2 teaspoon MSM Powder
- 1/2 teaspoon Camu camu powder

I got the sprouted chia seed powder from the health food store but you can get them online for less

Available at sunfood.com

I put them all in the blender, threw in some ice cubes and blended for a few minutes. It didn't taste nearly as bad as I expected. I've had one everyday since (with minor changes to the recipe: I've used almond milk, plain yoghurt and bananas).

It's been about a month since I started and I feel energetic, my skin is glowy (is that a word?), I have lost some weight (I won't give all the credit to the green smoothies as I have also been working ooout! but it is definitely a contributing factor). I haven't seen any benefits to my hair yet but then, it does takes about 3 months for the effect of your diet to show up in your hair so it's too early to tell. However, glowy skin, more energy and weight loss are definitely good enough reasons to get my green smoothie on. Plus, anything that is good for the skin will more often than not be good for the hair (and nails).

Do you make green smoothies? What are your favourite recipes?