Banana Chocolate Smoothie

I still have yet to eat all my meals in a day. With the way I normally eat, it's not a problem because I just grab whatever I want throughout the day. Right now, though, it's tedious to have to look at my meal guide to see how many servings of what I can have, then having to read food label after food label. So I do tend to just wait longer between meals than I should.

Today I skipped lunch, but the snack I had was pretty much lunch due to the amount of carbs it had in it.

So I made a triple berry smoothie last week, halving it since there was so much orange juice in it. I made it from this package from Yoplait. You can find it in the freezer section next to the juice I believe. Well, I wanted something fairly quick and yummy and I had been thinking about cocoa powder a bit today, knowing I could have some. Then I remembered we got fresh bananas. Yoplait also has a chocolate banana smoothie pack and the numbers on the nutrition label aren't bad, but you can definitely make on with better for you stuff and better numbers at home and I'm sure it would taste just as good.

Thinking of all that, I decided to give it a try. If I had been able to use a syrup I would have been able to make an amazing one! Having worked at Starbucks for two years I got to test a lot of stuff and figure out measurements in order to make stuff at home (I can tell you how much chocolate syrup made with the mocha powder you can buy from Starbucks goes into how many ounces of milk by having you measure it in a shot glass).

But the Hershey's chocolate syrup had too many carbs to really be worthwhile. So unsweetened cocoa powder and Splenda it was!

I decided to use some of the non-fat Greek yogurt instead of milk, but with how much powder I used I had to put in a whole banana to make sure it wasn't overpowered, so with the yogurt it was a bit thick. So I ended up adding 1/2 a cup of 2% milk. It was still thick, but it turned out really good.

Here's my recipe, I suggest you tweak it to your own liking. Next time I will use less cocoa powder and maybe crush up some ice in a bag so the Magic Bullet my mom has can really blend that in there. I discovered with the triple berry smoothie that whole cubes just don't work, haha! I ended up popping some ice cubes into the cup when I was done and giving it a stir to make it nice and cold.

Banana Chocolate Smoothie

• 1 Medium Banana
• 1/2c 2% Milk
• 1/2c Non-fat Greek Yogurt
• 2Tbsp Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
• 5 Packets of Splenda
• 1tsp Vanilla Extract/Flavoring

Total basic nutrition facts (roughly): 52g of Carbs, 140 Calories, 16g of Protein, 3.5g of Fat.

So this could be made for lunch or dinner. You would have to add something else to get a little more fat and protein and possibly something to give you more calories. Also I didn't taste the vanilla flavoring. I added it because my dietician said she sometimes uses vanilla flavoring to sweeten things. The Greek yogurt is pretty tart. Luckily the banana adds quite a bit of sweetness but when I put in only 2 packets of Splenda, it was still tart. Five packets doesn't make it incredibly sweet, it's still got that bit of bitter flavor from the cocoa powder with a hint of tang from the yogurt.

And something interesting, after an hour, maybe slightly over, I checked my sugars and it was only 84. For 52g of carbs that's pretty low. Especially since my dinner was a normal meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, a roll, and regular soda. An hour after dinner my sugars were 159, I'm sure at two hours they were higher (like the other day when I had Wendy's and it went from 150 at 1 hour to 170 at 2 hours). But that shows that my pancreas does kick in, it just takes longer.

Hope you enjoy this little idea. And from it think of all the different kind of smoothies you can make with the fruit you have. Like try something interesting like apples and lemon juice (lemon juice having about 1.3g of carbs per tablespoon) with some yogurt and sweetener. I have frozen, cut up mango in the freezer, too, so I could use some orange juice, pineapple chunks, and mangoes to make another. The Greek yogurt is a great staple for these smoothies because it's under the protein section so no meat, string cheese, or eggs.

I'll keep working at coming up with recipes and ideas to put in here. I'm a little overwhelmed still and it doesn't help when I get a sudden craving for bad things like soda and fried chicken.