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Blender Recipe – Banana Porridge Video

by Charlie Forness on May 15, 2012

I know I promised a video for yesterday.  Demonic Stomach Virus had other plans for my wife and kids.  Let’s just say that Mother’s Day this year was memorable for its puke-tacularness.

I Bring You Banana Porridge Recipe Awesomeness

The thing I love the most about my Vitamix is that everything is dreadfully simple.  I kinda hate cooking.  One bowl cooking ain’t bad.  But chopping and blending is pure awesomeness.

This is a super-easy recipe that will take you three minutes to make.  Four simple ingredients, five if you include the water.

Ingredients

1/2 Cup Raw Almonds soaked overnight in half cup water (keep the water!)
1 Banana, peeled.
1 TBSP Raw Honey
1/2 tsp to 1 tsp Ground Cardamom
Mix for one Minute in Vitamix (or other blender) on High

Before I get objections as to how bananas can be difficult to digest, the Cardamom actually helps with the digestion of them, or so people who currently know more than me about Ayurvedic cooking say.

If you have a nut allergy, please beware.  I have no idea what you are allergic to, so consider this my generic legal disclaimer.

…ka-Chow!

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Optimal Nutrition Part Two

by Charlie Forness on May 10, 2012

In my previous post, a video showing how to make an easy smoothie I showed the fundamental principle behind my diet for my Manboobs to Beach Body Transformation (name changes daily).

I’ve been around the block to know that there are as many diet philosophies as there are religions in the world and the proponents can often be rather zealous about their particular nutritional creed.

It drains me to even get in the argument and I’ve often found that the most zealous are those who follow the Primal diet, or what they perceive it to be.  Again, I’m not here to get into an argument about it.  I’m just not a proponent of eating stupid amounts of meat, especially when most of these proponents won’t kill their own food like their Primal ancestors did.

What I know is that I feel absolutely amazing when I have a natural foods smoothie.  And I’ve only begun to experiment.

The recipe I showed in the previous video is hardly the most nutritious you can make, but it’s still better for you that what most of us typically consume for breakfast.  That recipe contained orange, banana, cranberry, carrot, and celery.  I find that it keeps me satiated for about three to four hours before I start to become hungry, which is pretty good consider there is very few calories in it.

I’ve found that to the degree that I experiment with more dark, leafy greens in my drink the longer I can go without getting hungry.

For example, the Beet Greens, Banana, Apple drink I alluded to in that post made only half as much drink, yet I went six hours before my next meal after that one.

I’m not trying to restrict my calories to any degree.  In fact, the best body I ever had was in my early twenties when I was consuming about 5000 calories a day, spread over six meals.  There is the theory that muscles need calories to grow and you need to fuel your body to burn fat.  I’d argue that your body needs abundant and healthy nutrients and that this infatuation with counting calories and grams of protein, carbs, fat, whatever, is not working out so well as a collective whole.

So the “secret” to my diet during this is that I eat one or two healthy smoothies per day and then a sensible dinner.  Sometimes I’ll snack with my wife, somedays I won’t.  And…gasp… I’ll actually eat ice cream with the triplets some times.

Early next week I’ll shoot another video with a new recipe.  This is actually not a smoothie per se, but a porridge recipe that I had to guess at from a delicious meal I had while attending a Yoga and Meditation conference last year.  I also had to change it up due to some food allergies with the kids at home.

Lighten up…

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Optimal Nutrition – Smoothie Video

May 7, 2012

If you are having trouble seeing this video in your RSS reader it’s because most RSS feeders suck.  You’ll have to stop by to the site and see me to watch the video, then. One of the keys in my 90 Day From Man Boobs to Beach Body Challenge (name changes daily) has been my [...]

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Needful Things – 001

May 4, 2012

Sharing links on a blog seems to be a dead art.  Most folks just Tweet them and it gets lost in an ever moving feed.  So I thought I’d start sharing some of the powerful things I’ve read each week and maybably make it a regular feature here. 1.  Free Your Stuff – This is [...]

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Anatomy of a Beach Body Workout

May 2, 2012

I don’t really know what the most effective workout routine is for building a beach body and banishing my Man-boobs. I could have let my ignorance stop me from starting the challenge. I could have decided to go on a journey of reading, tabulating, reading some more, all the books that are out there regarding fitness…it [...]

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Anatomy of a Beach Body Challenge

April 30, 2012

I’m now just starting the third week of my personal Beach Body Challenge and I’ve learned a few valuable lessons already.  First let me say that everything is going terrific, better than I could have imagined. Why is this time different, where I’ve spectacularly failed so many times before? The answer to that will take [...]

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Personal Challenge: 90 Days to Banish my ManBoobs and get a Beach Body

April 20, 2012

Six days ago I started a new personal challenge.  I’ve done a number of personal challenges before, even on this blog, some of which were great successes, many more were spectacular failures…but we get no where unless we try. I turned 39 a month ago, and so age 40 is in my foresights.  With two [...]

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On Standing Up for What you Believe In

April 19, 2012

A beautiful reminder…for most of us with the ability to read this and watch this on the internet, we do not suffer such overt oppression. What’s keeping us from living our best life?

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My Introduction to Yoga

April 9, 2012

A year ago now, on a whim, I traveled down to Atlanta, Georgia to learn a form of Yoga called Shambhavi Mahamudra.  I’ve written about this experience in my books and in several blog essays here.  This type of Yoga resembles closely Meditation, with some active breathing techniques.  This practice is the focus of my [...]

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With One Voice

April 3, 2012

Saturday I had a very good day.  Even though my time was tight as chief entertainer for our triplets that day, due to my wife having a show related to her side business, I managed to fit in two, thirty minute Yoga sessions, two twenty minute meditation sessions, a fifteen minute Zhunti Mantra session, and [...]

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