Simple Green Smoothies

*Note: This post may contain affiliate links. Read my disclosure policy here.

What is Simple Green Smoothies?

I heard of Simple Green Smoothies a few years ago, but because I’m not one to complicate food prep (why do more than I need to if everyone eats fruits plain as it is), I never gave it much thought. But I was reintroduced to the site and its challenge when I was looking into doing challenges because y’all know we love a good challenge around here. SGS was started by Jen and Jadah in 2011. They wanted to share their story of how a simple green smoothie each morning changed their lives, and they wanted to show others how being “green” is easier than we think! So SGS was born. There are lots of smoothies on the website and they have also come out with *a book of smoothie recipes (49% on Amazon right now!). In addition to smoothies, if anyone is beyond the basics (not me! :p ), Jen also has great (and easy-to-understand) information about cleanses, resets, wholesome eating, and making smoothies a meal replacement.

What is the Simple 7 Challenge?

Here’s the Simple 7 Challenge in a nutshell:

🍓🍊🍌🍍🍐
7 ingredients
7 green smoothies
7 minutes a day
7 days straight
#simple7squad
@simplegreensmoothies

When you sign up, you will get a shopping list, downloadable guidebook, daily emails with encouragement and tips for each day of the 7 days, membership to the Simple 7 Squad community on Facebook, and chances to win free goodies monthly.(photo: Simple Green Smoothies)

Prepping for Our First Challenge

Norm does the grocery shopping around here because he’s better at remembering which stores are best for different items and what deals are available. So here are our shopping details:

– Trader Joe’s and Safeway
– Spinach and kale were bagged
– Oranges and bananas were fresh
– Mangoes, pineapples, and strawberries were frozen

We doubled the servings on the shopping list. It came out to be $25 for 2 people. If you are going by the list, it was $12.50 for SEVEN 16-oz. smoothies.

Sidenote: My sister also did this challenge with her hubby and a friend. They got their stuff at Costco, and it was $25 for 2 people as well.

We were not sure what to expect, so Norm and I prepped the smoothie bags when the girls were at Awana. It took us about an hour to prep the 14 bags. I think if we read through the guidebook beforehand, it would have been a bit faster. (If you buy all fresh fruits, it may take longer to prep, and depending on the size, you may have leftovers, like the pineapple my sister had…and I’m not sure if we were subconsciously not excited about the kale (in our drink…salad is fine), but we had an unused bag at the end.)

Note: I got the apple cutting/serving board (plus corer) from a friend and I’m not sure where she got it, but you can *purchase it on Amazon…or if you’d rather have a *watermelon board, or perhaps a *strawberry or lemon or lime or orange or grape or tomato or chili pepper board, they have those too!

What We Did for the Challenge 

I don’t know that we get the “right” amount of fruits and veggies in our bodies every single day, but all four of us eat salads (the girls’ fave is my Salt & Pepper Salad…seriously, the easiest thing ever after I tried making “fancy” salads for them), and you will always find 3-4 different fruits in our house at any given time (except maybe Sunday afternoon before grocery-shopping time).

So, for the challenge, we gave it a slow start. Y’all know I’m also about the baby steps (yes, sometimes it’s a problem, but I’m surviving).  We went through one bag a day for 2 weeks instead of the 7 days of the challenge. Each bag is for a 16-oz. drink, and we split it among the four of us. No, this doesn’t give each of us a lot, but like I said, we already eat a ton of fruits around here. We weren’t necessarily trying to do the challenge for health benefits (that’s an added bonus), but it gives us other options for how to eat/drink our fruits and veggies! (I will have to say MANY other Simple 7 Squad members have reported smoother skin, more energy, and better overall nutritional decisions in the rest of their meals.) We drank these in the morning, but if I can recall back 2 months correctly, we all ate something else for breakfast as well, so having the prep-ahead bags for 14 days instead of 7 worked for us.

Note: We have a *Breville BBL605XL Hemisphere Control Blender and it works for us, but there are high-powered ones, basic ones, as well as personal-size ones in The Blender Guide.

Our Thoughts About the Smoothies

It’s not the first time we’ve seen a green smoothie, but it was fun to watch as all the ingredients blended together in the blender. We finally found the best way to get things blended smoothly by mid-challenge. None of us mind the kale, but it is probably not our preferred green-of-choice. Also, we probably should have used our bag of baby kale instead of regular kale. EVERYONE agreed that the Beginner’s Luck was a great way to start. We didn’t completely or strongly dislike any of the smoothies.  We would all drink any of them again, but we all did have our own preferences, which I can’t remember now, but I’ll let you know once we try them all again. :p

Our Thoughts About the Challenge…and Next Steps

This is a great start to healthier eating, especially for people who do not regularly eat greens! It’s like I tell the girls all the time, you won’t know if you’ll like it until you try it. And if you try it and don’t like it, that’s fine too, but make sure to add fruits/veggies in your diet somewhere in your day/week. And if there are allergies or an ingredient you really don’t like, you can just swap it out. The Simple Green Smoothie Formula will help you out with that!

Prepping – I can see the girls having a great time helping with prep, so we will definitely have to do this next time! And probably the shopping too!! Life-schooling is the best! 🙂 We will hopefully have the *SGS book in our hands by next month when we do the challenge again, so we may try out some different recipes. There are also a bunch of yummy-looking ones on the SGS blog.

Freezing – I’ve read about different ways to freeze and blend…or blend and freeze…but I haven’t thought out what would be the best for us. The plastic bags worked, but it was a lot of plastic. My neighbor-friend says she preps and blends ahead of time, and uses canning jars to store her smoothies for the week. She just takes them out of the freezer in the morning and it is ready by the time she goes to work. We are open to all suggestions.

Drinking – I think we will still continue to double the ingredients and split it to drink over 2 weeks as it is not the only thing we have for breakfast. This time around, it will be a delightful start to the day as I’m hoping the spring will be much warmer than the winter we just had.

(photo: Simple Green Smoothies)

Have you tried a green smoothie before? What other colors of smoothies have you had? :p What are your favorite green smoothie recipes?

Links:
– Check out Simple Green Smoothies here –> simplegreensmoothies.com
– Join the Simple 7 Challenge here –> simplegreensmoothies.com/simple7
– Buy the Simple Green Smoothies book here –> *amzn.to/2lR9xxj (it’s 49% off at the time this post goes live)

*Note: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a tiny percentage if you make a purchase through my link at no extra cost to you. Read my disclosure policy here.