Lose Weight With A Diet Shake
Any diet to be successful calls upon you, the dieter, to arrest control of what goes into your body. In fact one of the best things about dieting besides losing weight and feeling great is the feeling that you are the boss of food, not the other way around. And since a diet shake is one of the best ways to get good nutrition into your system in a pleasing way, the more control you have over that process the better.
The diet industry makes millions of dollars selling foods already put together for dieters including diet shakes in cans that you can buy. But for a couple of reasons, buying your shakes is not the best way to go. For one thing, making your own diet shakes means you can use absolutely fresh foods and that means you are getting the most nutritional value from the shake. More importantly, those shakes you buy in cans may say "diet" on the outside of the container but too often what you actually drink is not that healthy.
Of course the heart of making a great shake of any kind is owning a great blender. But with that one piece of equipment on hand, its really just a matter of combining the right base with the right ingredient to make shakes that will be healthy and help you reach your diet goals and taste good too. There are three types of bases of any good diet shake and they are dairy, vegetable or fruit based shakes.
A dairy based diet shake is just that. It is built on a solid diet dairy product. Of course, if you are lactose intolerant, this base is out. But don't substitute soy or some other dairy replacement for a good 2% level of milk to use as a base for your shake. And since milk is such a hospitable substance, you have a lot of variety with the ingredients you add to the shake to keep them tasty and interesting.
For a shake that is full of core vitamins and is so rich and healthy it can actually be lunch or dinner, you can't beat a good vegetable diet shake. The commercial brand V8 gives us the pattern for a good vegetable shake recipe. If you like V8 you can start with a tomato base and then add in other vegetable blends and spices to make some really exciting shakes for your diet meal time. One thing to watch out for is to avoid any vegetable juice that might be hard for you to digest because many vegetables get a little hard on the digestive track in juice form.
What is great about making your own fruit diet shakes is that you can get that taste of something sweet and still stay on your program. The best way to make a fruit based shake is to start with fresh fruit and use the blender to turn it into a smooth drink. That way you retain all the health value of the fruit. And it's a delightful way to get your day going or even to have a light desert at night that isn't going to make you fat.
Now working from these bases, it's really up to you how to vary the ingredients in your diet shakes. It's a good idea to use that imagination of yours too because the more variety you can introduce in your diet, the more likely you are going to be able to stay on the diet month after month and see some real results. You can add peanut butter to a dairy or fruit based shake and increase the protein value significantly. You can also add powdered vitamin supplements to mix in important vitamin levels that you may not have complete control over working with raw ingredients.
It's fun to make diet shakes and adding something you enjoy to your diet can make it whole lot easier to get through a tough diet. It's also fun to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. So by using fresh foods in your shakes, you not only are saving money but getting the most food value from the drink. You can just focus on how great the shake tastes and let all that good stuff in it help your body lose the pounds. And a side benefit is the healthy ingredients will help your body fight off colds and flues and other diseases as well. So from one great tasting drink, you stay healthy, have more energy and you are having more fun and losing weight so pretty soon you look great too.