I finally got around to trying the infamous green monster smoothie that everyone raves about. Mine had 72 gm of spinach (2 big ole handfuls), 96 gm of banana (1 medium), 100 gm strawberries (5 med-large), 1/2 cup of unsweetened vanilla almond milk, splenda, 2 Tbsp of uncooked oat bran, ice, and water. It ended up being 2 points.
It filled that glass pictured above 1.5 times. I did have to breakout the full sized blender for this one though. I didn’t want to take any chances with half blended spinach, blech. I am not the biggest fan of spinach as it is. I’m only just now getting to where I can tolerate it raw and unless it is buried deep inside something with a lot of cheese and tomato sauce you can forget about me eating cooked spinach at all.
I was pleasantly surprised. Not that I didn’t believe everyone’s account of how awesome the green monster is but I just think it’s one of those things you have to try yourself. I’d like to find a way to bump up the protein without shifting to points all that much. Maybe pasteurized liquid egg whites? I used to put those in smoothies once upon a time.
This little adventure made me start thinking about how I log my food for Weight Watchers. You see if I log all these ingredients it comes up as 2 points because the only things that have enough calories to have points are the banana and the oat bran. However, if I plug all these ingredients into the Recipe Builder it says it’s worth three points.
Now which way is correct? Generally, I don’t use the recipe builder much. Especially for my day to day stuff. Things that I eat a lot I will log and then “make a meal” so that I have easier access to it later but I hardly ever create a recipe for things that I assemble. If I use the Recipe Builder it is generally because I want to find out how many points are in a given recipe that I already use but just don’t know the points for.
I think using the recipe builder is probably more accurate because it looks at the total for everything and then divides it by the servings. I take advantage of a lot of 0 point items (like just a few strawberries) and it seems that the recipe builder still accounts for those accumulated points in a recipe. Sometimes two 0 point foods can equal 1 point. Of course that statement is completely illogical with respect to actual math but we all know WW math is a different subject altogether.
So how do you calculate things, meals? recipes? individually?
-Weight Loss Warrior
I wonder about these things on a daily basis! Just too lazy or whatever to ask my meetings Leader.
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