Spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, apple, ginger, and turmeric.

This is the rather intimidating list of ingredients I’ve been ingesting in the form of a green smoothie almost every day for the last 10 years.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement, we need a quick rewind to my childhood. There, we find a well-meaning mother struggling to get her stubborn son to eat even the tiniest serving of veggies, let alone green things like kale and spinach. The best she could manage was some well-disguised carrots and potatoes in meat-centered casseroles and the occasional bribe for eating a few slices of cucumber on the side.

So, imagine her surprise when I started eating (or drinking) spinach, kale, and celery on a daily basis! But this was a special time — the start of my healthy living transformation — and I was highly motivated to change (a serious cancer scare can do that to you). When The World’s Healthiest Foods showed me that spinach was the most nutrient-dense thing on the planet, I knew I had to find a way to get more green stuff into my body.

Still, despite this surge of motivation, there were two serious obstacles in my way: 1) eating these bland greens was no fun whatsoever, and 2) making a daily smoothy (and cleaning up afterward) was even less fun.

The process of overcoming these obstacles gave me the key to lifelong healthy eating in a world filled with addictive empty-calorie treats (and inspired one delighted mom to adopt the green smoothie habit herself).

Today, I’d like to share this key with you.

Pain-Free Healthy Eating

Humans have strong instincts to chase instant pleasure and avoid instant pain. These are the instincts so shamelessly exploited by food companies to create the ultra-addictive treats that fuel our global obesity epidemic.

Here’s the rub: If you’re expecting yourself to consistently accept instant pain and forego all pleasure in the name of healthy eating, you’re deluding yourself. You might last a week, a month if you’re extremely motivated, but sooner or later, you’ll cave. And when you do, you’re likely to binge away all the progress you’ve made in no time flat.

No, healthy eating should not be painful. In fact, we should do everything in our power to make it as pleasurable as possible! It was this realization that started my lifelong green smoothie habit.

After learning about the health benefits of spinach, I tried several ways to prepare it and hated them all. Cooked spinach is just deeply unpleasant unless drowned in an unholy amount of cheese. Following many failed attempts, I finally happened upon the idea of a green smoothie.

What attracted me to this idea was the inclusion of apples and any kind of fruit juice. I liked several fruit juices and did not mind the occasional apple, so I thought to give this a try. At first, my ratios were rather lopsided towards apples and orange juice, but it worked: I found the resulting green smoothie quite tolerable, even mildly pleasant at times.

Over the years, I’ve gradually increased the spinach and kale fraction, reduced the orange juice, and switched to more expensive pressed juice with pulp. But this transition has been so gradual that it never threatened my commitment to my daily green smoothie.

More importantly, this philosophy soon flowed over to my other meals. For breakfast, I’ve come up with a genuinely delicious mix of nuts, seeds, and berries. For lunch, I use the meat as a vegetable dressing philosophy to bring great pleasure to the consumption of copious quantities of cooked veggies. And, for dinner, I mostly indulge in my favorite fruit, the avocado, on some seed-sprinkled crackers with a delightful bit of smoked salmon on top.

Because they are delicious, these ultra-healthy meals work with my natural instincts instead of against them. The result? Lifelong healthy eating habits without having to waste any of my preciously limited willpower reserves.

Effort Minimization

Our desire to avoid instant pain extends beyond our aversion to tasteless healthy food. Indeed, our food not only needs to be tasty; it also needs to be effortless.

This is a major challenge when it comes to green smoothies. The process of chopping up vegetables, blending them, and cleaning up afterward is no fun whatsoever. I soon realized that expecting myself to repeat this process every couple of days was never going to happen.

So, I decided to explore economies of scale. First, I bought a large smoothie maker and some freezer containers. Then, like any good engineer, I proceeded to optimize the process. I bought enough ingredients for two months of green smoothies, chopped them all up, arranged them in six piles for easy blending, blended one after the other, stored the product in the freezer containers, and cleaned up.

Soon, I had this workflow optimized to the point that it took less than 40 minutes to make 2 months’ worth of green smoothies. In other words, each smoothie costs me about 40 seconds, which is a price my lazy instincts are willing to pay for lifelong health.

Again, this philosophy soon spread to the rest of my eating regimen. For breakfast, I optimized the workflow so I could combine 16 healthy and delicious ingredients in a mere 2 minutes. For lunch, I followed the same bulk-prep-and-freeze strategy as with the green drink, creating ultra-convenient daily hot lunches for a mere 5 minutes a pop. For dinner, I developed a solid system for reliable avocado ripening and learned a few simple alternative recipes for some variation.

Overall, I spend an average of 10 minutes per day preparing my deeply enjoyable healthy meals. More importantly, the need for willpower is concentrated into a single session per month. On all the other days, the willpower requirement is zero.

To Sum Up

If you want to enjoy a (substantially longer and more rewarding) lifetime of healthy food, you must:

1. Make your healthy foods as desirable as possible. Putting healthy food into your body should require no willpower whatsoever.
2. Make healthy eating effortless. Concentrate your food preparation in large batches to restrict willpower requirements to once or twice per month.

Setting this up takes a bit of time, but you will enjoy rich returns for the rest of your life. I sure hope you give it a go!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.