Sometimes you need to lie to yourself and say "Yummm, this shake is groovy!"

Week: 1

I'm in week 1 right now which means I drink a lot of protein shakes. Five of them a day to be exact. These are not your typical protein shakes from EAS or other health food stores. These are from a company called Metabolic Nutrition Inc. You can’t buy them in a store, they are only sold to people under medical supervision.

I’ve tried the different flavors and the only ones I can stomach are Chocolate and Chicken Soup. I’ll get to the Chicken Soup flavor in a bit. The chocolate version sounds good, I mean who doesn’t love chocolate, but like with most diet stuff, ‘chocolate’ is an approximation of taste. With the scale between two extremes: “tastes like ass” to “tastes like medicine”.

The thing that makes these drinkable is we get to put in ½ a cup of berries. I’m learned to like the raspberries. That’s pretty much it. Mixing in blueberries with chocolate is instant puke time. Same goes for blackberries. Chocolate with raspberries is a nice combination, and I’m going to stick with this combination for as long as I can.

Making these things at work.

It is a royal pain in the ass to make this at home. Doing it at work is even more of a challenge. The packages say to mix content with “8 oz of water or ice”. If you put too much ice you get this icey-sledge mixture which is too hard to drink. Too little ice and it’s like a nasty reddish brown drink you have to swallow.

I tried making these at home, freezing them and bringing to work. This just doesn’t work. To stomach the shake, at least for me, it helps to be cold, at the right ice/slush level, and pre-freezing just makes it seem like a bad science experiment.

So now I have a Braun Hand Mixer which I use to make the shakes in my office. There was a lot of trial and error, but I’ve found success with the following recipe:

1) Orange Microsoft Cup with 4 Ice Cubes
2) Extra empty Orange Microsoft Cup
3) Fill the cup to the top.
4) Put water and ice in a 12 inch tall, 4 inch wide cylinder container.
5) Add ½ cup of berries
6) Insert Mixer and COVER THE TOP WITH YOUR HAND
7) Mix until the ice and berries are all crushed.
8) Take mixer out and put it into the extra empty cup.
9) Pour shake into the other cup and enjoy.
10) Make sure you wash everything within 30 mins or your office will start to smell.

Making these at work pretty much will guarantee your co-workers will want to know what the heck you’re doing. So if you wanted to ‘hide’ the fact you were doing 20/20 that’s not possible. Be sure to be ready to explain to people what it is you are doing.