I'm in the states too, so the typical options are like yours, but I find it difficult to eat solid food first thing, so I drink a coffee-chocolate protein shake every morning. It keeps the hypoglycemia away and tastes good, and I can sip on it all morning while I wake up. 😂
I'd be interested in knowing what brand of protein shake - I love coffee and chocolate flavors together! I'm totally with you on not wanting to eat first thing in the morning. It's 2 to 3 cups of coffee for me before I want food.
No brand; I'm allergic to all of the pre-mixes (which I found out the hard way, lol). My mix is from scratch: cup of coffee + few spoonfuls of yogurt or half cup ish of kefir + scoop of plain whey powder (2 heaping Tablespoons, maybe?) + scoop of cocoa powder (about equal amounts) + scoop of cane sugar (more or less depending on if it's fine ground or turbinado) + ice. Sometimes a bit of the sugar is replaced with honey.
Take those estimates of size with a grain of salt, I eyeball it and have different size scoops in the three powders. ;)
I wonder what the common ingredient(s) is in the prepared mixes that gets your allergies going? I like your version because you know exactly what's in it. I can work with this! When you say cocoa powder you mean the unsweetened kind? I just happen to have that! Then I can add the amount of sweetener to taste? I never thought of adding yogurt to my coffee! Thank you for sharing this!
Yep, unsweetened cocoa powder like you bake with, sweetener to taste. It's different things in different mixes; if they try and make it a wholistic vitamin shake with greens, I'm allergic to all greens. If they try and avoid sugar and use stevia, I'm allergic to stevia. If they are cheap and have additives, I'm allergic to corn and soy (which is what a lot of those lab experiment-sounding ingredient names are made of). Etc. 😉
And if it wasn't clear, I blend this in a blender, and it's like a healthier version of a frappuccino.
Okay, I think I have all of the ingredients for this, even have a 'crush ice' button on my blender!
All artificial sweeteners leave a metallic taste in my mouth, I don't know why that is but I think my body is saying no! The one exception is sucralose (Sweeta), which tastes okay to me, but still in moderation. I tried putting in greens but they just got wrapped around the blades so the heck with that!
So I will try this healthy frappuccino and see how it affects my blood sugar. It would be nice to have a different, tasty, alternative in the morning!
I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think! :)
I am with you in that I don't like the taste of artificial sweeteners either. And even without the allergy, stevia TASTES like aspartame to me. It may be healthier, but it ain't tastier. LOL
They do make green powders, if that's your fancy. I can't vouch for what they taste like, though. Before I had all the allergy testing done, I drank Shakeology for a long time which did it well (but cost a ton), and Garden of Life Raw was pretty good, too, chocolate for both brands. But just adding a green powder by itself, I haven't tried, because by the time I had the shake down to from scratch ingredients, I had the allergy diagnosis.
I have had allergies all my life but never had an actual allergy test until last year. My biggest concern was that I might be allergic to roses. Turned out I had no allergies at all! I looked at my blank arm, no red spots except for the 'control' one. What the heck? The doctor said I had thing where dust irritates my sinuses, he had it too. He gave me a nasal rinse and a spray, 'allergy' free for the first time ever! So that was a little disappointing. :-]
I'm not sure my body needs powdered green stuff. And you're right, stevia is nasty! (I was given a sample of it in the early 90's and it was nasty then too!) I'm going to try your recipe. All the research you've done and the brands you've tried - I'm not going to let that go to waste!
Oops, I just remembered I don't have any ice in the freezer. I'm going to go do that now. This will make a nice Sunday morning experiment!
A lot of people grow out of allergies, so it could have been that you legit were allergic to something besides dust being an irritant, and grew out of it. I actually grew into my allergies, as growing up the only thing I was allergic to was one dog (not all dogs, just the one) and Snuggle fabric softener. Now I'm allergic to half the supermarket. XD
I hope you enjoy the shake! Now I'm wanting one, even though it's two AM.