VIDEO DESCRIPTION: 🌱It’s RECIPE day! Today, I am going to walk you through how to make the Blueberry Blast Smoothie. This is a super tasty, cool, nutritious drink for when you are in the middle of an Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) flare.⭐

Hi, this is Alexis with IBD Vegan, and today we're going to make a blueberry blast smoothie. Let's get to it. We're going to need almond milk, bananas, blueberry juice, walnut butter, and cacao powder.

So we have our container. We're going to start with our digital scale and today we're going to  work in grams. Let's tare that out on the digital scale and account for the weight of the container. Okay, so let's get started. First we need 240 grams of almond milk or one cup.

We're going to tare that out again. And next we need 38 grams of bananas. These are frozen bananas. If we go with green bananas, then in a single portion size we can have more banana. Otherwise, it's a smaller portion size for regular yellow ripe bananas.

Today we're using green bananas and these are frozen pieces. What I do is when they come into the house, they only last about a day before they're not green anymore. So what I do is I slice those up and I put them on a sheet, little pieces, and put that into the freezer. Once they're frozen, then I take them off and put them into a container. Next we have a quarter cup or 45 grams of blueberry juice.

I'm going to tare this back out.

So blueberry juice, this is when prep is your friend. What I do is on a prep day when I have more energy, then I will take fresh blueberries and run them through the juicer and then I have a container of blueberry juice and I just keep that in the refrigerator for up to three days. This is really helpful when you have really low energy and you don't have the energy to be able to juice the blueberries, clean out the juicer and then use it. The intention for this smoothie is that you've already done your prep and then you just throw the pieces together in less than a couple of minutes. You have something that you can have that is cool, it's refreshing, you get some nutrients that you're needing that you could be lacking when you have a flare from IBD such as ⁓ ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease.

Okay so next we need 34 grams or 1 1⁄8 of a cup of walnut butter. We know that with IBD, we can't digest whole nuts or raw nuts. So, on a prep day, what I will do is I will roast walnuts. And then once they're roasted, then I take them and soak them overnight and then put them into a food processor and then I have my walnut butter. Okay, and lastly, we need 1.3 grams or half of a teaspoon of cacao butter. So put the blade on, and this is a single serving.

Now we're going to pour this into a glass. And we have our blueberry blast smoothie that's safer when you're having an IBD flare.

I love this smoothie. This smoothie really got me through when I was having a hard time, especially in the beginning of my diagnosis. And I was trying to figure out what I can eat and what I couldn't. And one of the things that I found was that there was no information for what was acceptable, what was helpful when you're having an IBD flare. For me, my experience, it seemed that the medical doctors, which I did go to, went to a gastroenterologist. Their focus was heavily on the pharmaceutical side. of the treatment, which by all means do that for sure. This is a lifetime disease, something that you will have for the rest of your life as an autoimmune disorder. So, pharmaceuticals for sure.

But it just made sense to me that if I was suffering from something that was gastrointestinal, ulcers, bleeding, those kinds of things, it just made sense to me that there should be an impact from diet. So, you'll find that these are ingredients that are not inflammatory. You'll find that these are whole foods, they're not processed foods, and these are the things that I have done for myself. my commitment to you is that the research that I did, the literature review from the scientific peer review journals, the books that I read from medical doctors, all of these things I have combined together so that you have what you need, and these are the things that I've used for myself.

BLOOPER

This is Alexis with IBD Vegan and today we're going to make a blueberry blast smoothie. We're going to need almond milk, bananas, blueberry juice, walnut butter, and cacao powder. Let's get to it.

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This is IBD Vegan. I'm your host, Alexis. And I want you to remember, it is possible to become more educated, resilient, and feel empowered for a better quality of life.

📍 Welcome to the IBD Vegan YouTube channel. The 4 areas of focus for @IBDvegan are (1) nutrition for flares, (2) science explained, (3) impactful interviews, and (4) real reviews. While I already have a ton of content I want to share with you; knowing it will take some time to get it out in front of you, I want to know which topics you want to hear about next. What do you want to learn first? Understanding this will help me to prioritize which content I publish first. Looking forward to your ideas!