6: Sleep Aid, Digestive and Hangover Smoothies
You’ve seen a bunch of smoothies that you can rely on as your morning pick-me-up and any of these will help you to improve your general health while also starting to feel much more energetic not just in the mornings but throughout the entire day.
Remember: one smoothie will make you feel better for a few hours. But it’s by drinking smoothies regularly that you start to see the benefits build up over time and really change your life. You need to stick with it!
That said, you might find you want to experiment with some different ingredients to see if you can enjoy some of the many other possible benefits of smoothies. This chapter then is going to look at some more general positive health effects of drinking smoothies. In particular, we’ll discover how you can boost your sleep, aid your digestion and even combat a hangover!
The Bed Time Smoothie
This bed time smoothie will help you to not only sleep more deeply and get better restoration but will also help you to be more anabolic through the night so that you build more muscle!
- 2 cups whole milk
- 1⁄2 a banana
- 2 tablespoons peanut butter
- Cherries
- Kiwi
- 1 tablespoon honey
There’s a whole lot of good stuff in this smoothie that will help you to sleep more deeply and wake up feeling more energized. For bodybuilders and athletes, this smoothie will also help to put you in a more anabolic state, meaning that you’ll produce more testosterone through the night and wake up with enhanced energy.
So how does it all work?
First up the whole milk. Whole milk is an ideal choice for drinking before bed and especially for men. That’s because whole milk can drastically increase testosterone production and the majority of our testosterone production occurs during sleep. Specifically, we produce the most testosterone at 4am! Why is whole milk so important for testosterone? Simple: testosterone is made from healthy saturated fats. And whole milk contains lots of saturated fat. Women meanwhile can just enjoy the soothing benefits of milk which should help put them in the mood for sleep!
The peanut butter is in here partly because it will provide a source of protein as well while you’re sleeping, so your body can put that testosterone to good use and build muscle!
Next up comes that tablespoon of honey, which is once again perfect for supply energy both slowly and quickly. This actually has a particular benefit while you sleep though because you need energy while you sleep in order to enjoy the greatest restoration. One reason a lot of us wake up feeling groggy and unwell (other than the aforementioned caffeine withdrawal), is that we have such low blood sugar. If you recall how rough you feel when you haven’t eaten anything for a while, imagine how your body must feel after not eating for 8 hours! Honey can solve this problem by ensuring you have a steady supply throughout the night and several health writers like Seth Rogen highly recommend it right before bed.
Cherries are the cherry on top. That’s because – other than being great sources of vitamin C and excellent antioxidants – they also happen to provide us with a natural source of melatonin. And if melatonin is familiar, it’s probably because you know it as the ‘sleep hormone’. This is what the brain. produces to get us ready for bed and it can thus make us fall asleep faster and also enjoy a deeper rest when we eventually get there!
Why is kiwi in here? Well actually, it is carefully chosen for its synergistic effects with the peanut butter and banana. Across these three ingredients we have ample sources of zinc, magnesium and vitamin B6 – the very same ingredients that make up the popular supplement ZMA. ZMA is a supplement that is used by athletes to encourage deeper sleep and also to produce more testosterone. The magnesium and zinc will also likely have powerful beneficial effects on ‘brain plasticity’– in other words, they will help your brain to rewire itself and form new connections, cementing everything that you learned during the day!
Hangover Smoothie
The above smoothie will also work very nicely as a hangover cure, or you can simplify it and just use the most important ingredients:
- Peanut butter
- Banana
- Honey
In fact, I would recommend that you do this and also replace the milk with water. Milk is not terribly friendly after a hangover as it can curdle somewhat in the stomach and make you gag. Add a little salt and lemon too, to create this:
- Peanut butter
- Banana
- Honey
- Water
- Pinch of salt
- Pinch of lemon
The other three ingredients though are perfect for making you feel much better after a big night out. Firstly, the bananas will provide you with a natural alkaline. This will help to counteract the unwanted effects of the acidity in the stomach and provide a natural antacid. Good start. At the same time though, it will also help you to replenish your potassium. Increasing potassium is very important as you will have lost your electrolytes from drinking. This is partly what is causing your headaches and it’s also why you
experience cramping in the night. This is also why we’ve included a little salt so that you get the sodium and potassium balance back up to scratch – it’s a little like drinking an isotonic sports drink!
Next up is the honey, which is incredible for hangovers. Yes, it will improve your blood sugar and give you back some much-needed energy. But at the same time, it will also provide you with a way to counteract acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is the main toxic substance that the body creates when it breaks down alcohol – this is precisely what is causing the majority of your symptoms and it needs to go. Guess what gets rid of acetaldehyde? Fructose!
The water meanwhile will rehydrate you, while the protein in the peanut butter will help you to replenish your neurotransmitters and also get rid of those munchies!
How to Create a Smoothie to Improve Digestion
Why drink a smoothie to improve digestion? Of course this can be helpful if you have any digestion troubles that lead to acid reflux etc. but it’s also just a good idea for your general health.
You know all those nutrients you’re getting through your smoothies? As it happens, they’re only going to be any use if you can actually digest them and put them into action. And unfortunately, a lot of us have poor digestion and struggle with this. That’s particularly true if you are someone who experiences a lot of stress in their life. The reason that stress prevents digestion is because stress causes blood flow to be directed toward the functions that are considered critical for survival – for ‘fight or flight’. These include the likes of the muscles, the brain and the senses – but not digestion or immune system.
What’s more, is that we require a lot of particular elements in our diet in order to be able to digest food properly and many of us just aren’t getting these crucial things. For example, certain fruits will contain enzymes that naturally help you to break down foods. One of the best known examples of this is pineapple, which contains bromelain (which is also very good for your teeth!).
At the same time, fermented foods, raw vegetables and things like yogurt are helpful to us because they contain live cultures of ‘friendly bacteria’. They’re referred to as friendly bacteria because they have positive roles in the body, including the ability to create a lot of important micronutrients and to help us create digestive enzymes.
If you suspect you need a little help with your digestion, the try making a smoothie that contains any of the following ingredients, all of which have very positive effects on digestion:
- Pear
- Pineapple
- Watermelon
- Melon
- Papaya
- Hami Melon
- Orange
- Tangerine
- Guava
- Mango
- Cauliflower
- Chinese Yam
- Tomato
- Spinach
- Cabbage
- Pumpkin
- Grape
- Sugarcane
- Grapefruit
- Catnip
- Probiotics like yogurt and fermented foods
This time, I will leave the precise mixture up to you! This is a great option though for creating a green smoothie that will also be low in sugar and provide you with lots of further nutrients.
