When I was 13, my favorite band was O-Town.  Don't remember them?  If you blinked, you would have missed them.  They were on some band reality show, the kind that was popular back then (way back 12 years ago).  I was instantly smitten, madly in love with Erik Michael Estrada, one of the members.  While other girls went for Ashley Parker Angel (yes, he's a guy...and why did they all go by three names?), I adored all things Spanish back then, and Erik was no exception.  There were three other guys in the band, but I don't remember their names at all.

One of their popular songs, and one of my favorites, which I definitely did not listen to on repeat literally hundreds of times in a row, was "All or Nothing."  Now, I do not think (for real this time.  Note: I overuse parentheses.  They're like my favorite things ever.  I had to stop myself like ten times while writing this because I wanted to use more.  I would use them every sentence if I could.  Well, I guess I could if I really want to.  But I won't.  I promise. Where was I?) there is any connection between the song and my current state, but all or nothing has become the tagline for my life.  If things can't be perfect, they won't be done at all.  For example, my house.  It's either an absolute, can't have company over, wouldn't call the police in an emergency, disaster, or it's spotless.  Same with my car.  Nobody can put their feet down at the moment because of all the half full water bottles sitting on the floor.  That leads me to another thing.  Environmentalism.  Since I can't afford organic foods, special light bulbs, and tons of cloth napkins and microfiber clothes, I pretty much gave up on it.  Including water bottles.  A few years ago, I was aghast at the amount of people who bought plastic water bottles and drove SUVs.  SUVs!  A work of the devil! Think of the carbon footprint!  Yes, you can join me in my time travel to slap my sanctimonious twenty-year-old self.  I do recycle, but that's the extent of my environmentalism these days.  

At work, I always give it all.  And everything has to be PERFECT.  The disparity between the condition of my house most of the time and my organization skills at work is crazy.  

But, perhaps most of all, this all or nothing mentality is most evident in my diet.  It's either going to be PERFECT- which is different for everybody these days, but to me basically means following the food plate, except maybe a few less grains!- or it's going to be junk.  Yes, I am now using dashes instead of parentheses.  Like, cookies for lunch, candy for snack, ice cream for dinner junk.  What I really want to do is find the balance between all and nothing, the almost healthy balance.  Some days that might mean more junk, some days that might mean mostly healthy.  But, as long as my diet is healthy overall, or almost healthy, it will be probably be better than two month cycles of complete junk and extreme perfectionism.  I wonder how long this will last!?

Green Smoothie

1 cup spinach

1 cup kale 

1 banana, broken into thirds, can be frozen

1 peach, cut into 1" pieces

1 apple, cut into 1" pieces

1/4 cup orange juice

1 tbsp flax 

4-5 ice cubes, can omit if using a frozen banana

Put all of the ingredients into the blender.  Using the ice crush button, then the liquefy button, mix until smooth and you can't really see spinach and kale leaves anymore.  

1 serving, 395 calories   

I was very, very skeptical about this.  It wasn't the best thing I ever tasted, but it didn't taste too much like spinach and kale.  I used 1/2 cup of orange juice, but I thought that was too much, so hopefully 1/4 cup is better.  I might even omit it.  I guess I'm going to suck at food blogging if I don't even test the final recipes I post!  I will probably start posting pictures of the food, although I have a plain old point and shoot camera and no artistic skills whatsoever.  And no nice dishes.  Maybe one day!  

I'm going to play around with green smoothies, since this will help me get the veggies in, especially the leafy greens!  I should also probably mention that I did the calorie count myself using Google, so it may not be totally accurate.  I probably won't do calorie counts most of the time!