The green smoothie that really lasts until lunchtime

Half past ten on a Tuesday in November, in a windowless meeting room down by the docks. A woman puts her hand up while I am talking about breathing and asks why she is hungry every morning at eleven when she does eat breakfast. A smoothie, she says. Green, fresh, the very picture of sensible. And she still ends up by the coffee machine, eyeing the biscuit tin.

The question comes up in nearly every workshop I run, just behind sleep. Let me disappoint you straight away: I have nothing against smoothies, I drink two or three a week, usually before a session on the water at Pointe Rouge. What does irritate me is the bottled detox juice at seven euros a go, sold with a promise to cleanse a body that manages perfectly well by itself. A smoothie can genuinely carry you through to midday. Everything hangs on what goes into it, and it took me years of fiddling about before I worked out that three ingredients do most of the work.

Too much fruit, not enough fat

When I ask what actually goes in the jug, I usually get the same list: a banana, a mango, three dates, and a splash of orange juice so the blender will turn. Nobody would sit down at seven in the morning and eat all that with a spoon. Drunk in two minutes, it slips past unnoticed. A blender does keep the fibre, which is its advantage over a juicer, though it shreds it so finely that it holds very little back. I have no study to quote at you, and I am wary of people who quote too many. All I have is what people tell me at eleven o'clock, week after week: how fast you swallow counts about as much as what is in the glass.

Fat and protein are the two things that slow everything down, and they are what tends to be missing. Without them a smoothie leaves the stomach in no time and hunger turns up long before lunch. You can watch it happen at a morning paddle yoga class. The ones who came on a glass of blended fruit hold up for the first half hour, then they get cold and spend the rest of the class hunting for their balance. The ones who added half an avocado and a bit of protein say nothing to me at all, which suits me fine.

The recipe I make before a session

1. 01Pour 200 ml of unsweetened plant milk, almond or oat, into the blender jug. No fruit juice, please, it brings sugar without the fibre.
2. 02Two large handfuls of fresh spinach. Young chard leaves do the job nicely if the market has them.
3. 03Half a ripe avocado, and on this one I will not budge: it is what gives the drink its creamy texture and its staying power, so leave it in.
4. 04A tablespoon of wholemeal almond butter, a tablespoon of ground flaxseed or chia seeds.
5. 05One piece of fruit. Half a ripe banana, frozen if you can, or half a pear.
6. 06Your protein: two tablespoons of Greek yoghurt or skyr, or a scoop of unflavoured plant protein if you avoid dairy.
7. 07The juice of half a lime and a piece of fresh ginger the size of a fingernail. The lime wakes up the greens, the ginger wakes up everything else.
8. 08Blend for a full minute, until it is genuinely smooth, then drink it sitting down and slowly, over five minutes at least. Standing at the sink, it satisfies nobody, and I tried that for months.

If you remember one thing, remember the structure: an unsweetened liquid, greens as you like, a source of fat, a source of protein, one piece of fruit. As long as those five boxes are ticked, the rest moves with the season and with whatever is lying about in the fridge. In winter I switch to pear, with a pinch of cardamom. In summer, when the figs turn up on the market stalls, half a fig stands in beautifully for the banana.

A good breakfast goes unnoticed. You measure it by the eleven o'clock craving that never arrives.

Three variations for rushed mornings

• The Mediterranean one. A tablespoon of tahini in place of the almond butter, a few fresh mint leaves. It tastes of this coast and it holds remarkably well.
• The green cocoa one, for mornings when the thought of drinking something green is simply unbearable: a teaspoon of unsweetened cocoa, a pinch of cinnamon. The colour changes, the contents stay the same.
• The night-before one: everything in a jar the evening before except the liquid, into the fridge, then pour and blend when you wake up. Two minutes flat, and one excuse fewer.

Try it three mornings in a row, changing nothing else about your day, and just note the time hunger comes back. If eleven o'clock becomes quarter past twelve, you will know what to put in the blender next Wednesday. And if nothing shifts, tell me at the next class and we will go through your list together.