I don’t know about you but I have a really hard time between lunch and dinner in terms of snacking. I love to snack but it’s not so good for the old waist line. I did the Michelle Bridges 12WBT last year and although I had great success I found that her snacks were a bit shit. A smear of avocado on a tiny rice cake for 100 calories? So unsatisfying. I need a lot more bang for my calorie buck than that so I started researching different bliss ball recipes.
Nuts and dried fruit are often the main ingredients of bliss balls but they’re really high in calories so it’s important to add a bit of protein to keep you full and lighten up on the dried fruit ingredients. I ADORE nuts but I find it hard to stop eating them so this is the perfect way to eat a portion controlled serving of nuts in delicious little balls of bliss. Here’s my fail safe, simple and low calorie bliss ball recipe.
- 10 pitted medjool dates
- 1 cup of almonds
- ½ cup walnuts
- ½ cashews
- 2 heaped tablespoons of natural whey chocolate protein powder
- ¼ cup of nut butter (make sure it's pure nut butter not full of gunky chemicals and sugar)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
- ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg
- ¼ cinnamon
- Soak the dates in warm water for 5 mins.
- Place all ingredients in a food processor and process until the mixture starts coming together in a ball. Roll 1 tablespoon of mixture into a ball - you may need to sort of squish the balls rather than roll them. You should be able to make about 25 balls.
- Store your bliss balls in an airtight container in the fridge.
- Note: you can use any nuts that you like as long you keep the full amount to about 2 cups worth. I also sometimes add chia seeds if I've got some in the cupboard.
Each ball has around 100 calories so you can have 1 or 2 per serve depending on how many calories you need. I put an absolute limit of 2 per day on myself because if you sneak it up to 3 or 4 you’ve just added an extra 200 calories to your day! Yikes!
Oh and if you want to get totally on top of your health game this week check out my make ahead meals for 300 calories, healthy lunchbox ideas for grown ups and 10 healthy 100 calorie snack ideas posts for lots of clean eating inspiration for the week ahead.