Krav Maga Journey

A little while back I wrote about Gatorade and my hard realization that it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you read that you’ll recall my lamenting that I don’t live down in a tropical climate with a lemon tree in my backyard. Because of this I was resorting to bottled juices for convenience as well as cost reasons. While this is not a horribly bad thing, it’s just not lemon. I love me some lemon!

Fast forward several months to my discovery of True Lemon. Whoa is it good. They come in little packets and when dissolved in liquid it tastes JUST. LIKE. LEMON. Amazing. My first question was: does it include any nasty artificial sweeteners? That’s usually how manufacturers ruin a good thing. Del Monte No Sugar Added fruit, low calorie flavored waters — heck, even SodaStream has Splenda in its regular sodas! Imagine my happiness when I read the ingredients on True Lemon and saw that it has NO artificial sweeteners (or sugar) at all! Just pure crystallized lemons.

Great taste, convenient, cheap….what’s the catch!??  So far I haven’t found one.  Really. This stuff rules! Put it in cold or hot tea, bake/cook with it, or pour some into plain old water for a little zing. Sometimes when no one’s looking I’ll just drop back a packet straight up. There, I said it.

Another good thing is that the product also comes in grapefruit and other flavors so I see some more experimenting in my future. Unfortunately some of their other packets (iced teas and lemonades) do have Stevia which is evil. Hopefully they and start offering unsweeted or sugar-sweetened varieties at some point. Until then I’ll stick with the plain old citrus varieties that don’t taste weird, run the risk of giving me cancer, or cause a hand to grow out of my forehead.

Anyhow, I decided I’d tinker a little with it to see if I can get a rockin’ sports drink on the cheap. For my basic sports drink I mix the following into my trusty Nalgene bottle and I’m good to go:

• 1 Liter of filtered water
• 2 packets of True Lemon (or substitute one Lemon for a Grapefruit, Orange, Citrus, or Lime. Add more or less to taste)
• 1 tablespoon of sugar (again, more or less to taste)
• Dash of table salt (that’s your electrolytes)

That’s it.  Give it a good shake and you’re on your way. This makes a pretty mild but very refreshing lemon sports recovery drink. No stickiness, great taste, very low calories, and very inexpensive. Try pennies on the dollar.

Give it a try, tweak my recipe a bit and let me know what else you come up with.