Rainbow 10 Challenge: Add Some Colors to Your Day

Scroll through social media these days and you'll see some CRAY CRAY diet and exercise advice. Buy this supplement and you'll be pretty. Whatever you do, don't eat carbs. NEVER EAT FRUIT after midnight or you'll turn into a Gremlin. Eat anything you want but only between 12:01am and 12:02am while you’re upside down. The rest of the day you can only eat dust and Diet Coke. Lose 16 pounds in three weeks to squeeze into a Marylin Monroe dress for a photo opp in the middle of a civil war and a pandemic (#priorities)? Buy this sauna suit and just sweat those fat cells away! Fake sugar is healthy; chemicals are good for you! Cry yourself skinny. Run until your feet bleed. Do 100 push ups a day with your busted shoulder. Pills, powders and cleanses. AGGGGG!!!!! It's exhausting. 

I was talking with a friend recently about how different things feel these days. I remember a few years ago my biggest priority was training to finish sub two hours in a half marathon. That literally felt like the most important thing to me at the time. Earlier this week I could barely muster the motivation and focus to run two miles and I remembered how different things felt before. For where I’m at today, a finish time for a race feels like a frivolous priority. Note, that’s not a dig to anyone who is working on that goal. I miss caring about that so deeply. So please don’t think I’m poking at it. I am signed up for the SF Half Marathon this summer and looking forward to it and I support anyone who is working on a healthy fitness goal. My point is life is hard right now and for some of us the things that motivated us in “the before times” don’t resonate right now.

Something that DOES resonate with me these days is improving my relationship with food. As a former fat kid turned alcoholic turned personal trainer I have an “interesting” relationship with food. Food was my first addiction. So my history with food twists and turns from an emotional support tool as a way to escape, to a way to manipulate my body and how I look, to a way to support my athletic performance to a way to do something good for my health--it’s been a real roller coaster over the years. 

This post isn’t about how to eat to lose fat or gain muscle (those are great goals and I help people do that all the time. You can get that for free in my guide. But this is about something different.) So what am I babbling about? Here we go. 

This post is about looking at your routine and what you’re eating in a day and incremental, manageable improvement. The goal is simply to do something kind for your body (not so you look better, but so you feel better physically and emotionally because you know you are doing something good for your health). 

Lots of folks know that Peter and I eat a “veggie bag” every day. We’re done so for years. I actually don’t like vegetables. Don’t take my trainer credentials away! Hear me out. No, I don’t really enjoy eating them. I kinda just eat them mindlessly while I am doing something else. I eat them because I know they are good for me. The colors are indicative of lots of different nutrients that heal my body and help keep me healthy. So I eat them with reluctant gratitude. And then when I eat a burrito on Friday night or pasta on Saturday or some cookies after dinner (all normal occurrences in my week) I don’t feel bad at all. Because I know that I put all those healthy veggies in my body and true health and happiness is about balance. Adding good stuff is a fundamental and important step, often more important than removing “bad stuff”.

Earlier this year I had my annual check up and surprisingly to my doctor my cholesterol was a little high for me and some blood levels were a little off. We looked at my diet and decided to substitute oatmeal and berries for the Greek yogurt I was eating every morning. The good stuff in oatmeal and fruit (micronutrients and fiber and all that) are known to help lower bad cholesterol. So now I have a cup of “real” oatmeal (not instant) every morning mixed with strawberries, blackberries and blueberries. Peter makes a big batch every Sunday that I eat off every day and I cut the berries up in a big batch to make it “grab and go” during the busy week. And it tastes good and really makes me feel good and helps give me the energy I need to start work early and to get in a workout most days. WIN.

One day I was looking at my oatmeal and berries next to my veggie bag and noted how cool the colors are and gave myself props for getting in six different kinds of fruits and veggies before lunch. Most days, that’s where it ends. I don’t eat many more fruits and veggies at lunch and dinner (mostly out of convenience and because as I mentioned I don’t really like them). So one day I thought I’m going to add one more. So I started eating two clementines as a snack in the afternoon. And that made me feel good. So I was up to seven kinds of fruits and veggies in just one day. And that was manageable. And then one day a few weeks ago I thought, “I want to get to 10 a day”. Note, I wasn’t necessarily talking about 10 full servings. Just 10 different kinds. So even a few bites of something counted. So I started adding broccoli and corn to my eggwhite muffins I eat before my workouts. So that’s nine. SO CLOSE! From there I committed to making sure my dinner has at least one veggie in it which is super easy (we use Freshly meal delivery with lots of options with veggies). Done. So with relatively little work, just a little planning and tweaking of what I was already doing I went from six to 10 kinds of fruits and veggies a day. And for where I’m at today, that feels good and I know it’s doing some good stuff for my body under the hood. 

So I’m starting to talk to my clients about how many fruits and veggies they typically eat in a day and looking for reasonable ways to add different colors to their diet. Can they go from two to four? Or five to seven? With the long term potential goal of getting to 10 one day if that works for them. Let's call it the Rainbow 10 Challenge! (Obviously, if you have GI issues, medical conditions, disordered eating, etc consult your physician; I'm a trainer not a doctor or clinician). Since starting talking about this I’m getting texts from clients showing me how they are hedging closer to 10 and it’s beautiful to see. If you want to join in the fun, let me know how you decide to eat the rainbow this week! Feel free to share your ideas, recipes, meal prep strategies, wins, misses, etc. Community and accountability are great tools in this jouney!