What is ‘Eat The Rainbow’?

Eat the Rainbow? What does eating the rainbow mean?

In fitness and nutrition parlance, this phrase has been gaining popularity for quite some time now.

To understand the phrase Eat the Rainbow, we must understand the relevance and importance of the clean-eating movement. Gone are the days when getting healthy was solely equated to exercise and movement.

Nowadays, emphasis is laid on the importance of approaching good health in a well-rounded and holistic manner. Agreed that exercise and workouts are an integral part of the journey to fitness, what you eat plays an equally important role.

Recently, enough emphasis is being placed on what you eat as opposed to how much you move to become healthy and ‘fit’. In that context, fad diets have become highly popular over the last couple of decades. While these diets do help you in meeting your fitness goals, it is not advisable to stick with them for longer than a few weeks or months if you have the resolve to stretch it that far.

A very important thing to remember about fad diets is that they come and go out of style. Dozens of nutritionists support them and dozens others write them off as harmful. In any case, fad diets are not sustainable. Most of the time, a person starts a fad diet to meet their particular fitness goal and go back to their regular diet after they have met it. In some cases though, these fad diets become so difficult to keep up with that people give up on them midway and end up binge eating instead.

Clean Eating is a brilliant solution to the fad diet craze. No diet plan or fad diet schedule can hold a torch to the benefits of balanced and a clean nutritious diet.

‘Clean’ in the context of food and diet plans does not refer to the hygiene part of the food. Clean Eating refers to eating home-cooked simple meals, devoid of artificial flavoring and additives.

Eating right also makes it easier to give your body the required nourishment that otherwise is fed into your body through supplements and synthetic medication.

‘Eating the Rainbow’ in the context of clean-eating has become quite the rage in the recent decade, especially among parents who primarily struggle with toddlers and children who do not eat nutritious food regularly.

Essentially, to eat the rainbow is to incorporate foods that occur naturally in the colors of the rainbow. So fruits and vegetables that are Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red and Violet fall in the purview of this group.

The ‘Eat the Rainbow’ movement took flight prominently in the pandemic lockdown time. With parents cooped up with their kids, their health and overall well-being became the center of attention in most households. What became glaringly evident was that the food habits of children had severely deteriorated in the last couple of decades.

The revolution of ‘back to nature’ gained momentum at a massive level, although individually in all homes. Parents collectively felt the need for introducing healthy options for food for their kids who had become addicted to fast-food and unhealthy diet alternatives.

Clean eating, or introducing natural foods was definitely the solution for the parents’ problem. But how do you do that to a group of kids who have heavy dependence on foods that are addictive and sugar-loaded. Especially if this group of children are picky eaters by nature, or are toddlers and pre-teens who have very specific choices.

‘Eat The Rainbow’ addresses exactly that.

It attaches the allure of eating vibrant colored food along with it being nutrient-rich. It has not been claimed to be the perfect solution to bridge the clean eating gap in kids but hey, this is as good a solution as any. And what is best is that it is definitely worth a shot while making the food a visual delight.

Disclaimer: One thing should always be kept in mind before you dive into a new food group or are embarking on a food intake journey very much different than your own. Consult your doctor. Or a registered qualified nutritionist. If you have lifestyle diseases or hormone related conditions like obesity, hypertension, diabetes and thyroid, it is imperative that you start a new diet or make changes in your existing eating plan only after consulting your doctor.

Disha is a writer, fitness enthusiast, parent of two girls and a self-proclaimed humorist. She has her Masters in Social Sciences and a diploma in Disaster Management, a degree which massively helps her in her tryst with parenting. Her true passion is photography but writing and dance come a close second. She is on Instagram and other social media as well that which are slightly irrelevant currently.