Feeling Blah? Eat a Rainbow!
I never feel “recharged” after vacation. Instead, I feel tired and drained. Judging by the conversations I’ve had with friends, I’m not the only one. “I live tired,” a colleague told me the other day when I mentioned that the beginning of autumn always feels exhausting to me. While I try to comply with the basics of healthy living such as eating a balanced diet and getting enough physical exercise, I know fail in other ways: I’m not great at controlling my stress and I don’t always get a full eight hours of sleep.
Personal struggles aside, this is the time of the year when many of us feel depressed and fatigued. And not solely because of Seasonal Affective Disorder—which, is definitely a very real thing. “After summer, it’s also necessary to detoxify; to ease the excesses that come with a summer of alcohol, poor sleep, and being out of a routine,” explains Catalina Fernández de Ana Portela, PhD, who is a biologist, mycologist, and the CEO of the medicinal mushroom supplement brand Hifas da Terra. “Toxins gather in the liver and blood, loading the lymphatic system.”
Eating the rainbow: To that end, she recommends putting into practice something she calls “the rainbow rule.” Best of all, it’s pretty easy to follow: you simply consume as many different colored fruits and vegetables as possible at each meal. As registered dietitian nutritionist and GI-expert April Panitz of New York-based Amenta Nutrition puts it, you “eat the rainbow.”
Excerpted from Vogue
