Life Foods: Healthy Food at home equals healthy kids

We are having great success with our Food-Life-Fun game at home – and in case you missed it, here are the details. This game will suit you if you are enthusiastic and committed to making sure your kids only eat real, healthy, beneficial food.

Why we created this game?
1. We are passionate about creating and sharing ways of feeding our body in ways that honour the body’s natural, organic functions.
2. We respect the earth and its natural ways of providing us with an edible habitat.

Why is this game important to us?

We live in incredible times, with an intelligent society and more resources and facilities than ever before. Yet I agree with a friend at My Baby Brilliant that we are raising our families in unhealthy times.

We often take what we have been taught for granted. Our parents lived in times of incredible growth with new products to market and exceptional advances in advertising, packaging and marketing. To our parents, new products on the supermarket shelves were a reason to be excited! Somewhere along the line, however, this generation stopped questioning how the food was made and if it was healthy. Supermarkets, which were at first an exciting novelty, became routine and an integral way of life. As children of this generation, we learned supermarket shopping as the only way. We are now consciously and sub-consciously influenced by advertisers and marketers, but have not been taught to question everything.

Trying to educate us, however, are medical experts, nutritionists, naturopaths, social workers, and so on, who encourage us to take on a certain diet or purchase certain food groups and supplements to benefit our health. There are charts and diagrams, tables and lists, of exactly what is in each food, and calculations for us to estimate our daily intake of certain food groups.

When it comes to feeding a family, counting food groups and calculating ‘recommended dietary intake’ is confusing, difficult to teach children, and is hard to live with. And it has possibly created an unhealthy and complicated view of what it really is to be healthy.

Many families are choosing a much simpler and truly healthier approach than label-reading, and in this approach everything is good in abundance and everything is recommended. Parenting Energy call this ‘Life Food’.

Life Food is a simple way to change the way you and your children think about eating. If it’s a Life Food, it’s good to eat.

What is Life Food?

Parents just need to understand the difference between two categories of food: Life Food and Labelled Food.

Life Food is anything that is as close to its original life form as physically possible. It can be grown and produced in your home or by a neighbor – in a metaphorical sense. For example, fresh seasonal produce, free-range animal products, wheat, grains, legumes, etc – anything that can be grown and produced within a family environment and you can see the original food in your kitchen. This also includes home-made preserves, sauces, breads, seasonings, juices, milks, etc, or other creative ways of using Life Foods. We can buy plenty of Life Foods in the supermarket so long as we shop in the fresh-food aisles – or otherwise read packaging to check that Life Foods are not altered in ways we couldn’t do ourselves at home (such as adding excessive and harmful amounts of gluten to bread.)

A Labelled Food is sold in a package and may be something you could never independently produce, due to the complicated production processes – or it may be an original Life Food that has had something added to it that couldn’t be added at home. A tin of beans, for example, contains healthy Life Food until additives and preservatives (acidity regulator) are added. It then becomes a Labelled Food. Rice, a Life Food, is healthy unless it is bleached. Milk is healthier unhomogenised. I.e. The less the Life Food is altered, the healthier it is for your family to eat.

In agreement with many health ambassadors around the world, we believe that any food that has additives we couldn’t grow or produce ourselves could have long-term negative effects on our health. New tests and shocking findings are being released on a regular basis. There are far too many unanswered questions. Yet, with Life Foods, you trust the earth, the farmer, and your instinct – instead of a profit-seeking enterprises.

If you were to take notice of what your family eats for one week, would they be eating mostly Life Foods, or Labelled Foods? If you want to be empowered on the foods and additives that go into your body – you might like to take a Life Food approach.

We have made it easy to get on the right road with Life-Food-Fun.

Life-Food-Fun is helpful for parents taking a real-time experiment and journey of changing the foods in their pantry to help each member in their household live healthier, natural and empowered lives. It makes improving diets much, much easier.

Healthier: Giving bodies the food they need to grow and create healthy cells. Not modifying the food in radical ways that destroys their health benefits.

Natural: Respecting the relationship between the earth and human bodies by eating foods in their natural season that they grow, and minimizing food kilometers (or the carbon impact by food traveling to defy the natural season).

Empowered: Taking back control of what food is put into our body. Deciding to eat only food, and not unnatural additives.

With Life-Food-Fun, you simply play a game with the food that’s available and have a little fun talking about it.

Imagine a set of traffic lights. Red is stop, orange is proceed with caution or stop if possible, and red is stop. From a very young age children can learn and associate actions with these colours, and so we use these colours for Life-Food-Fun.

Life Foods are the green light. Go! Eat as much as you like! Healthy! Eat these all day! These foods help your body! Hooray! For example, all fresh fruit and vegetables.

Then Life Foods, which are blended with oils, are mostly wheat products, or are animal products/bi-products, are the orange light. Hmmm, lets think about this. Is this food helpful for my body? Was it produced safely and respectfully? For example, butter, chicken, etc. A little might be ok but plan your diet well or do your best to stop while you can.

Labelled Foods are the red light. Stop! Think about what you are asking your body to do – this food is not what your body is designed to eat. Sugar has long-term health impacts including cancer. The ingredients in some foods we eat with our family on special occasions (such as ice cream and custard) have harmful ingredients likened to paint stripper. Question everything, and if you can’t understand how a food is made, stop now.

We can eat green light all day and live healthy, happy, empowered lives. Thousands of people do right now. They feel happy and confident, look amazing, are enthusiastic to discover new foods, and they have a tasty, varied diet.

The simplest way to play the game with your children is to tell them, when they pick food, what colour light it is and whether to Go! Wait and think, or Stop. Be animated! And explain why – what is the food doing that is good, or not good, for the body.

Remember, even if you have a home full of green light foods, you may find that some foods agree with you better than some others do. All people have a body that has its own unique needs that can only be discovered by each person. You will know you best, and you can learn all by yourself.

Day by day we aim to repair our bodies and have trust, faith and optimism for the future. You can join me as I walk to wellness in the private facebook group Joanna Haley Homestead (Journey to Wellness)

Joanna Haley, Author