We live in an awesome time, with a super-intelligent society and more resources and facilities than ever before. Our parents lived in times of massive industrial/commercial growth with new products and advances in advertising, packaging and marketing through technology. To our parents, new products on the supermarket shelves were a reason to be excited!
Somewhere along the line, however, we awesome people generally stopped questioning how food was being made and if it was healthy. Supermarkets, which were at first an exciting novelty, became routine and an integral way of life. We started to take packaged food for granted. And children of this generation learned supermarket shopping as the only way. Many of us are still consciously and sub-consciously influenced by advertisers and marketers, and have not the time to question everything.
Trying to educate us 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.
That’s why I love this game and love sharing it with parents who want some simple techniques! I believe this game is a healthier approach than label-reading.
Life Food Fun a simple way to change the way you and your children think about eating. In this approach everything is good in abundance and everything is recommended. If it’s Life Food, it’s good to eat.
We have always had fun with our Food-Life-Fun game at home.
Why you might like this game?
1. You are passionate about creating and sharing ways of feeding our body in ways that honour the body’s natural, organic functions.
2. You respect the earth and its natural ways of providing us with an edible habitat.
3. You are enthusiastic and committed to making sure your kids eat extra servings of real, healthy, beneficial food.
What is Life 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 or community 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.
But 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. The less the Life Food is altered, the healthier it is for your family to eat.
It’s easy to get on the right road with Life-Food-Fun.
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. You can exclaim to your kids: “Go! Eat as much as you like! Healthy! Eat these all day! These foods help your body! Hooray!”
Life Foods, which are blended with oils, are mostly wheat products, or are animal products/bi-products, are the orange light. You can ponder with your kids: “Hmmm, lets think about this. Is this food helpful for my body? Was it produced safely, and respectfully? A little might be ok but we should plan what we’re going to eat today so we make sure to give our body the best food.”
Labelled Foods are the red light. You can say, “Whoa! Stop! Let’s think about what are asking our body to do – this food is not what our body is designed to eat.”
The ingredients in some foods we eat with our family on special occasions (such as ice cream and custard) have some harmful ingredients likened to paint stripper. We question everything, and if we can’t understand how a food is made, stop now.
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.
If you were to take notice of what your family eats for one week, would they be eating mostly Life Foods, or Labelled Foods? I’d love to hear your feedback to this question – comment below or send me a private message to chat.
P.S. 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. Life-Food-Fun could be helpful for you, if you are taking a real-time experiment and journey of changing the foods in your pantry live healthier, natural and empowered lives.
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.
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