Paleo Living in Thailand [How to Eat Like a Caveman with a Paleo Diet]

I don’t follow trends, fashion or fads and usually take the path less travelled. That attitude can set you up for a hard life, but who ever said life was going to be easy?

Let’s take things at a base level and say life is a struggle, struggle is life. It just makes every little victory taste sweeter.

Speaking of a sweet life (sort off), let’s talk about diet and food in Thailand, specifically the paleo diet.

When I first came to Asia and started living in Thailand, I thought food was very healthy. I soon discovered that wasn’t the reality.

Street vendors add a lot of msg to season their dishes. Sugar is added to fruit shakes and most fruit is grown with copious amounts of pesticides and other nasty chemicals.

Pork and chicken are the two main sources of animal protein, and I can only guess at the conditions those animals have to endure before slaughter.

So if I was going to eat healthily in Thailand I needed a plan. So I started to grow a food forest.

I use natural farming and permaculture principals to grow much of our food now, working with nature, rather than against it. That means no pesticides, herbicides, hormones or any other nasty chemicals. Just good, clean, honest and organic produce.

We also like to source wild edibles and encourage them to grow in our food forest.

The Paleo Diet

Without even knowing it, I pretty much eat a caveman or paleo diet. But as I mentioned before, I don’t follow fads or fashions and that goes for diets too. I simply eat what I want to eat and fortunately enough for me, it’s pretty healthy.

I can’t see the point of sticking to a rigid diet, denying oneself simple pleasures or making oneself miserable because of the food choices we make. A little of what you fancy, always does you good, right? Besides, life is too short. I don’t want to live forever, but I do want to enjoy a high quality of life while I inhabit this mortal coil.

What is a Paleo Diet?

A paleo diet consists of the foods our ancestors ate 2.5 million years ago, up to about 10,000 years ago when farming started to emerge.

A paleo diet consists of fresh fruits, nuts, fish and grass-fed meat. Obviously the diet changed as to where these hunter gatherers were located and from season to season.

These kinds of food are high in vitamins, minerals and fibre.

 

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What isn’t a Paleo Diet?

A paleo diet doesn’t consist of any processed or fast food, must legumes, grains, dairy and refined sugar that are low in nutritional value in addition to artificial sweeteners, soda and GMO.

With the advent of these industrial foods, mono crops and lab made ‘food’, we have seen diabetes, heart disease and cancers rocket in society. I wonder if there is a correlation? What do you think?

Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat. – American nutritionist Victor Lindlahr (1930).

Even body builders and professional athlete will tell you, a healthy diet is 80% of their success.

The Purpose of a Paleo Diet

The aim of a Paleolithic diet is to get back to a way of eating that’s more in tune to with our roots.

The reasoning being it is that the modern diet that is thrust down our throats by big ag and the media is mismatched to our genetic makeup. This discordance hypothesis argues that the human body simply hasn’t adapted to this rapid change in diet and and has resulted in many negative health issues plaguing modern society.

Big pharma has grown on top of this health pandemic but will not fix it. Quite the contrary. However, getting back to diet basics could.

Paleo Living

One of the best things about having a food forest is foraging for food every morning… like a caveman.

After taking the dogs for a walk, I see what fruits are ready for picking for my breakfast. This can consist of bananas, passionfruit, papaya, starfruit, pineapple, Barbados cherries, guava, coconut, pomelo, oranges, mango, kumquats and more.

My breakfast usually consists of 5 or 6 fruits with grain free granola, home-made yogurt and natural honey. Yes, I know yogurt is dairy and it’s not allowed in a paleo diet but I make it myself and it’s good for gut health. Rules are there to be broken!

I also have a generous sprinkling of cocoa nibs (produced by Anarchy Chocolate of course!) on my breakfast. They are another healthy source of important minerals.

We keep a couple of flocks of free range chickens and geese. They are not only an important addition to the health of the soil but a great source of fresh eggs. However, we don’t eat our chickens. We get to attached to them. They all have their own characters so it’s hard to kill them.

Instead of culling our chickens we get free range chicken from a Bangkok company called Paleo Robbie.

Paleo Robbie

Paleo Robbie share our ethos of getting back to the way humans are supposed to eat. The way we ate before the rise of big industrial food companies and marketing departments.

We also order grass fed and finished beef, bacon, buckwheat, salmon, almonds etc. from them every month to round our diets out.

Click the link > here < and try Paleo Robbie for yourself and enjoy 500THB off your first order.

We have been ordering from them since early 2018 and have nothing but a positive experience from them every time. They deliver to us in Trat, so it doesn’t matter where you are in Thailand, they’ll ensure you’ll get fresh, delicious and healthy food every time.

For those of you in Bangkok they also have fresh ready meals, so you can eat a healthy paleo diet without cooking and save on the washing up!

Protein

Our ponds are stocked with tilapia and catfish. We could buy these fish from the local market or big box store, they are very cheap, but it’s not about the money. You can’t put a price on health.

Farmed tilapia isn’t on our menu for obvious reasons. Rearing our own supply ensures we have healthy fish and our own constant source of protein.

In Conclusion

A paleo diet is a great way to eat healthy and nutritious food as part of a healthy lifestyle. But like anything, don’t get too hooked on an ideal. Life is for living. Enjoy other foods in moderation. Red wine and chocolate have lots of health benefits, no one in their right mind would ban them from their diet. Take a cheat day, kick back and relax… your in Thailand!

Paleo Living in Thailand [How to Eat Like a Caveman]