I am Ayano, and together with my husband, Tobias, we founded Healtholicious in summer 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand.

Initially we started it as we became obsessed with clean eating and healthy lifestyle. The more we wanted, the more we got frustrated. Although Thailand is quickly developing to serve the ever-growing health conscious people, it is still hard to get hold of many ingredients and supplements, and every week we were placing orders from the US or Japan. In addition, "organic" labels are used everywhere in the supermarket but it's been often revealed that they contain more pesticides than non-organic produce! (Here is an interesting article posted in Bangkok Post last year on this topic) 

It was becoming clear that doing the sourcing by ourselves as a company makes it easier. Many of our friends became infected with our passion towards healthy eating and at one point it really made sense to make it into a new business. How satisfying it is to be able to help people to become healthier?

Everything we sell in our online shop is what we also eat. Carefully selected from trust-worthy suppliers whom we personally visited mostly, such as matcha powder from Kyoto, where my parents currently live. 

We do not sell everything like a normal grocery shop though. To be frank, things like pink Himalayan salt or chia seeds, these can be bought any any supermarkets now. 

We are now in the process of developing a cafe concept, using these beautiful ingredients to create healthy beverages, snacks, and eventually, food. Bangkok has many cafes and restaurants, but it is very hard to find the one who serve truly health conscious foods, in our opinions. For example, some may serve organic ingredients, but it is full of sugar. Healtholicious cafe does NOT serve refined sugar, as we regard sugar being toxic to our body. So many fancy cafes all serving similar menu.  

We are inspired by the Bulletproof Diet concept proposed by Dave Asprey, which is essentially a kind of low carbohydrate, high fat diet with a focus on selectively eating food which causes the least inflammation to your body, optimizing the gut health, and bring the mental and physical performance to the maximum level. You can go to his website to read more about it. The blog section has many useful articles, but you should be open-minded! This concept is rather new and many people would find it hard to accept (I was one of them!). For example, here is the list of things you should or should not be eating.

It is understandable that you cannot change your eating habit from one day to another. We still believe that you can enjoy a wider range of food even if they are not perfectly 'green' in the Bulletproof roadmap, as long as you are aware what you are eating and how they could affect your body. We would like our friends to be more aware of how our body functions, and how we can choose to upgrade what we eat, without restricting too many things, which could make you feel miserable.

ONE STEP AT A TIME - is what we always say, and the great starting point is to say bye-bye to refined sugar and cut processed food as much as possible. There are many great alternative sweeteners you can opt for! Stevia, Xylitol, Erythritol.... 

Well, this is enough for the first blog. Please follow up in Facebook, we will always update the latest information regarding health, fitness and developments in the nutritional science! If you have any comments, please do not hesitate to leave comments!

Best,

Ayano and Tobias