My favourite Thai noodles for lunch? How does weight loss work at Bangkok retreat RAKxa? By changing your attitude to food and your body
- Food writer Chris Dwyer tries out the RAKxa wellness retreat in Bangkok and is surprised not to be weighed and to have so much tempting food to eat
- Having chosen from a list of treatments including hyperbaric chamber therapy and hydrotherapy, he comes away with a new awareness of what food does to his body
Although this is my first weight-loss and wellness retreat, I imagine that it’s pretty unusual not to be weighed, either on arrival, throughout, or on departure.
Not only that, but every lunch and dinner starts with home-made sourdough bread served with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. So far, so beautifully unexpected. This is going to be a piece of cake.
But after four nights at RAKxa, on a riverside in verdant south Bangkok – which feels a million miles from the city’s bustling Sukhumvit area – all will become abundantly clear. I am here not just to lose some of my robust food writer’s frame; I am to unlearn almost five decades of bad habits – and also learn some good ones.
Things didn’t start well. Walking past Burger King in Bangkok airport, I contemplated popping in to stock up on a couple of emergency Whoppers. As I was whisked through the Thai capital in the retreat’s black Mercedes S class, smoky roadside stalls beckoned with their gloriously charred and sticky things on sticks.
RAKxa is hidden away on Bang Krachao, an artificial island formed by a bend in the Chao Phraya river where life feels decidedly laid back. There’s not even a sign from the quiet laneway that leads you to spacious, manicured grounds dotted with elegant villas and wellness facilities.