Ebere is a banker that stays in Lagos.  She wakes up at 4.30 every weekday morning.  She tries to do some exercises for 20mins each of these times then heads out for work at 6am. She has 4 slices of toast bread, 2 sausages and a cup of tea for breakfast; a wrap of wheat flour and egusi soup for lunch and fruits for dinner. On her drive home she stays on traffic for about 2 hours, snacks on 1 gala and 1 pack of plantain chips just to stay awake. And that is the cycle every week day and days when she works weekend.

The thing is Ebere is overweight, tilting into obesity. But for the past 5 months the scale has not moved to the left. She is concerned.

A lot of people will relate to Ebere’s situation.People always say its hard to loose weight in Nigeria because a lot f our foods are very heavy carbs. Bu then I will say our foods are really almost the best to loose weight on. The thing is how are you preparing them.

Lets start like here. Do you know your body mass index BMI? This will tell you if you are underweight, normal weight,overweight, or obese. Check here to know where you stand.

In previous posts here and here, I have listed out approximate calorie contents of most of our foods. It is important to balance out meals in a day.

For instance, you don’t have yam and bread the same day. Or you don’t have rice and noodles the same day.  You don’t have amala or eba and rice same day. Balance out your day’s meal.

Our soups are highly nutritious but the amount of oil we put in kills them. The gods didn’t emphasize that our lips need to have a glossy shine after each meal. These oils are very high in calorie. Even though the are very nutritious. Thus they have to be used in caution.

Snacking. Hmmm this is a story for another day…….

To be continued.

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