How I Lost 7kg in 8 Weeks Eating Jollof, Swallow and Plantain (No Gym, No Starving, No Bland Food)

If you are a Nigerian woman who has been trying to lose weight and failing — I was you 2 years ago, and I wrote this to help.

You know the drill by now.

Wardrobe open at 6am. Gown after gown. Looking for the one that hides your stomach.

"I'll do a proper birthday shoot when I lose small weight." You've said it three birthdays running now.

It didn't happen all at once. NYSC ended. The bank job started. And somewhere between 6am departures and 9pm dinners, the weight was just... there.

Nobody said anything at first. Then they started greeting you with it. "Ah ah, you don add o!" Said with a smile. Like a compliment. It is not a compliment.

So you tried things. You skipped meals until your head was pounding by 2pm. You ate boiled, tasteless food until you couldn't take it anymore. You bought the slimming teas. You did 10k steps in January and stopped in February.

And every single time, the weight came back. Sometimes with interest.

So now you've quietly concluded maybe it's just your body. Maybe it's the Nigerian food. Maybe this is simply who you are now.

"Maybe I should just accept it."

Please don't. Because everything you've been told about why you're gaining weight is wrong.

Drop everything you are doing right now and listen to every word I'm about to say.

Our mothers never sat us down and taught us this. They just watched us struggle and said "you'll grow out of it," or said nothing at all — and we believed that was the only option because nobody ever gave us a better one.

Dieticians in the big private hospitals charge more than half a salary — ₦100,000 and above — to teach a version of what I'm about to give you for free in this story, then hand you a meal plan full of quinoa, salmon and Greek yoghurt that no normal Nigerian kitchen has ever seen.

Aunty Ebele is my mum's younger sister. 47 years old. Mum of four. And she looks lean and pretty in a way that does not make sense when you stand next to her and do the maths in your head.

Every time she comes to a family gathering, the women are eyeing her from across the room. "Wetin she dey use? Na waist trainer? Abi she don do surgery?" Nobody will ask her face to face. So nobody learns anything. And we continue blaming the food.

I was one of those people eyeing her.

Hi, my name is Adaeze. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm just a regular Naija woman who fought her own body for years, lost every single round... until one conversation with a 47-year-old mum of four who looks lean and pretty like a 30-year-old model changed everything.

It started small. 2019, NYSC, 68kg. Not skinny, but fine. I liked mirrors. I liked photos.

Then my bank job on the Island. I lived on the Mainland — I honestly don't know how some of my colleagues afford living on the Island 😭. Nine hours in one chair, two hours in traffic, dinner at 9pm because what else was I supposed to do. By 2022 I was 78kg. By last year, 84kg. The weight didn't land on me in one day. It was small, small. After detty December, small. After Easter break, small. After my birthday, small. Until one morning my work skirt wouldn't zip and I told myself it must have shrunk inside the washing machine.

The photos from my friend Tola's wedding finished me. Matching aso-ebi. When they hit the group chat, I scrolled past myself twice because I genuinely did not recognise the woman in the picture.

That night I cried, then opened Google and typed "how to lose belly fat fast without exercise" and read until 2am. Then deleted the history, because God forbid anybody sees it.

I postponed my own 30th birthday shoot "until I lose small weight." I am 32 now. That shoot never happened.

My mother tried to warn me

One Sunday on the phone she stopped me mid-sentence: "Adaeze, so it is hunger you want to be using to punish yourself? You will starve yourself from morning till night, then one day you will faint inside that banking hall and they will call me. If you want to reduce, reduce with sense. Go and learn how this thing works. Are you hearing me?"

I said "Yes ma" and changed the topic. What did Mummy know? She was not the one being called orobo by bus conductors. So I went to war. And I lost every single battle.

Starving myself. By 2pm my head was pounding. By 4pm I was at the office gate buying puff-puff, hating myself while chewing.

The boiled bland diet. Eleven days of hospital-food chicken. Day twelve, a colleague's send-off scattered it all in one sitting.

₦20,000 gym membership. Seven visits total. Never renewed.

Slimming teas. ₦18,000. Constant purging. Stomach exactly the same. One vendor blocked me when I complained.

Cutting swallow completely. Three weeks of holding out. Undone in one afternoon at an owambe.

Money I was managing, wasted. And I was heavier than when I started.

The breaking point

Then last year I stopped at a pharmacy to check my BP, just casually. The attendant looked at the reading, then at me, and asked me to sit and take it again. It was high. Not emergency high. High enough that she asked, gently, about my family history.

My mother has taken BP tablets every morning since she was 55. I sat in my car for twenty minutes without starting the engine, thinking: Mummy's own started at 55. The way I'm going, mine starts at 40.

The day Aunty Ebele sat beside me

Two weeks later, at my cousin's traditional wedding in Enugu, I was doing my usual — small portion, no swallow, pretending I wasn't hungry — when Aunty Ebele sat down beside me and looked at my sad little plate.

You know her already. What you don't know is that after her fourth child she crossed 91kg. Everybody watched it happen. Nobody said anything to her face. Then she just started reducing. Quietly. No teas, no waist-trainer gist, no disappearing to any camp. And this woman eats swallow every single day.

She looked at my plate and laughed, gently.

I asked her the question everybody in this family has been too respectful to ask. "Aunty... how?"

She told me she'd once paid a dietician serious money, who handed her a plan full of quinoa, salmon and Greek yoghurt. She looked at the paper and told the woman: "My dear, I am an Igbo woman. I will not eat food I cannot pronounce. Teach me the principle, and I will do it with my own food." So the dietician taught her two things: her daily number, and the plate structure. Aunty Ebele rebuilt both around eba, ogbono, rice — everything she actually eats. Seven years now, it has not come back.

Then she took my plate, walked to the buffet, and rebuilt it in front of me. Half the plate: vegetables. A quarter: protein — real pieces, not decoration. The last quarter: swallow. Not banned. Just measured. The stew, a controlled amount, not a swimming pool.

"Eat everything on this plate. You will be full. And you will see."

Your body has a daily number. Eat around that number and you cannot store fat, no matter what the food is called. Jollof, eba, plantain — your body does not know their names. It only counts.

Eight weeks later

Week three, my grey work skirt — the one with the safety pin arrangement — zipped. No pin. No sucking in. No prayer. I laughed out loud like a mad woman, then checked the scale: 81.5kg.

Week five, my husband held my waist while I was cooking. "Ada, this your body is changing o. What are you doing?" I had missed that look.

Week eight: 77kg. Seven kilos, gone. Eating my normal food. No gym. Not one day of hunger.

At Christmas, my cousin Ify dragged me into a corner. "Ada, abeg, talk true. Wetin you dey use?" The voice notes I sent her became documents. The documents kept growing, until I realised I had basically written a book — so I decided to finish the job properly.