I always imagined that I would debut the story of my weight loss journey as an expert at a Ted Conference or perhaps on the white couch of The Ellen Show, but I guess this would do.
The year was 2001, and like the whole country, my eyes were glued to the television. The Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria had just become Miss World. I remember her walking across the stage in her stunning figure-hugging green dress, crown on her head, flowers in hand, and a smile that shined brighter than the burning bush. I wanted to be her so badly – tall, slender, and beautiful and nothing was going to stop me. Then puberty hit. It was then that I realized that “no amount of motivation fit make snail become lion”. My lower body started to betray me; my legs went from being nicknamed Naomi Campbell to Carlos Tevez (Google him for context).
Just when I began to panic, the Kardashians came onto the scene and life as we knew it changed. My broad hips and thick thighs were now deemed attractive. I had arrived. While I never participated in any beauty pageants, I was pretty satisfied being a ‘local champion’; you know, the big fish in a teeny tiny lake. But as they say, all good things must come to an end.
You see, the larger my pocket money grew, the fatter I became, and for a while, I was okay with it. Then the unsolicited comments began, “What happened to you?”, “Chop-Chop, you better start eating vegetables”. It was bad enough that I had to deal with buttons spontaneously popping off my blouses, trousers not going past my thighs, back rolls, now this? I had family members who were three times my size giving me weight loss advice and then the teasing, oh the teasing! I would walk up the stairs, and my brother would scream, “It’s an earthquake!” I would get into the backseat of my family car, and dad would say, “tyre mi ti lo le (my tyre has been deflated)”.
There was nothing I did not try in my quest to lose weight. I once sat in a dark room filled with mosquitoes so I would get malaria and shed some inches from lack of appetite. That did not work. I tried the 24-hour waist trainer plan and almost passed out from suffocation. My most extreme measure surprisingly worked but was short-lived; I started a low-calorie liquid-only diet plan that had me eating a deficit of 800 calories a day. I went from a size 16 to a size 10/12 in six weeks. I was slim again, but this time I had no curves whatsoever and interestingly, the size of my head remained the same – a living, breathing lollipop.
I became so ashamed of how I looked that I started to eat again in a bid to gain more curves but instead gained all the lost weight back. Since then, it has been a constant battle – diet upon diet, fasting upon fasting, truly a never-ending journey to my former self.
I anticipate that this journey would conclude as an inspiring tale about self-love (just in time for my Ted talk), but for now, I am still a product of social conditioning. I still have an ideal standard of beauty that was probably fed to me subconsciously through the unrealistic features propagated in the media. For now, I am still human.
