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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I wanted to be her so badly \u2013 tall, slender, and beautiful and nothing was going to stop me. Then puberty hit. It was then that I realized that \u201cno amount of motivation fit make snail become lion\u201d. My lower body started to betray me; my legs went from being nicknamed Naomi Campbell to Carlos Tevez (Google him for context).<\/p>\n
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 \u2018local champion\u2019; you know, the big fish in a teeny tiny lake. But as they say, all good things must come to an end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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, \u201cWhat happened to you?\u201d, \u201cChop-Chop, you better start eating vegetables\u201d. 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, \u201cIt\u2019s an earthquake!\u201d I would get into the backseat of my family car, and dad would say, \u201ctyre mi ti lo le (my tyre has been deflated)\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5451,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5448\/revisions\/5451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heirsholdings.com\/hhpeople\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}