Awaken Lifestyles with Olamide Balogun: Promoting Good Health Practices for a Wholesome Wellbeing

When I was asked if I would start this column on BellaNaija, I got very excited because over the years (a conservative estimate would be 20 years) I have done so much research and experimented with myself to such an extent that I know I have the answer to your weight loss issues and I am ready to spill the beans. Only one person can stop you and that person is you!

Many who know me are quick to say that I have never had a weight problem. This is not true. I struggled with being overweight many years ago in University and after I had my 5th Child in 2002. It is research about nutrition, dieting and healthy living that I have conducted over the last twenty years that has helped me so far and a few others to lose weight they have not been able to shed for years and keep it off.

Many people just go with the flow of life. Sleeping, waking, eating, more eating, sleeping… and starting the cycle again. Many are too busy just living and not thinking about making any real kind of headway and if we are thinking about making headway it is never about our health. There is a widely held belief that bad things only happen to other people. Trust me if you don’t look after yourself sooner or later something bad will happen.

Many people care about how they look (some don’t at all) but in many instances don’t know how to look good and also be healthy. Some put really corrosive stuff on their skin or ingest very deadly things just to have fair skin for instance. Some go without real food for months just so they can lose weight, which they put right back and more once they start eating. I can assure you this is not healthy.

There is now so much information and research that no one needs to struggle with having a healthy weight and a healthy lifestyle. I am going to be writing about awakening a healthy lifestyle that produces good health and one of the by-products will be weight loss. What constitutes good health is not just the absence of disease but the quality of life from the look and feel, physically, emotionally and spiritually. If one of these is out of whack the whole will not be balanced.

I will be bursting many myths and telling many truths. For example, you have to eat to lose weight permanently. You cannot have cheat days and keep the weight off. Diet drinks don’t only keep you fat but are dangerous to your health.

Food is of extreme importance to total wellness. Hippocrates the father of medicine said we should let food be our medicine and our medicine be food. The bad news is that there are no quick fixes, but the good news is that there are some things that show positive results very quickly.

Food, however, is not the only thing. The hormones we have contribute to our wellness. The emotions we have also do the same. The amount of sleep and rest we get also contributes to our health. This column is for those who are struggling with weight issues, facing some disease or condition, or fighting inexplicable fatigue or lethargy. The column is also for very wise people who want to learn how to prevent any of this.

What I will be promoting here is not a diet, but a paradigm shift in current lifestyles to give us a lifestyle that will have us at our optimum always.
It seems that many of the world’s leading dietary experts have adopted one-size-fits-all dietary solutions that they believe can be universally applied. While there are indeed certain universal truths, such as the evil and danger of sugar and flour, research has taught me that a one-size-fits-all dietary approach simply doesn’t work very well.

I am not a doctor, but I have come to realise that many doctors are only interested in using medication to solve problems but there are many ailments that even they don’t know how it came about and therefore how they can be cured. I am however someone who has battled my weight for many years through five children, being a stay at home mum, a career woman and menopause (which is real by the way).

If this column has caught your fancy, stay with me and you will get healthier with every article.