Weight Watchers Naija Style ;-)

Someone recently asked me if I followed Weight Watchers religiously and my answer is yes.... BUT WW meal plans are not based on Nigerian meals.
None of the sample weekly plans had roasted or boiled plantain with grilled chicken and veg. Or any usual foods in the Nigerian diet so I had to make it work for me:


1. What my friends named my "Weight Watcher's Stew" - why? only because I used much less oil than the generous amount that we're all used to. I figured, the chicken stock definitely contained oil so why did I have to use vegetable, sunflower, etc oil? I tried it the 1st time and was pleasantly surprised! Like I've said before, oil doesn't make food taste better. If you season your chicken nicely = yummy chicken stock and you season your stew properly, you don't need to see oil floating on your stew for your stew to taste nice.

2. Fried Rice, Adura style - Simple thing which I'm sure a lot of people already do. One thing I learned during this time was to bulk my meals with vegetables. Usually the ratio of rice to mixed veg was 2:1, and at the very best, 1:1. All I did was greatly increase the portion of mixed veg to result in a ratio of  1:3(or 4) for rice to vegetables for my fried rice. Trust me, there's enough rice in there, it actually made my fried rice look more appetizing (all those beautiful colours - red, green, yellow, orange...) and honestly, it tasted good, if not better than my usual fried rice and it was more nutritious. (I know most of us do this already but for those who don't know, cooking rice in chicken stock just makes it taste soooo good).
I did this same thing for noodles, I used to have 2 packs of noodles (nothing unusual there, everyone does it). I cooked my noodles with mixed vegetables and chicken, usually ended up with a plateful of a lot of food <-- I usually was unable to finish a whole pack of noodles.

3. Eating more protein that usual.... Before WW, I ate a big plate of rice with one or 2 pieces of chicken. After weightwatcher, and learning that chicken wasn't bad in very generous portions, I reduced my portion of rice, replaced with vegetables and a lot of chicken. So yep, I was one of those who had less than 2 serving spoons of rice (jollof or fried) and about 4 pieces of chicken... why not? ;-)

4. For other Nigerian staples e.g. yam and plantain, I reduced the portions and boiled or roasted them.

Good thing about weight watchers is they have an online resource that can calculate points for almost anything now. They also have a growing list of points for just about anything now, they're much better than when I was on it :)

Be aware of the size/weights of their servings. E.g. the plantain they had down as 2 points was about half the size of plantain I usually bought.

Photo Credit: Weight Watchers