ON SUCH A DAY, I cannot keep quiet but shout aloud and campaign against obesity while accepting, supporting and honoring the obese people in their healing journey.
Experience has shown that overweight and obesity deprives women and girls of their confidence to speak up, their active participation in development activities, their aspirations to take up leadership roles, and failure to serve not only their own families but also the nation at large.
For a woman like me, self-esteem seems to be everything I needed and at the time I lost it, life started to cripple. We are all aware of society’s negative reactions to obesity, and when it is personalized, it can really hurt.
Human beings crave for approval, recognition and affirmation. Most of the times, we seek out for other people’s clue on our self-worth and acceptability. We all crave for positive feedback people give us about our attractiveness, personality, intelligence and friendliness. The more positive feedback we receive and internalize, the more secure we feel in ourselves. The more negative the feedback, the more insecure we can feel about life.
After living with obesity for a significant number of years, any one can imagine how insecure I felt while listening to people’s teasing words, criticisms, accusations and rejections. I reached to a point where I began to build a wall around myself, to protect myself from excessive criticism, put-downs and labeling.
Obesity did not only come along with low self-esteem and lack of confidence but also high risk of catching non communicable diseases to include; high blood pressure (hypertension), Type 2 diabetes, stroke, and breast cancer that could all lead to death.
So three years back, I became intentional with my health and decided to reverse the trends that led to obesity by making changes in my eating habits and getting engaged in sports and physical activities. Patience and perseverance were the two main qualities that made my progress yield results.
In the process, I have managed to drop more than 20kg though the journey continues.
Time was necessary to make the deep spiritual and emotional changes that keep weight off forever. With patience and perseverance, weight loss success transforms from being a goal someone achieves to becoming a new person in the process.
It may seem like losing weight is a simple goal—do some exercise, go on a diet, and voila! But there is much more to that, keeping weight off long term means liking the lifestyle that helped you lose the weight in the first place. In other words, instead of starving yourself or eating nothing but baby food, you have to make changes that you actually enjoy and want to stick with over the long term. Unless you like the life you are living while losing weight, you’re probably not going to keep living that way and as a consequence, that weight that you’ve lost will come back.
After succeeding in losing weight and keeping it off permanently, I decided to reach out to society with a program that seeks to contribute to the promotion of healthier lifestyles, well-being and self-care of women and girls through education, economic empowerment, inspiration and support.
Care4Them Wellness Organization under its program dabbed "Slim n’ Fit” is devoted to the empowerment of women and girls through sports and fitness. The organization has pursued this goal from 2019 and is working with various national organizations like National Alliance for Non Communicable diseases, National Early Childhood Development Program and Rwanda Biomedical Center among others to enlighten women and girls on the significance of sports and fitness as a national agenda in the fight against overweight and obesity the major risk factor of Non Communicable Diseases.
Most importantly, at the end of the fun arousing from sports, the compounds are converted into classrooms (safe places), a platform to strengthen, promote and share knowledge on leadership, financial freedom, nutrition, women’s rights, gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Slim n’ Fit program has created a friendly environment that has attracted especially girls and women with over 150kg to participate in the center’s sports and fitness activities.
The center accepts and honors obese people in their healing journey, offers them an open ear without judgment and recognizes that the healing process is unique to each one them.
The program is committed to making women and girls have an opportunity to reach their fullest potential through the prevention of overweight and obesity that come along with social and emotional effects that result into stigmatization, depression, anxiety and decreased self-esteem.
"Care4Them Wellness Organization reached out to me at a time I was hopeless with no sense of life’s direction. Together with the structured weight loss program, I have so far managed to drop 20kg! I cannot thank the facilitators of Slim n’ Fit program enough,” said Sarafina Mukeshimana one of the program beneficiaries suffering from both diabetes and high blood pressure.
As we celebrate the World Obesity Day today, it is high time we break the cycle of shame and blame of obese people and reevaluate our approach for addressing this complex global public health problem.
Together we can make a difference. There is a lot we can do, to include raising health awareness about the causes and risks of obesity and methods of prevention, raising awareness about adopting a healthy lifestyle, importance of sports and physical activities and encouraging early detection of obesity to reduce prevalence. We also ought to shed light on the importance of taking preventive measures to combat obesity by urging all stakeholders to cooperate and contribute to finding solutions to eliminate obesity.
Florence Uwamwezi is the chairperson and founder of Care4Them Wellness Organization
flomiss2@gmail.com