(west) African food!

I loooooove eating and cooking African food i think the best way to lose weight and still enjoy all types of food is to just cut down on the portions. I do tend to stay away from putting creamed coconut and dumplings in my soups now tho lol x

Hey guys,

I'm nigerian and i eat a lot of nigerian or african food for dinner. i wonder if there are other people like me here who lost weight or are also on a journey.. Are there any types of foods u stayed away from or did u also controlur portions while eating african food?

I think the problem with African food is the frying. As a Caribbean person, our food is similar and we tend to fry a lot of stuff - fish, chicken etc and use a lot of oil.

I would use the oven more, which would cut back on the frying and excess oil. For example, instead of frying your fish, use the oven instead. Place a heavy skillet in the oven at 350 (rub some oil over the pan to prevent sticking), when the pan is smoking hot, place fish or chicken on pan, (rub some oil on fish/chicken) to cook. Or you could steam your fish in foil with okra, peppers, onions etc - less fattening or healthier.

A lot of the foods we eat are extremely starchy, but you do not have to give them up, eat in moderation. Use brown rice instead of white, whole wheat flour instead of white flour. Try and cut out all the white stuff, use more beans - black, kidney, pigeon peas, lentils etc.

Yesterday, I fancied coconut dumpling and salt fish. I made my dumplings with whole wheat flour along with the coconut and I was in heaven. I do not need to eat them for a while now. If you would have told me a couple of years ago I would be easting whole wheat flour, I would have told you no way. I also made 15 coconut johnny cake for Christmas (with whole wheat flour and coconut), for two of us.

At Easter, Christmas and New Year, I eat all Caribbean food cooked the way we like it - fry, fry and more frying, that is my time celebrate. Once January 2 arrives, I reduce my frying to zero.

I think the best thing to do is substitute different things... for instance instead of using fufu you can use oat meal. significantly reduce the amount of oil you use to make stew. Don't fry anything.

bake dont fry

I'm Nigerian. Whenever I visit family for the holidays, all the stuff I don't or can't consume regularly get eaten in massive quantities: jollof rice, fried rice, fufu, fried plantains. By myself I have to weigh and cook one portion of rice so I do not get tempted by too much. I bake plantains rather than fry them to cut down on oil retained. In my beans recipe, the palm oil was the highest calorie ingredient so I cut it down a bit to two table spoons for an eight serving pot of beans. I even made meat pie and had to keep tweaking down the ingredients and ultimately just kept the original recipe but only make two tiny meat pies. Enough for dinner. Lol

It's like losing weight with any other food type: no food is "bad". Eat enough protein, fats, etc. Control your portions. Measure measure measure. Do you have a food scale? It will be important to create and record your own recipes since you won't find too many pre packaged meals that just tell you the total calorie count.

I eat those when I visit my family but unfortunately I'm not the best cook so I don't make them.. Sorry!

Weighing has become much less annoying, if not second nature to me:

Use MFP recipe function
Edit/Tweak the recipe each time with weights of ingredients
Some items are sub 10 calorie items, I don't bother with those if they'll annoy me or keep me from logging the bulk of a recipe. Just "round up" on some other ingredient instead
The "Tare" function on the scale is my friend. I can incrementally add ingredients into a container and get the weight of each to add into the MFP recipe
I log using my phone: way easy having the logger right there in the kitchen sometimes!

Finally, if you use the same quantities, you'll have less need to edit each time

I'd say everyone struggles with making measured food rather than just by feel or taste. Only when we realized that we needed to be clear on the "calories in" portion of the equation did we start with all this measuring shenanigans. Good luck!