Denis Opudo
The African digital environment has been experiencing a drastic growth in the recent past. This has offered the best environment for local entrepreneurs to develop their businesses. They have managed to do this through the use of great technology that is getting into the continent. People are in a position to receive and give information at a faster speed. The best part of it is that investors are in a better position to make decisions. All these have made it easier to tap the existing potential in Africa. Entrepreneurs have managed to come up with structures that not only inspire the locals but also offer solutions to the global market.
For instance Remi Owadokun, the founder and CEO of Total Makeover Program, a health firm that aims at empowering individuals with the right needed tools that will help them to live a healthy life. The program makes use of online courses, mobile games and various custom build tools to offer the best results in its service delivery. Remi decided to share her experience in developing the program and running it until it has reached where it is now.
She said that she suffered depression due to her weighing 110 kg in 2013. According to her, this was an overweight. The weight also made her have low self-esteem, migraines, hormonal imbalance, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and pre-diabetes. However, she never realized any effect with the changes since she had lived with them for a period of 13 years. She had to go through normal steps that anyone goes through while in that state including getting pills every now and then. Depression problem knocked her doors at the time when she had just cleared her carrier in Fashion. This made her more confused than before not knowing what to do with her life. That made her to engage herself more in order to lose weight which will allow her to fit in her clothes. In a span of 10 months, she had lost 5 kg, followed by 10 kg and lastly, she lost 40 kg. Her physical appearance changed for better making her look 10 years younger compared to how she was when she was weighing 110 kg. The most important one is that her self-esteem grew and she did away with daily medications.
In a period of 13 years she used to have monthly periods that lasted for 2 weeks to 2 months, this changed to only 5 days. Her decision to lose weight made her experience a Total Makeover in her whole life and that is why she has more love for the brand. She had to reflect on what she did to make her achieve all that within the shortest time. She qualified as a Health Coach from one of the biggest nutritional institutions globally and later on started attending to customers. Currently, she is running an online academy that serves more than 1,600 individuals in 10 countries. They are currently training women who have changed their lives via the program to become Certified Health Coaches. This will allow them to also change other people’s lives and be of help in the society. One of Remi’s book about weight loss become one of the Amazon’s bestselling books in the UK, Canada and US. She also launched Phat Gal in 2017, a mobile game which was nominated for the Her Network Woman of the year award in the tech category.
The idea of developing the mobile game revolved around a character she referred to as Phat Gal. She had to name the character after her during the time when she was weighing 110 kg. She realized that many people do spend much of their time on their mobile phones and she saw that as the best way of engaging them rather than taking them out of where they are mostly found. She decided to use that avenue to influence them on how they view healthy living and food. Furthermore, she developed the mobile game to educate the users through exiting and funny ways. She admits that she is playing an important role in changing people’s lives.
Remi says many health startups put much of their focus on diet and exercise and many people have been told that the best way to lose weight is to focus on exercise and diet. She objects that as the best way of losing weight given the fact that overweight people are still there. Her startup stands out from the rest of other health startups since it focuses on two major issues that are primary and secondary diet. Primary food is those staff that people feed on though they are not served on plates like career, education, relationship, love and many others. On the other hand, secondary foods are the things people eat served on plates daily. The best way of managing diet is by first focusing on what makes one eat. Once the primary food is sorted then secondary food will automatically sort out itself. Many individuals eating habits are determined by emotions of which many startups do not work on solving. Emotions influence peoples’ eating habit either positively or negatively. There are those who will eat a lot when they are emotional while there are those who will not eat at all while in that state. So the best way is to educate people on how they can work out to ways to control their emotions.
