Advice built on food you can actually buy in Abuja.

What the dietitian works on

• Weight: losing it, and gaining it where that is the problem.
• Diabetes: what to eat, when, and how it fits around rice, yam, swallow and the way your household actually cooks.
• High blood pressure: salt, seasoning cubes and the hidden sodium nobody counts.
• Cholesterol and heart risk.
• Anaemia and iron deficiency: very common, very treatable, and a frequent cause of exhaustion blamed on stress.
• A child who is not growing, or who refuses to eat.
• Pregnancy and breastfeeding nutrition.
• Kidney disease and gout diets.
• Sickle cell nutrition and hydration.
• Eating during Ramadan or Lent with a medical condition.
• Food intolerance and allergy.

Look at your plate

You do not need to count anything. How much of the plate is swallow, how much is vegetables, how much is protein — that one picture does more for most people than any diet sheet.

The five changes that do the most

1. Shrink the swallow, grow the soup. Halve the starch, double the vegetables in the soup. Same meal, same table, entirely different blood sugar.
2. Stop drinking sugar. Soft drinks, malt, sweetened yoghurt, "fruit" drinks and three sugars in tea add up faster than anything you eat. This one change alone shifts weight and sugar readings.
3. Count the seasoning cubes. Most Nigerian salt intake comes from cubes and seasoning, not the salt shaker. Use fewer and lean on pepper, onion, ginger, garlic, uziza, curry and thyme.
4. Eat beans properly often. Cheap, filling, high in protein and fibre, and it lowers the blood-sugar spike of whatever it sits beside.
5. Eat at a table, with the phone put away. People eat measurably less and notice being full.

Each month we publish a single theme with a shopping list and a few meals built around what is in season and cheap — see this month's.

Book if any of this sounds familiar

• You have been told your sugar, blood pressure or cholesterol is high.
• You are tired all the time and tests were "normal", ask about iron specifically.
• You have gained or lost weight without trying.
• Your child is not gaining weight, or has dropped down the growth chart.
• Your child will only eat three foods.
• You are pregnant, breastfeeding, or planning a pregnancy.
• You have kidney disease, gout or sickle cell and nobody has ever given you a proper eating plan.
• You have tried to lose weight repeatedly and it keeps coming back.

What it costs

A dietitian consultation is ₦25,000.

How the first appointment works

1. Weight, height, waist, blood pressure, and blood tests if they have not been done recently.
2. A genuine conversation about what you eat. Not a lecture, an inventory. Who cooks, what the budget is, who else eats it, and what you would refuse to give up.
3. A written plan built around that, with portions described in things you own — a cup, a wrap, a spoon.
4. A follow-up date, because this only works when it is reviewed.

Common questions