For over 20 years, Dr. Quincy Olasumbo Ayodele has been at the forefront of the herbal weight loss and natural skin care business. The beautician, who is the Managing Director of Quincy Herbal Slimmers, is also the pioneer Secretary-General of the umbrella body of the Traditional Medicine Practitioners in Nigeria. One would wonder, why the sudden passion for alternative medical therapy?
“I have been doing this for a long time on myself because I was very big. So I would go to the gym to exercise and after the routine, I would go and drink like two bottles of soda with suya, thereby bringing back all the weight I had burnt in the gym. With my knowledge of cleaning with natural herbs, I then knew that I had to eat healthily and exercise to be fit and healthy,” she says.
Having worked in the defunct Societe Generale Bank for 14 years as a personal assistant to the Managing Director, Quincy, who is an adviser to the World Health Organisation on the development of African traditional medicine, says she opted out of paid employment for two reasons, “one to help other women like me who were overweight or even fatter than me; I was weighing 95kg over a height of 5.1 feet. Secondly, though I was a fulfilled personnel in the bank then and I was very hardworking, there was something in me that was not right. I wanted to do more than answering calls for somebody else; let me do something for myself.”
Ayodele learned about herbs, plants and their uses from her grandmother, so working with herbs was not strange to her. But the fact that she has worked hard to attain her current status does not mean she has abandoned her role as a good wife and mother.
“My father taught me that simplicity costs you nothing and gets you everything. When I’m at work, my children will be in school, but once they close and they are at home, I become Mrs Ayodele; We cook together, talk together, do their homework together,” she notes.
What keeps her going on this job? “I like seeing the positive results of my herbs on my clients; when their skin naturally transforms into their desires. I like it when I see potbellies melt and can fit into the desired sizes,” she says.
On retirement, she asks “can a healer retire?”
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