Anowa Adjah’s Fitness Revolution: Empowering Curvy Women

When Anowa Adjah first broke onto the fitness scene in 2010 at 5-foot-10 and 200 pounds, she was exactly the bold statement that needed to be made in the exercise industry. The New Jerseyan Temple University alum not only revolutionized the look of fitness—she also jump-started a much-needed conversation on an issue that far too many mothers experience but far too few discuss. Radiant Health Magazine had the opportunity to chat with the voluptuous, health-conscious mother of two to further the exchange on curvy fitness, post-pregnancy training, motherhood, and self-acceptance. 

Image credit: Courtesy of Anowa Adjah

This interview was first published in print in Radiant Issue No. 15, The Motherhood Issue. 

A Post-Pregnancy Fitness Trainer Who Gets It

There are some women who naturally enjoy a poochless, stretchmark-free post-pregnancy experience, and then there are the rest of us—moms who employ exercise, surgery, or the art of optical illusion to get their sexy back.

If we choose exercise, we often turn to personal training experts like Anowa Adjah to help us help ourselves. We purchase workout DVDs and try to come up with both the schedule and the will to watch and perform while juggling the demands of motherhood and life. That’s why we find it particularly refreshing when fitness experts like Anowa are forthcoming about their own pregnancy and fitness challenges.

“My pregnancy was not the ideal,” Anowa Adjah confided. “I was pregnant with twins, which doctors considered high risk. I couldn’t relax as much as I wanted because they had to closely monitor everything.”

Twin births account for 32.6 of every 1,000 live births, according to 2018 data from the National Center for Health Statistics, and present several risks for both moms and babies. For moms, the risks include pregnancy-induced hypertension, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, gastrointestinal issues, and cesarean section. For babies, the primary risk is being born prematurely, which can lead to improper organ and nervous system development, feeding issues, chronic and general respiratory issues, and learning disabilities and delays.

During her pregnancy, Anowa Adjah focused on practicing good prenatal care to carry her babies to full term. This meant eating properly for three, remaining well hydrated, and trading her normal intense training regimen for walking and yoga as her pregnancy progressed. Throughout her pregnancy journey, she shared details with her fitness audience, including the constant exhaustion she battled, her food cravings, the additional 75 pounds she gained, and the rigor of accepting her ever-changing body.

“It took a toll on my body, and that’s the reality. My abdominal muscles just bled. While getting a checkup at eight months pregnant, I sneezed, and suddenly felt pain. I developed diastasis recti, which led to an umbilical hernia. And that was basically what created the hernia.”

Diastasis recti is the fancy name for what we’ve all come to know as “mommy pooch.” It is the condition in which the left and right abdominal muscles separate due to a hormone-induced thinning of the linea alba or connective tissue between the muscle groups. Such thinning allows a pregnant woman’s abdominal area to accommodate her growing uterus. However, the linea alba can become so taxed that it loses its elasticity and simply won’t return to how it was before pregnancy.

This condition, which affects 60% of moms, along with the pressure of carrying two babies set the stage for Anowa’s umbilical hernia. An umbilical hernia is when either body fat or part of the intestine pushes through a weak opening in the area just below the belly button.

“To carry those babies for so long … I was very lucky,” Anowa sighed, then she shared the distressing story about experiencing a cesarean section at 39 weeks of pregnancy. Still, she expressed her appreciation and relief at having birthed two completely healthy boys.

She also recognized how pregnancy had changed her view of and approach to fitness coaching. “A lot of personal trainers try their best through science, through research and education, to empathize with women after pregnancy. But there is really no way to understand what a woman goes through unless you go through it yourself.”

As Anowa learned more about diastasis recti and its prevalence and treatment options, she was even more inspired to speak honestly about her own trials. “Certain issues that happen post-pregnancy cannot be rectified just through exercise,” she explained. “Sometimes surgery is necessary. You can use exercise to reach a certain point. Some of your body will tighten, some will not.” Anowa knew this truth firsthand. When her umbilical hernia caused her to experience severe chronic pain, she opted to have reparative surgery.

“Everything else, I’ve done through training. I started to experiment with strategies to help rectify and improve my abdominal situation in addition to what doctors were telling me. My diastasis recti recovery program has been helpful to a lot of women. The problem with diastasis recti abdominal separation is that if you don’t know how to properly treat the condition, you can worsen it. You have to train those abdominal muscles internally and stay away from exercises than can exacerbate the condition. You can lose all the weight in the world, but you will still have that abdominal separation because the issue is not the weight but rather the muscles.”

There are so many women who have gotten surgery—and there is nothing wrong with it—but they are also promoting fitness programs. Their audience believes they could look the same way if they practice the same regimen. But the people pushing the program didn’t even do [their program] to get those results.

Anowa went on to note the importance of avoiding crunches, planks, and twists when rebuilding core muscles to remedy diastasis recti. Her program is designed to help moms rebuild their core without inflicting more harm, and includes a 30-day training schedule, a nutritional plan, and an online support group. Still, Anowa repeatedly emphasized that everyone’s experience with the condition is different and may require different solutions, including surgery—which is perfectly fine.

“It’s so important to be transparent and honest, especially with the explosion of social media. There are so many women who have gotten surgery—and there is nothing wrong with it—but they are also promoting fitness programs. Their audience believes they could look the same way if they practice the same regimen. But the people pushing the program didn’t even do [their program] to get those results. Being honest and authentic about the results these exercises can achieve is very important to me.

Again, refreshing. Which is exactly why Anowa’s social media sites and fitness DVDs have enjoyed such popularity. Gaining that acceptance, however, came with its own set of challenges.

Not the Only In-Shape Curvy Girl

Image credit: Courtesy of Anowa Adjah

As an adolescent, there was no way Anowa could have known that she’d be an important player in the body acceptance movement. At age 12, Anowa already stood at 5-foot-7 with a figure that was clearly different from those of her classmates, peers, and family members. Feeling like a proverbial sore thumb, she struggled with how others perceived her and how she saw herself.

“Growing up, there weren’t a lot of women outside of sports who were shaped like me. Outside of Serena Williams, there was no one. I always felt like something was wrong with me,” Anowa recalled. But fitness, a habit gifted by her athletic mother, provided the support she needed.

“My mother was a gym rat and so she was the one who introduced me to fitness. Everybody in my family, my brother and my sisters, we’re all quite accomplished athletes. It became a way of life for me. Athletics became my safe space and where I felt like I belonged. Outside of that, I just felt very awkward compared to my colleagues and classmates. They didn’t look anything like me, even colorwise.”

While matriculating at Temple University, Anowa and her ongoing commitment to fitness, training, and dance did not go unnoticed. People often complimented her on her fit, toned physique and constantly asked her what she did to stay in shape.

“Still, there wasn’t anyone in the media who looked like me, and I didn’t understand that,” she reflected. There’s a certain comfort that comes with shared experience. It’s the warmth of knowing you’re not alone and the embrace of being understood. That’s what Anowa wanted.

After she received her degree in public relations, Anowa set out to become the representation she wanted. She earned her fitness certification and pursued a career in fitness modeling, submitting her portfolio to agencies and trying over and again to break into the industry. However, agencies repeatedly told her that she did not have the right look or needed to lose weight.

“It became really alarming for me. How was that even possible? I was a Division I athlete. I had been in shape all of my life.”

For a while, Anowa struggled to adhere to a standard that simply did not make sense for her body. “I tried to lose weight. Then I gained weight to soften up my curves, thinking that maybe if I were a lot thicker … I was trying to fit into what was considered normal at the time.”

Still, Anowa persisted, managing to snag exposure in natural beauty expositions and other publications before seizing her own destiny and posting what would prove to be a radical statement on YouTube.

In her video, Anowa stood on a scale and showed the world that she was 200 pounds and in shape. She was living proof that curves and fitness aren’t anathema to each other and confirmation that fitness looks different on different people.

Of course, the video went viral. Anowa’s body is on point! Still, after so many years of hearing otherwise, the relatability of her post came as a shock. “I didn’t expect it to be so well received. I just grew tired of trying to fit in with everyone else and tired of the media dictating what fitness meant to me.”I knew I wasn’t the only curvy girl in shape.”

Anowa received thousands of letters and emails from people thanking her for epitomizing the shared experience they needed and desired. “They wanted to know what I did to stay in shape and it made them feel safe. I looked like them and they knew that if I could do it then they could do it too.” That YouTube experience sparked the idea of creating workout DVDs—the first of which featured one woman who was nearly 300 pounds and another who weighed about 420.

“I raised the money, released the video, and that’s all she wrote.” Having worked as a certified personal trainer and group instructor, Anowa possessed an arsenal of routines and programs she’d personally tried and professionally crafted for her clients. She attentively listened to her clients and felt inspired to address their individual fitness objectives. The programs she developed were not about conforming to a one-size-fits-all ideal.

“I incorporated what worked for me for my clients who were from all walks of life. They weren’t just curvy women. Some were smaller. Some white, some Black. So many women have similar desires—to achieve bigger legs, get rid of cellulite, develop a bigger butt. Based on outcomes obtained from each particular client, I was able to craft specific programs to get certain results.”

Anowa currently offers seven online fitness programs (including the 21-Day Lose the Gutt, Keep the Butt challenge) in addition to three workout DVDs, two of which were recorded while Anowa was four months along.

When Life Throws You a Curve

Image credit: Courtesy of Anowa Adjah

As Anowa continued to speak plainly about her motherhood journey, she noted that recording a fitness DVD while four months pregnant had definitely not been her original intent. When she’d initially recorded, the first shoot had not yielded the material necessary to move forward with production.

“I wasn’t supposed to be pregnant,” she admitted. “But this is how life throws a curveball. I had already raised the money from fans, supporters, friends, and family. I had made the promise and I still needed to put out those DVDs.” So she remained hush-hush about her condition during those tapings.

“I think at that time I was a little embarrassed because, you know, I didn’t expect it to happen. Like they didn’t pay for a pregnant woman to be doing these exercises, but it ended up being just really groundbreaking on our end because, of course, I was pregnant with my twins.”

Life is like that—which we can all attest to, given the events of 2020. We can make all the plans we want based on how we expect things to happen, yet life decides otherwise. Anowa and I also exchanged plenty of notes on how we came to be single mothers.

“People feel like they can judge a single mom. In my mind, I never wrote out that I was going to be a single mom. I tried to do things the ‘right’ way. I’d known him since I was 18, been with him for six years, and we were going to be together. And it just didn’t happen that way at all. I remember going to therapy. Everyone was just concerned with me because I was just quiet. I was just trying to survive. “Having a baby for the first time isn’t easy—and I had two!” I was going through a bad breakup. My doctors recommended that I talk to someone.

“One of the first things my therapist said to me was, ‘You like to move really quickly because you don’t want to slow down and face what you have going on.’ He could have just shot me then because it was so true. He told me that my life will never be the same but it’s okay. I had a clear vision of how my life should look, and accepting that it turned out differently was challenging, but that’s okay. My sons have made me a well-rounded, stronger human being.”

Yeah, kids will definitely do that and it’s a wonderful thing.

“Oh, I love it,” Anowa gushed. “It’s a lot of work some days. I’ve always strived to overachieve and seek perfection, but this experience has truly humanized me. Motherhood showed me that things don’t have to be perfect and that so many things are simply normal. I absolutely love having these two little human beings that I love and who love me unconditionally. I feel so grateful to look at them, want them to be better than I am, and teach and guide them to become great people. It’s a liberating, beautiful experience and one of the most rewarding I’ve ever had.

Image credit: Courtesy of Anowa Adjah

From there, we gabbed about the challenge of homeschooling while juggling work. We laughed about the joys of raising two boys and what tickled us about their different personalities. We touched on dating, maintaining a personal life, and responding to a son’s desire to have a man in the house. And when I asked about tips on fitness for moms, Anowa Adjah shared a bit of wisdom on giving ourselves the gift of grace.

“Be kind to yourself. A lot of us have these expectations of what we should look like. We think we need to look how we looked before motherhood. That whole mindset will take you down a very ugly road. We need to understand that our bodies have undergone significant trauma. It’s a beautiful experience, but we were carrying another human being for nine months. And you have to give your body time to acclimate.

“Don’t let someone else’s story be your story. Your story is the story that works for you. You’ve got to pace yourself. Do you what you can, when you can. It’s about doing it when you can and setting realistic expectations for yourself.”

To learn more about Anowa Adjah and the various fitness programs she offers, visit anowaadjah.com.

This interview was first published in the now sold out print edition of Radiant Issue No. 15, The Motherhood Issue. Click here to read the digital edition of this issue.