Pillar 3 · Responsibility Without Self-Blame

You Are Not Chasing 65 Kilos. You Are Chasing How It Feels.

By Zeinab Kamara, Oncology Nurse · 23 August 2026 · 6 min read · Companion to this video

Every woman I have ever worked with tracks her weight. Almost none of them track her energy. Think about that: the thing she measures every morning is the thing she does not actually want, and the thing she actually wants, to get through four o'clock without falling over, to be present at dinner, to not feel like a stranger in her own body, she has never once written down. You are not chasing 65 kilos. You are chasing how 65 kilos feels. Those are not the same target, which is why you can arrive at one and feel nothing at all. This is responsibility without self-blame, aimed at the target instead of the layer.

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This is the second way we misdiagnose ourselves. The companion piece on the five capacities showed the first: spending discipline at the wrong layer of the body. This one is quieter, because you can do everything right and still hit it.

Means goals and end goals

Here is a distinction to keep. A means goal is the vehicle. An end goal is the destination. The scale, the dress size, the protocol completed, the grams of protein logged, those are all means. They feel like the target because you can measure them. The end goal is always a feeling state: vitality, stable energy, clarity, the capacity to show up for the life you are actually building.

"Weight is a means goal. Energy is an end goal. Almost nobody tells you which one you're actually chasing."

Here is how you know you have confused them. Look at what happens when you hit the number. If you get there and feel empty, or immediately look for the next number, you were never after the number. You were after what you were promised it would feel like, and nobody delivered that, because nobody was aiming at it. This is also why women give up: not when they fail, but when they succeed and it does not feel like anything.

You can watch this happen with protein. Right now the internet is arguing about grams, 0.8 or 1.6 per kilo, per-meal timing, shakes, and exhausted women read that and quietly give up, because it is one more thing to get wrong. They are being handed a means goal to optimise when what they need is a floor to defend on the worst day. Same nutrient, completely different target.

What I had to admit

Last week I gained weight I did not like. I want to be honest about the two seconds that followed, because you know them: there is a flinch, and an old sentence arrives, you're slipping, and it arrives with the full authority of somebody who has been right before. But then I looked at the actual week I had had. I had the vitality I had spent years trying to get back. Stable energy. Clarity. Whole days without the three o'clock crash that used to define my afternoons. I was present with my children in a way I have not always been.

So I had to ask a question I had never quite asked in that form: which one am I actually after? I was having a beautiful time, and the scale was going up, and those two facts sat there refusing to resolve. That told me everything about which target I had been aiming at all those years without ever choosing it.

The Means-End Health Reframe

This is what I call the Means-End Health Reframe, and it changes the question you ask when things are not working:

• "Why am I not losing weight?" becomes "Why am I not getting the feelings I actually want?"
• "I failed the plan" becomes "Was this the right plan for the feelings I was after?"
• "I have no discipline" becomes "I was chasing the wrong target."

Notice what that does. It does not excuse you. You are still responsible for your health, completely. It relocates the problem to where it actually lives, and that is more useful than shame has ever been, because you can act on a wrong target. You cannot act on a character flaw.

The one tool: name the feeling

Here is the one thing to do this week, and it takes about four minutes. Write down the number you are chasing. Then underneath it, write the sentence "and when I get there, I will feel..." and finish it, in detail. What does the morning look like? What can you do at four o'clock that you cannot do now? Who are you at dinner?

That second thing is your actual goal. It always was. Now ask whether anything in your current plan is aimed at it, or whether every single thing you are doing is aimed at the number and hoping the feeling arrives as a side effect. Then track the feeling, once a week is enough, because the thing you measure is the thing you will protect.

When you chase the end goal, the energy, the clarity, the capacity, the means very often follows anyway. I never chased the weight. I chased the energy, and the weight came with it. But even when it does not come, you will have the thing you were actually after, which means you stop abandoning the plan every time the number refuses to move. You are not someone who let herself go. You are someone who was never given the right chart.