Pillar 4 · Rebuilding After Collapse

I Lost 40 kg and Gained It Back 4 Times. Here Is Why

By Zeinab Kamara, Oncology Nurse · 16 September 2026 · 9 min read · Companion to this video

Losing the weight was never the hard part. Keeping it was. I know that because I did it four times: 105 kilos down to 65, and all the way back, over and over. And I am a nurse. This is the story underneath every one of those collapses, and why it had nothing to do with what I knew. It is the heart of rebuilding after collapse.

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Here is what the loop looks like from the inside. You have tried. You tried the deficit, tracking every gram, the fasting window, the 5am start, the gym membership you actually used. And here is the part almost nobody says out loud: they all worked, every one of them, for a while. Then each one stopped, and each time it stopped, you had a little less confidence than when you began. That is a specific kind of tired. You used to be the person who figured things out. You are not lazy, you have never been lazy, you have the information. And it is still not working.

Where my version started

I have to go further back than I usually do. I delivered twins, and I lost 3.5 liters of blood doing it. When you lose blood like that, your body has to decide where to send what is left. It protects the organs you cannot live without, and the pituitary, the gland that tells all your other hormone glands what to do, did not get its share. So the glands underneath it stopped being told anything.

My cortisol came back low. Not high. Low. There is a prescription with my name on it, and in the reason line it says cortisol deficiency.

And here is the part I had never said out loud. I wanted to breastfeed my babies, I was advised to, and I was told to try very hard. So I did what I always do. I read everything, every food, every drink, every single thing that was supposed to bring milk in, and I ate all of it, enormous amounts, at every hour of the day and night, on almost no sleep. And the gland that makes breast milk answers to the same pituitary that had just been damaged. So the harder I worked, the less my body could answer. Nobody told me anything was compromised. I was told to try harder.

"That is where the weight came from. It was not appetite, and it was not a lack of discipline. It was months of forced eating, on a signaling system that was no longer telling me anything true, on almost no sleep."

The years after

At one point I wrote a list before a doctor's appointment, because there were so many things on it I was afraid I would forget some. Fatigue that did not lift no matter how much I slept. Brain fog. Heart palpitations. Weight I could not move. An HPV infection that was not clearing. An ovarian cyst that had grown enough that surgery was booked. My doctor read that list and said: you have a lot of symptoms, what are we going to do about this? He was not being unkind. He genuinely did not have an answer.

I want to be exact about the medication, because this is where people get hurt. I was taking cortisone, to replace the hormone my body could not make, and two blood pressure medications, because after the delivery my blood pressure would not come down and I ended up in intensive care. Those drugs were doing their job. And their job was never to rebuild me. Cortisone replaces a hormone. Blood pressure medication brings blood pressure down. Neither repairs the system underneath, because that is not what they are for. So I did the rebuilding while I was still taking them, not instead of them. And I measured everything: my blood pressure, five or six times a day, written in a book by hand, carried to my GP at every appointment. I have never wanted to do any of this blindly.

What I will and will not claim

My cortisol did come back. It was tested properly, with a stimulation test: they took my blood, gave me an injection that tells a working system to produce cortisol, and took my blood again after. Both readings were normal.

I am not going to tell you that what I ate repaired my pituitary gland. That is not a claim I can make, and I will not make it. But here is what I believe, strongly: nothing recovers while the thing that broke it is still running. If I had carried on the way I was going, the processed food, the refined sugar, the industrial oils, giving my body nothing to work with and no rest to do it in, I do not believe that gland would have come back at all. So I will not tell you I healed myself. What I will tell you is that I stopped standing in my body's way, and I gave it something to work with.

What I could already see

Everything on that list was one system under load. Not six separate problems in six separate departments. And I had spent years treating it as a behavior problem. I did not need better information. I am a nurse. I had the information. What I did not have was the order. It is the same thing I now call capacity before consistency: you cannot out-discipline a deficit that lives upstream of your discipline.

I want to end somewhere specific, and it is not with a plan. Because a plan is exactly what was handed to me, over and over, and then it is what I handed to myself. Somebody gives you the right information at a moment when your body is in no condition to use it, and when it does not work, the conclusion everybody reaches, including you, is that the problem is you.

"The plan was not too hard for you. It was in the wrong order for the state your body was in. You did not fail four times. You started in the wrong place, four times."

I have spent 20 years explaining bodies to people on some of the worst days of their lives, and I could not do it for myself. Not because I did not know enough, but because I kept handing my own body instructions it was in no condition to follow. If that is you, you are not behind. You are starting in the wrong place. Health under real life pressure: slowly, honestly, and realistically.