Momina Munir on losing 22 kgs and finding herself again

The gap year that wasn’t really a gap

The episode opens with Muzamil noting something he had been watching from the outside for a while. He had seen Momina Munir go quiet — no content for a long stretch, a meeting in 2019 where she seemed confused about where she was headed, and then a kind of disappearance. “I remember us meeting in 2019 and you being confused,” Muzamil says, “and then it was about taking the year off and not doing content.”

What followed wasn’t a clean sabbatical. It was a period of grief, physical deterioration, and slow reconstruction. Momina is candid about this from the start. The gap year wasn’t a strategic pause. It was a response to circumstances she hadn’t chosen.

Losing a best friend, losing 22 kgs

The most striking disclosure in the conversation comes early. Momina describes losing her best friend — not a falling out, but a loss — and the way that grief moved through her body. “I lost 22 kgs randomly — not randomly, obviously. I was not eating.” She is careful to clarify: “When I say random I mean it’s natural weight loss. I didn’t do exercises. I didn’t diet.”

The weight loss became a signal. She started to recognise that something was wrong at a level she couldn’t manage alone. “I started to realise I am going through something. You’re mentally very weak and you need to change that.”

This is the moment the gap year became intentional. She decided not to push through university applications that year. A person close to her — she refers to him as someone who truly cared — told her she had already achieved more than most of the students she was comparing herself to. That reframing gave her permission to stop.

The introvert who thought she was an extrovert

One of the more psychologically interesting threads in the conversation is Momina’s account of how she processes emotion. She describes herself as someone who used to identify as extroverted, then came to understand something more complicated about herself.

“I used to call myself an extroverted person for the longest time,” she says, “and then I realised that I’m actually an introvert who’s very emotional, who really sort of dives deep into his emotions and thoughts if he’s alone.”

Her coping mechanism during hard times was to surround herself with people — not to share what she was going through, but to avoid being alone with it. She kept her personal struggles private even in company. Muzamil recognises the pattern immediately and says he does the same thing: “I’m much more vulnerable in very silly things.”

Both of them land on a similar conclusion — that being able to manage your own emotions without broadcasting them is a form of emotional intelligence, not suppression. “I feel like it’s emotional intelligence, to be very honest,” Momina says, “to be able to know that I can deal with my emotions myself and I don’t need to put them out there in front of other people.”

Kickboxing as the first step back

The return didn’t start with content. It started with the body. Two close friends — Momina names them as Emma and Charity — recognised that she needed to get her physical foundation back before anything else. “They were like, let’s go kickboxing. Get yourself back into your physique.”

She got a trainer. She started showing up. The discipline of something new every day — a skill that required presence and attention — gave her a structure that the gap year had been missing. Without a school routine, she had found it nearly impossible to build her own. Kickboxing gave her an anchor.

Muzamil reflects on this phase with some honesty of his own. He tells Momina that during the period she wasn’t making content, he was quietly frustrated — not at her, but because he could see what she was capable of. “I’ll be very honest — last year I was a little disappointed when you weren’t doing content. I know. And if you ask Hamnah, she can tell you how many times I was like, yeah, like what’s going on.”

The university question, still open

Later in the discussion, Muzamil returns to the question of where Momina is headed academically. She is 20, still on a gap year, and has applied to universities again — including reapplying for A-levels, which she explains is partly emotional. She had friends at a particular institution, and the connection to that place is hard to reason away.

Her A-level grades were not strong enough the first time. She is matter-of-fact about this. Chemistry was the problem. The predicted grades during COVID were handled by an algorithm she had no control over, and she watched friends from other schools receive better outcomes.

What’s interesting is how she frames the value of university itself. It isn’t primarily about the degree. “Exposure — that’s all university gives besides knowledge. It is just exposure.” She talks about professors the way she talks about mentors. She talks about networking as the real output. Muzamil pushes back gently — at the point she’s at, he doesn’t think she needs a degree to fall back on. But he acknowledges it’s a personal decision.

The conversation also touches on what she might have studied. Psychology comes up first. Then sociology, economics, politics, English, medicine. Muzamil suggests online courses as a way to explore without committing. She agrees in principle but hasn’t acted on it yet.

Coming back to YouTube — and what that actually means

By the time the conversation turns to content, Momina has a clearer sense of what went wrong before. She describes the feeling of putting out the same content repeatedly — vlogs, challenges, sit-down videos — and hitting a wall. “I feel like you keep on putting out the same content.”

She references a conversation she had with Irfan Junejo’s wife, which shifted something for her. The message was simple: you have to set challenges for yourself to grow, or the work becomes mechanical. Momina had been in a phase where she couldn’t act on that advice. But she had kept making content privately — recording carpool sessions with friends, editing them, uploading to a private Instagram account just for herself. “I was editing throughout the whole period. I was making content throughout. But I was not uploading.”

That private practice kept the muscle alive. Now she is returning to vlogs, daily life content, the things she actually enjoyed making. She is also building a small team — people she refers to, with some awkwardness, as employees. “Should I call them my employees? They are my employees technically. It just feels so weird.”

Muzamil notes that she has been filming on her phone and editing on her phone — no laptop, no professional setup — with over 150,000 subscribers. He calls it impressive. She seems unbothered by it.

Pakistan, the internet, and the experimental generation

The final stretch of the conversation moves outward. Muzamil asks Momina how she sees Pakistan evolving over the next thirty years — a question he says he puts to every guest. She is 20 now. At 50, she will be in a position of influence within her own context.

Her answer is grounded and honest. She acknowledges the bubble she operates in — good education, good networking, access to the internet. She doesn’t pretend that her experience is representative. But she is optimistic about what the internet is doing to Pakistani consciousness, particularly through platforms like TikTok, which she sees as genuinely connecting the masses to the wider world. “TikTok — what it’s doing to inculcate consumerism, growth — everyone gets a chance.”

She also makes a point about the generational shift. Her generation, she says, has seen the extremist sides of Pakistani society and is trying to find a middle ground. The internet broke a certain complacency. “We are the experimental generation,” she says. “Ignorance is bliss — but now they’re like, hey, listen, I reject this.”

Muzamil adds that what really changed Pakistan was the media, the internet, and the consciousness that came with it — the awareness that things could be different. Both of them are careful not to be naive about it. There are provinces and regions where internet access is still limited, where the shift hasn’t arrived yet. But the direction, they agree, is toward more connection, more awareness, and — hopefully — more ground between the extremes.

The episode closes with Muzamil thanking Momina for coming on. It is a conversation that started with a trip to the northern areas and ended somewhere much more interior — a portrait of a young creator who went quiet not because she stopped caring, but because she had to.