20: Jane McGuinness in the hot seat

Jane is a Registered Clinical Counsellor and mother of three fearless young Australians. North Vancouver has been home for twelve years now as this Aussie expat traded the heat for the rain. Her own therapy consists of escaping to the mountains whenever possible to hike or bike with her trademark enthusiasm for life. This recovering emotional eater advocates acceptance, gratitude, and kindness above all else, and maintains that a day without laughter is a day wasted. Always Hungry: How I Lost the Weight and Found Myself is Jane’s first book.

As a published author, registered psychotherapist, and mother to three young adults, I was compelled to share this story of my path to health in my first book as I recovered from an emotional eating disorder. By cutting through the diet culture nonsense and healing emotionally from the grip of disordered eating, I have lost and maintained a 103lb weight loss for one decade now.

The rudeness and cruelty that I often experienced when in a larger body speaks to deeply entrenched biases in society that continue today. The world is kind to me now and it’s for all the wrong reasons. Kind because as a slim white woman, I am the cultural ideal. It’s abhorrent.

I am also an outlier. Most people don’t sustain significant weight loss for a decade—I have, and dearly wish to share (with humility) what I have learnt. What I’ve learnt about how to lose the weight without ridiculous, often extreme medical interventions and the latest crash diet (that usually results in nothing more than rapid weight loss and subsequent regain). This is also a story of healing from the inside out. Through interoceptive awareness, through deep excavation to the core of my emotional eating disorder, I found peace.

Rare is the person who doesn’t have a complex, sometimes disordered relationship with food. If any of this resonates, then perhaps you’ll find my book helpful in some small way. I hope so.

This story is also told with riotous humour. Divorce, dating, and parenting feature heavily in my first book, and Lord knows humour was required to navigate all three.

Jane McGuinness's Website