Always Hungry

How I Lost the Weight and Found Myself

De: Jane McGuinness

Narrado por: Jane McGuinness

Raw and wickedly funny, this debut memoir details one woman’s recovery from her emotional eating disorder, while navigating divorce, discrimination, motherhood, and the madness that is Tinder dating.

A riot of dark humor beginning with Jane McGuinness’s dysfunctional childhood in outback Australia, Always Hungry explores themes of patriarchy and discrimination against the overweight as it details Jane’s recovery from an emotional eating disorder.

Jane’s journey to find herself is something of a curious social experiment: She walks away from her long-term marriage, returns to grad school while raising her three children in a foreign country, and gradually transforms her health. Listeners will find themselves amused and aghast in equal measure as she recounts her experiences hiking the Camino de Santiago through Spain, adventuring in Greece, and subjecting herself to the horrors of post-divorce Tinder dating in her dry, self-deprecating wit.

This debut memoir is truly a transformative journey in every sense, as Jane ultimately discovers that it was never food that she hungered for after all.

©2025 Jane McGuinness (P)2025 Jane McGuinness

Humor, Humility, and Honesty

Author Jane McGuinness’ story is uncomfortably close to the reality staring many of us straight in the face. Escape, boredom, relief, stress, and a myriad of things happening in our lives driving us to eat in disordered ways. Immediately relatable, her opening story allows readers to see a bit of themselves in Jane, at least that was the case for this reader.

You won’t find recipes and fitness tips amongst these pages, but you will find humor, humility, honesty, and a hunger to live a better life, as a healthier version of yourself. Whether a story about her trial of Botox, something that really does work, leaving her children worried she was having a ministroke, to her childhood in Broken Hill, Australia, Jane shares her story with a grace and acceptance that took more than a decade to embrace. Finally discovering it was time to be proud of the work she’s put in to losing weight, sharing the secrets she’s kept buried, and making peace with her past self. “Always Hungry” is at times a memoir and an exploration of weight loss.

Breathtakingly honest, “Always Hungry” features bold admissions and a revealing look at the hunger author Jane McGuinness found herself under, through the layers of weight. From a marriage she walked away from, to the mountains she now feels drawn to, Jane’s decade-long maintenance of weight loss defies the odds as she sheds the emotional layers she’s dug through to get here. Humor, raw emotion, and traumatic revelations make way for this beautiful memoir. Relatable and down to earth, Jane walks readers through her life, taking us on the jagged trails through the depths of her valleys and peaks as she pulls back the curtain and bares all in this exquisite look at her journey to health.

Authentic & Funny

Jane has put her heart and soul into this book. She reveals every part of her journey, the ups, the downs, with nothing left out. I recommend everybody give this a read. It will give you a variety of perspectives regarding what someone goes through!

A Candid, Hilarious, and Healing Memoir

If you’ve ever found yourself standing in front of the refrigerator at 10PM wondering how you got there—or if you’ve ever tried to outrun a feeling instead of dealing with it—this book is for you.

Always Hungry? isn’t just a memoir about weight loss. It’s a story about identity, shame, growth, and rediscovering your own worth. Jane McGuinness takes you into the trenches of emotional eating with twice the humor and about three times the vulnerability you expect in a book like this. What makes it so readable is that she never preaches. She just tells the truth—her truth—and invites you to look for yours along the way.

Jane shares “We eat from a thousand different hungers—and most of them aren’t about food.” That idea stuck with me. The weight isn’t just physical. It’s the anxiety. The shame. The stories we carry. Jane calls all of it out with the perfect balance of honesty and levity. Yes, there are some laugh-out-loud dating stories (and a Tinder saga that made me want to hug my wife for taking me off the market decades ago), but there are also deeply emotional moments of healing, self-confrontation, and finally choosing herself.

What I love most is that this isn’t a before-and-after makeover story. It’s a transformation from the inside out. Jane doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff—from divorce to motherhood to her experience as a therapist. She talks openly about “slim privilege,” the psychology of comfort eating, and why diets rarely work long-term. The real story isn’t losing the weight. It’s reclaiming your life.

As a reader, I couldn't help but feel writing this book aided in Jane's healing process and, because of that, the book becomes healing for the reader, too.

This is a memoir for anyone who has ever felt too much, eaten their feelings, believed they were broken, or started over when the world told them not to. Jane shows you that change doesn’t happen in a single moment—it happens over thousands of small choices.

Uplifting. Brave. FUNNY AS HELL. And full of the kind of insight that stays with you long after the last page.

Highly recommended.