📚 Tired As F*ck Book Club - Week 6
- May 19
- 7 min read
Week 6 (May 4 – 10)
📖 How to Become a French Woman → How to Figure Out What’s Depleting You (p. 164–221)
Delayed (again 😅), so thank you for your patience — Week 6 recap!And as always, thanks for being here 💛
🥖 How to Become a French Woman
**Trigger warning around her recounting of the pursuit of thinness / ongoing deeply ingrained anti-fat bias and fatphobia.
She describes being very tired and ill (including getting mono because her immune system was susceptible), and honestly… she doesn’t do a very good job connecting this directly to the amount of restriction she was engaging in, which feels very obvious to me as a reader.
Of course she was experiencing a deep fatigue that couldn’t be solved with “rest.”
She also fails to connect:
her high overall anxiety with ongoing chronic restriction
how alcohol consumption also increases anxiety
and how severe restriction was very likely the reason she “couldn’t handle alcohol” the way others her age could
She also hints at another major problem with many self-help books:
👉 writers drinking the diet culture Kool-Aid and often talk about “food addiction” and “emotional eating” without actually understanding nutrition science, how starvation affects the brain and body and they generally don't understand anti-fat bias yet speak and write from a place of false authority all the while recommending habits that promote and reinforce disordered eating, eating disorders, and anti fat bias.... [ugh 😑 ]
Also, a hill I will continue to die on:
So much “food noise” and “emotional eating” gets blamed on unresolved emotions without actually looking at the science and evidence around under-eating and restriction. So, people end up selling programs to help folks “stop eating sugar,” as if sugar itself is the problem.
Trying to co-opt emotional processing in order to increase restriction also doesn’t work and isn’t “mindful” or “intuitive” eating. [again, ugh 😑 ]
💻 How to Become Rich on the Internet
Kind of a blah chapter 😅
Easily skippable.
🦴 How to Eat Like a Cavewoman
The opening sentence:
“I wasn't feeling great. I'd been tired and unmotivated and panicky for a whole year.” (p.176)
*cough 👀 restriction*
…this sentence is honestly such a good summary of what it feels like to exist in the world while not eating enough.
I would say this chapter could be very triggering for folks with a history of eating disorders or disordered eating. She goes into a fairly descriptive account of her experience with the Paleo Diet... While she definitely does not endorse the Paleo diet as healthy, I still think reading detailed descriptions of those thought processes and behaviours could be activating for some people.
I am glad she starts to notice the possibility that:
👉 maybe avoiding carbs and chronic dieting are actually harming her health
…instead of assuming the problem is simply what or how much she is eating.
Also: not everyone who is under-eating and underweight loses their period, but the fact that she describes losing hers definitely confirms that she was under-eating and underweight for her body’s needs/genetic set point.
🍽️ How to Stop Dieting
Best line in this chapter:
“Dieting is a flawed concept. You can’t heal binges by cutting out food. Weight loss isn't going to heal you.” (p.183)
And this one too:
“Dieting has done nothing but make me exhausted, hungry, obsessed with food and hate myself.”
Yep.
🧪 How to Rule Out Every Miracle Cure
No particularly standout commentary around diet culture here.
Overall: kind of a “meh” chapter for me.
📚 How to Heal Your Creative Soul
This chapter recommends Fearing the Black Body — a book that gets recommended over and over again in conversations around body image and anti-fat bias/fatphobia.
If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. I’d also happily consider it as a future book club pick if there’s enough interest 👀
There are a few other book recommendations in this chapter too. I don’t personally agree with her high praise of Health at Every Size by Lindo Bacon — it is very important the book should not be confused with Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) and the actual HAES® principles themselves.
This line also stood out to me:
“It never seemed like my problem was restricting, it seemed like my problem was binging.” (p.193)
🔄 Side Quest / Story Time
At work recently, I was complaining that a youth who is currently restricting food—and has a significant history of restriction—is not required to eat before their morning stimulant med dose. AND that they were prescribed the stimulant before receiving support to eat adequately every day… despite the fact that restriction impacts functioning in ways that can look identical to the symptoms used to diagnose ADHD.
Most mental health professionals (counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors) receive little to no training in eating disorders or the effects of under-eating on the brain and nervous system.
So these medical decisions get made, and honestly, I continue to find it incredibly frustrating and upsetting.
And as a lowly casual counsellor in a hospital system, I have very little ability to advocate for more evidence-based care (though I do try) One of the last times I tried to give suggestions on how to implement evidenced based care for eating disorders, I was severely reprimanded by my manager 🙃 and as one might be able to guess, clinical outcomes were not great...
ANYWAYS.
After talking with a nurse (who agreed with my concerns), about how completing something with calories needs to happen pre stimulant med, he then asked me about GLP-1s because people seem to assume that being an eating disorder therapist means all my clients are on GLP-1s or want to be... (& for clarification: no eating disorder client I've ever worked with are on GLP-1s for weight loss, though maybe it will come up at some point in the future... the bigger point is, eating disorders are illnesses that don't typically follow the trending diet of the day, though engaging in dieting does of course increase risk of developing and ED) ... I digress... back to the story...
This GLP1 convo led into a conversation about binge eating and binge eating disorder… and I found myself saying something I say all the time:
👉 I have never met someone struggling with binge eating where restriction wasn’t a primary driving issue.
It’s stigma, judgment, and anti-fat bias that lead people to believe the “problem” is their binging, instead of noticing and addressing the problematic the restriction underneath it all.
And honestly, many clients in the binge eating groups I used to run also didn’t initially understand how skipping breakfast and/or lunch (restriction) was one of the main maintaining factors driving binge eating.
Not chips in the house.
Not fast food.
Not lack of willpower.
Restriction.
Mental and/or physical restriction.
And we cannot resolve binge eating without addressing the restriction mindset and behaviours driving it.
Ok, off my soap box... back to the book... 📖
☎️ How to Be a Receptionist Who’s Afraid of the Phone
In this chapter she talks about always being hungry at night — which is honestly a great sign that she was not eating enough during the day, probably most days.
It’s also good to hear her talk about gradually allowing different foods back in and working through fears around food.
I also agreed with a lot of her commentary around:
social media
comparison
pressure around careers and “success”
Most youth I’ve worked with feel an immense amount of pressure to know exactly who they are and what they want to do by the time they finish high school, which is honestly WILD. That pressure is so pervasive and normalized in our culture, and its not ok.
For anyone who needs to hear this: You can change your mind about any and all aspects of your life at anytime and at any age, you are not "behind"
🌊 How to Feel
Main takeaway here:
👉 please get professional support for healing trauma and eating disorders
👉 and please keep trying different providers until you find people who actually feel like a good fit.
Relationship and connection make up a huge portion of therapeutic outcomes.
Some books quotes that stood out:
“I noticed I wasn't thinking about my body anymore. It took a long time to notice, because it's hard to notice what you aren't doing anymore.” (p.210)
That really captures one of the strange and beautiful parts of healing your relationship with food and your body --- it is geniuinely hard to notice when the thoughts, feelings and or physical symptoms of pain are less or gone.
I liked this quote too:
“Everything I did in my pursuit of healing was actually a way to avoid the discomfort of having emotions and being alive. But in order to emotionally heal and process trauma, we have to be willing to pause, breathe and feel. We have to come back into our bodies and feel what's there, waiting to be felt.” (p.211)
And also please remember:
✨ professional support exists
✨ community exists
✨ you do not have to do this alone
In fact, I really don’t recommend trying to do it alone.
⚡ How to Be Extreme About Everything
From everything I’ve read so far… this author definitely leans toward extremes 😅
At times what she says feels grounded and important.And at other times… she wanders way into the extreme.
🧹 How to Figure Out What’s Depleting You
This chapter touches on burnout, over-functioning, and continuing to force yourself down a path that doesn’t actually fit you anymore (or maybe never did)
There’s something really sad and relatable about pushing yourself to keep going simply because you think you’re supposed to.
She also references The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up — which I’ve also read and mostly enjoyed. And honestly, I don’t think that book is really about minimalism.
To me, it’s more about:
letting go
trusting that it’s safe to release things you no longer need
creating more space
allowing less
Less pressure. Less obligation. Less clutter. More permission to rest.
✨ Week 6 Wrap-Up
This week's pages felt tough at times in terms of seeing the long-term impact of chronic restriction, anxiety, perfectionism, and unresolved trauma.
And underneath so many of these chapters is the same thread:
👉 trying to control ourselves harder is not what heals us.
Support, nourishment, rest, safety, connection, flexibility… those are the things that actually move people toward healing.
📖 UP NEXT — Final Week!
(Coming soon-ish… as I’m typing this and realizing it’s already May 18 😅)
Week 7 (May 11 – 17)
→ How to Figure Out if You’re Allowed to Be Tired → How to Live (p. 222–end) 🎉
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