Hi

As you might have figured out, my name is Liane Shaw.  I’ve been a mom and a teacher for the past twenty-five years and now I guess I’m an author too.  As the mom of two young adult daughters, I’m constantly aware of the bombardment of pressures for young women to be increasingly thin and beautiful in our society today.

Bonjour

Comme vous avez deviné probablement, mon nom est Liane Shaw et je suis passionné pour avoir mon livre traduit dans français.   Je ne suis pas entièrement bilingue mais je ferai mon meilleur fort pour augmenter le contenu français sur mon blog.  J’obtiens quelque aide avec les traductions écrites, donc s’il vous plaît me pardonner s’il y a quelques erreurs. ..and ne se gêne pas me corriger !  Je prends un cours français pour améliorer ma communication donc j’apprécie n’importe quelle aide que j’obtiens.

When I was a young teenager,  for all kinds of complicated reasons, I developed an eating disorder.   At the time, very little was known about such things.  We had touched on it just a little in health class but it wasn’t something that was talked about in the media and certainly wasn’t something that everyone in my life knew about.  I became increasingly obssessed with my weight and increasingly convinced that I was obese in spite of the fact that everyone around me was starting to worry about how thin I was.  It got to the point where my family doctor threatened to hospitalize me if I lost five more pounds.  I bottomed out at around 87 pounds before I started to slowy, slowly crawl my way out of a very deep hole. 

I won’t go into the details of my recovery.  Everyone’s experience is different.  Suffice it to say, it was lengthy and the struggle continues to this day to remember to be thankful for a strong healthy body.

As my girls entered into the treacherous territory of teen life, I couldn’t help but worry about the influence of our modern world’s overwhelming obssession with the desire to be thin.  While there are all kinds of complex reasons that contribute to the development of an eating disorder, it was hard to keep myself from being concerned that one or both of my daughters might follow in my path.  When my youngest daughter was in her mid teens, to my eyes she was absolutely perfect.  In fact, her body was the one that I was trying so hard to create for myself in my own youth.   She didn’t see it that way though.  She started a diet and became thin to the point where I got scared.  Luckily for us both, she caught herself before she went too far down…although she still worries too much about her weight for my liking. 

The novel, thinandbeautiful.com, grew out of my concerns over my children and my own need to sort out my feelings about body image….my own, my daughters’, my students’…everyone’s.   While first trying to get my thoughts down, I starting researching eating disorders and ended up accidentally on pro-ana and thinspiration sites.   Seeing as I am not exactly a computer wiz…just ask my former students…it was ridiculously easy to find these sites and this scared me on every level.   While I totally understand the need to have support and understanding from your peers, it seemed that some of these sites were actually promoting eating disorders…calling them lifestyle choices and providing advice on how to lose more weight from already emaciated bodies.   I wondered what affect that kind of thing would have had on me back in the days when I was the only one I knew of that was weird enough to be starving myself.  If I had people encouraging me and telling me about better ways to starve myself, would I even be here now?   I could only imagine the devastating affect these sites could be having on the vulnerable young people who were so used to believing what they read on the internet in this technological society of ours.

The story of Maddie evolved out of all of these things.  It is a novel and as such, is fictional.   However, I did a great deal of research into the field of eating disorders to ensure that |I didn’t misrepresent this serious topic, along with consulting with educational professionals and psychologists regarding the possible impact of the novel on young people, always a concern with novels on teen issue topics.

 Some of the incidents are based on real life.  All of the emotions are based on real feelings.  I am not a doctor or a psychologist and cannot in any way, shape or form pretend to be an expert on eating disorders.   I have created resource pages and links on this site to present the factual information and expert opinions and will continue to add to this as time goes on.

I am a mom, a teacher and a woman though and perhaps that makes me a bit of an expert in trying to find my way to a positive body image in a world that seems determined to make that our toughest challenge.