About me

Mariana den Hollander Miranda was born in San José, Costa Rica, and as she calls herself, she is a hybrid between her homeland and the Netherlands. She studied Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague and since childhood, she has lived in different countries around the world. For four years, she dedicated to giving workshops in Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain and the Netherlands to learn how to do "The Work" of Byron Katie: group workshops where people worked on their different issues and sought to understand them through this questioning technique. She was also on the staff of multiple Byron Katie Nine Day Schools.

She currently resides in Belgium, where dedicates to body diversity and anti-fatphobia activism, as well as raising awareness about bariatric surgery. She also focuses on textile art & design and she recently started a Bachelor's degree in Textile Art at the Anderlecht Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels.

Mariana admits that since she read The Diary of Anne Frank at the age of eleven, she understood that humans have one voice no matter our nationality, age, or gender. She is also passionate about human relationships and how they can be the source of our deepest joy or our deepest pain. Through writing, she finds a way to share her insights or “tips” on how to navigate the sometimes tempestuous waters of life.

The Heaviest Weight is her first book, originally published in Barcelona in 2007 by Aurea Editores, which has been published in its third edition in October of 2020 in Spanish. In November of 2020, it was published in English for the first time.

The Heaviest Surgery is her second book, to be published in June 2021. This book was born unexpectedly after realizing that there is a normalized silence about the long-term side effects of bariatric surgeries and a myriad of bariatric patients around the world who are not getting answers about their health.

Mariana is currently writing the continuation of The Heaviest Weight in a new book that will be published in 2021 and that intends to tell how by publishing the first book in its third edition in 2020, she realized the existence of a whole movement of body liberation & Health at Every Size® completely unknown to her; and how the community of her Instagram accounts (@marianadenhollander_books in English and @marianadenhollander_libros in Spanish) revolutionized her life and her emotional processes.