This gave me the incentive to return to school and earn my degree as a health practitioner. During this same period, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I started investigating the correlation between diet and healing. In my thirties when my son was two years old, I realized that inspiring other moms to make healthier food choices for their children and teaching them to cook was more than a hobby-it was my true passion. I coauthored the popular book The Twelve Step Plan to Becoming an Actor in L.A., which became a regional bestseller. Growing up, I was also involved in show business, first as an actress, then as a producer and writer. Fueling my passion was my mentor, my grandmother Beauty, who inspired me as a child to learn how to cook and taught me about the power of healing through fresh ingredients. I became fascinated with the correlation be- tween what we eat and how we feel. My interest in healthy eating began at an early age, as I watched my obese father struggle with yoyo dieting and fluctuating weight.

I am a board-certified nutrition expert and contributor to the New York Times Well Blog, as well as the founder of Magnificent Mommies, a company specializing in personal, corporate, and school-based education. Humorous and compassionate, this memoir is an ode to the incomparable satisfaction that comes with feeding the ones you love. In My Fat Dad, Dawn reflects on her colorful family and culinary-centric upbringing, and how food shaped her connection to her family, her Jewish heritage, and herself. She continued to cultivate Dawn’s love of wholesome food, and ultimately taught her how to make her own way in the world-one recipe at a time. Even after Dawn’s father took a prestigious ad job in New York City and moved the family away, Beauty would send a card from Chicago every week-with a recipe, a shopping list, and a twenty-dollar bill. Those days spent with Beauty, learning to cook, breathing in the scents of fresh dill or sharing the comfort of a warm pot of chicken soup, made it all bearable.

It was chaotic and lonely, but Dawn had someone she could turn her grandmother Beauty. She was too busy ferrying her other daughter to acting auditions and scolding Dawn for cleaning the house (“Whom are you trying to impress?”).

Dawn’s mother, on the other hand, could barely be bothered to eat a can of tuna over the sink. She craved good food as her father, 450 pounds at his heaviest, pursued endless fad diets, from Atkins to Pritikin to all sorts of freeze-dried, saccharin-laced concoctions, and insisted the family do the same-even though no one else was overweight. From the author of the New York Times Well Blog series, My Fat DadĮvery story and every memory from my childhood is attached to food …ĭawn Lerman spent her childhood constantly hungry.

My dad is fat book