About Dishing With Your Daughter™

Dishing with Your Daughter is dedicated to shifting the way the next generation of girls (and current generation of women) experiences food, eating and body image…from deprivation, struggle and body-bashing to peace, nourishment and good health!

The Dishing With Your Daughter Manifesto

We believe in empowering moms to “be the change” they wish to see in their daughters (because our girls are looking to US to see how to live in – and feel about – a woman’s body; and let’s face it, you moms deserve to feel great too!)

We believe that food and eating should be NOURISHING and FUN, and that healthy eating is an act of self-love and self-care that can (and must!) be DELICIOUS.

We believe that well-nourished lives are the cornerstone of well-nourished bodies; and well-nourished, healthy bodies are the cornerstone of a well-nourished life.

We believe it is possible to change the consciousness of girls and women EVERYWHERE. And that this change will be led by mothers, healing their own relationships with food, body and themselves to create a different future for ALL of our daughters.

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About Karen

I’m a social worker, holistic health coach and a mom of two (a son and a daughter). I like to say that I’ve been a “food and eating expert” in an informal way, for almost 35 years.  When I was 13, my father, who was 46 at the time, had a heart attack. Not only was that one of the scariest moments of my life, but also one of the most transformative.  My father realized that his life was in his own hands and step by step, through food and lifestyle changes, he completely recovered his health (and I’m happy to report, is a happy, healthy, active 77-year-old now, who still works full-time, except when he’s busy traveling to exotic places with my mom).  This childhood experience taught me two major things:  1) that food has unbelievable power, both for healing and for harming, and 2) that we each have the power to change our own lives – and the only way to do so is to “just do it” and not wait around for it to magically get fixed.

Unfortunately, it took me about 10 more years to actually put these two lessons to good use. I first had to experience my own struggles in order to really “get it.”  My first diet started in seventh grade.  I followed in my mother’s – and my grandmother’s – footsteps. Dieting (and trying to get your body different) was just a thing women did. When my body started to change with puberty, I was not happy. I remember eating “energy bars” or salads for lunch, counting calories, and obsessively feeling my stomach for bulges.

This diet led into a full-fledged eating disorder by the time I was a sophomore in high school. I battled my body constantly and most of my energy was tied up in concerns about eating and my weight.  Finally, when I was 23 years old, I had an epiphany: The only way I was going to end my self-imposed torture was to “just do it” as I had learned from my father 10 years earlier. It was then that I realized that instead of making food and body my enemy, I had to befriend it.

I made a commitment to immerse myself in absolutely everything that had to do with developing a positive relationship to food and my body. I read every book I could find and worked with a wonderful therapist.  It was not easy and I often felt discouraged, but after a year, my life was completely different. After a few years, I was completely different!  I decided to become a clinical social worker so I could help people make gratifying changes in their lives, as I had done in mine.

Twelve years into my successful psychotherapy practice, I began to feel something was missing. I loved my clients and I loved my work, but I wasn’t using my knowledge of and passion for food and nutrition.  I had also had two children by this time, and I knew that I wanted them to grow up eating well, but not developing crazy habits and worries about food and their bodies as I had.  That is when I decided to go back to school and more formally study nutrition and holistic health.  Attending the Institute for Integrative Nutrition was life-changing and career-shifting.

Not long after, Dishing With Your Daughter was born. I focus on the mom-daughter relationship because I believe it’s one of the most valuable tools we have to create change in our girls. I know from my personal experience and from working with clients how important this relationship is.  We moms “get it” – we know, first hand, what it’s like to grow up female: to be bombarded with negative body image messages, to struggle with weight, or to feel “big” in our bodies but “small” in our lives. Our girls need us to show them another – better, easier – way. And we can.

PS: If you were hoping for more about my credentials, you can read my "just the facts" bio here.