Going to the Fat Farm With Dad

Dawn Lerman and her younger sister spent the summer of 1974 at a “fat farm” with their overweight father.

My dad was a brilliant ad man in the “Mad Men” era, responsible for such iconic slogans as “Coke Is It,” “Leggo My Eggo,” and “Fly the Friendly Skies of United.” He also was extremely overweight.

When I was 10, he got his big career break as the international creative director at a top ad firm in New York City. The only wrinkle was his weight. His appearance was not what the agency wanted to project, especially since he would be working on high-profile glamorous accounts.

His bosses sent him on a six-month paid medical leave to Duke University’s “fat farm,” where he was expected to drop a significant amount of weight. He left in March, and when summer break hit, we flew down to Durham, N.C., to join him. Family members were expected to be supportive, which meant my mother, my younger sister, April, and I would be eating in the dining room with my father and the other dieters, even though none of us were overweight.

By the time we arrived, we had not seen my dad for several months, and we were amazed to see he had lost close to 100 pounds. He said he thought about food all the time but felt great. I remember feeling relieved that maybe traveling with him now wouldn’t be so difficult. He normally took up two seats on an airplane or a bus. He definitely looked as if now he could fit in one seat.

He appeared healthy, happy and tan, and was swimming and writing his award-winning slogans from the pool. It looked like he was having a ball. His fellow dieters included a who’s who of comedians, actors and bigwig business people. They were bopping around in the pool and visiting the local malls where they walked laps wearing pedometers. Nighttime felt a little more desperate, as the dieters looked for amusing ways to avoid thinking about their growling stomachs. I remember one comedian swapping apple juice for urine in the specimen containers that were required to be left outside the door at night.

It was the fanciest place my sister and I had ever stayed. Every meal was a special occasion. Three times a day, people dressed as if they were going to an event. My sister and I just wore sundresses and sandals, since they were a little lax on the dress code with children, but there were no exceptions to the menu. We ate the same meal as everyone else. Breakfast was a bowl of white rice with either a piece of canned peach or pineapple. With lunch came a bowl of white rice with three ounces of dry chicken and a little bit of stewed tomatoes. Dinner consisted of — you guessed it — white rice and three ounces of fish with no seasoning.

The white rice gave me a stomachache, but I quite liked the plain fish and chicken. It was a low-sodium, low-fat diet. Nothing had salt or oil, and it made a huge difference in my health. Whenever I ate something salty, I swelled up. “I’m dizzy and my toes are popping out of my shoes,” I would tell my mother. But she was skeptical. “You’re being picky,” she would say. Maybe she didn’t want to change our meals at home, which mainly consisted of salty prepackaged frozen foods or greasy fast food.

But at Duke, I talked to a dietitian about my strange symptoms and she diagnosed my iodine sensitivity. I have never added salt to my food since.

Although I was fine with the strict fat-farm food, my mother and my sister were getting sick of it. Once a week we went off campus to a restaurant that Duke University had approved. I remember my father putting some kind of weird stick in his soda to make sure it was really a diet soda. The stick turned colors if the beverage contained sugar. I remember one meal when we ordered grilled mushrooms and grilled white fish. It was the best meal my family ever had together, then and now.

There are two things I remember most about my month on the fat farm: the validation and relief I felt when the dietitian diagnosed my problems with salt, and the experience of sitting down to three meals a day with both of my parents at a table. That had never happened before.

When we came back from the fat farm, my mother was horrified to learn she had gained 10 pounds. She immediately went back to her usual pattern of eating one small meal a day while talking on the phone and pursuing acting jobs. Although my father’s weight eventually crept back on, he learned some healthy eating habits that he was able to maintain for a while, and for the first time in his life, he was able to shop in a regular department store.

My sister and I started a new school year with lots of stories to share and a new appreciation for what was missing from our lives. We pinky-swore that when we were grown-ups, we always would eat with our children — seated at the table.

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father will appear on occasional Fridays on Well in June and July.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/going-to-the-fat-farm-with-dad/

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Going to the Fat Farm With Dad

Dawn Lerman and her younger sister spent the summer of 1974 at a “fat farm” with their overweight father.

My dad was a brilliant ad man in the “Mad Men” era, responsible for such iconic slogans as “Coke Is It,” “Leggo My Eggo,” and “Fly the Friendly Skies of United.” He also was extremely overweight.

When I was 10, he got his big career break as the international creative director at a top ad firm in New York City. The only wrinkle was his weight. His appearance was not what the agency wanted to project, especially since he would be working on high-profile glamorous accounts.

His bosses sent him on a six-month paid medical leave to Duke University’s “fat farm,” where he was expected to drop a significant amount of weight. He left in March, and when summer break hit, we flew down to Durham, N.C., to join him. Family members were expected to be supportive, which meant my mother, my younger sister, April, and I would be eating in the dining room with my father and the other dieters, even though none of us were overweight.

By the time we arrived, we had not seen my dad for several months, and we were amazed to see he had lost close to 100 pounds. He said he thought about food all the time but felt great. I remember feeling relieved that maybe traveling with him now wouldn’t be so difficult. He normally took up two seats on an airplane or a bus. He definitely looked as if now he could fit in one seat.

He appeared healthy, happy and tan, and was swimming and writing his award-winning slogans from the pool. It looked like he was having a ball. His fellow dieters included a who’s who of comedians, actors and bigwig business people. They were bopping around in the pool and visiting the local malls where they walked laps wearing pedometers. Nighttime felt a little more desperate, as the dieters looked for amusing ways to avoid thinking about their growling stomachs. I remember one comedian swapping apple juice for urine in the specimen containers that were required to be left outside the door at night.

It was the fanciest place my sister and I had ever stayed. Every meal was a special occasion. Three times a day, people dressed as if they were going to an event. My sister and I just wore sundresses and sandals, since they were a little lax on the dress code with children, but there were no exceptions to the menu. We ate the same meal as everyone else. Breakfast was a bowl of white rice with either a piece of canned peach or pineapple. With lunch came a bowl of white rice with three ounces of dry chicken and a little bit of stewed tomatoes. Dinner consisted of — you guessed it — white rice and three ounces of fish with no seasoning.

The white rice gave me a stomachache, but I quite liked the plain fish and chicken. It was a low-sodium, low-fat diet. Nothing had salt or oil, and it made a huge difference in my health. Whenever I ate something salty, I swelled up. “I’m dizzy and my toes are popping out of my shoes,” I would tell my mother. But she was skeptical. “You’re being picky,” she would say. Maybe she didn’t want to change our meals at home, which mainly consisted of salty prepackaged frozen foods or greasy fast food.

But at Duke, I talked to a dietitian about my strange symptoms and she diagnosed my iodine sensitivity. I have never added salt to my food since.

Although I was fine with the strict fat-farm food, my mother and my sister were getting sick of it. Once a week we went off campus to a restaurant that Duke University had approved. I remember my father putting some kind of weird stick in his soda to make sure it was really a diet soda. The stick turned colors if the beverage contained sugar. I remember one meal when we ordered grilled mushrooms and grilled white fish. It was the best meal my family ever had together, then and now.

There are two things I remember most about my month on the fat farm: the validation and relief I felt when the dietitian diagnosed my problems with salt, and the experience of sitting down to three meals a day with both of my parents at a table. That had never happened before.

When we came back from the fat farm, my mother was horrified to learn she had gained 10 pounds. She immediately went back to her usual pattern of eating one small meal a day while talking on the phone and pursuing acting jobs. Although my father’s weight eventually crept back on, he learned some healthy eating habits that he was able to maintain for a while, and for the first time in his life, he was able to shop in a regular department store.

My sister and I started a new school year with lots of stories to share and a new appreciation for what was missing from our lives. We pinky-swore that when we were grown-ups, we always would eat with our children — seated at the table.

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father will appear on occasional Fridays on Well in June and July.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/going-to-the-fat-farm-with-dad/

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Well: Going to the Fat Farm With Dad

Dawn Lerman and her younger sister spent the summer of 1974 at a “fat farm” with their overweight father.

My dad was a brilliant ad man in the “Mad Men” era, responsible for such iconic slogans as “Coke Is It,” “Leggo My Eggo,” and “Fly the Friendly Skies of United.” He also was extremely overweight.

When I was 10, he got his big career break as the international creative director at a top ad firm in New York City. The only wrinkle was his weight. His appearance was not what the agency wanted to project, especially since he would be working on high-profile glamorous accounts.

His bosses sent him on a six-month paid medical leave to Duke University’s “fat farm,” where he was expected to drop a significant amount of weight. He left in March, and when summer break hit, we flew down to Durham, N.C., to join him. Family members were expected to be supportive, which meant my mother, my younger sister, April, and I would be eating in the dining room with my father and the other dieters, even though none of us were overweight.

By the time we arrived, we had not seen my dad for several months, and we were amazed to see he had lost close to 100 pounds. He said he thought about food all the time but felt great. I remember feeling relieved that maybe traveling with him now wouldn’t be so difficult. He normally took up two seats on an airplane or a bus. He definitely looked as if now he could fit in one seat.

He appeared healthy, happy and tan, and was swimming and writing his award-winning slogans from the pool. It looked like he was having a ball. His fellow dieters included a who’s who of comedians, actors and bigwig business people. They were bopping around in the pool and visiting the local malls where they walked laps wearing pedometers. Nighttime felt a little more desperate, as the dieters looked for amusing ways to avoid thinking about their growling stomachs. I remember one comedian swapping apple juice for urine in the specimen containers that were required to be left outside the door at night.

It was the fanciest place my sister and I had ever stayed. Every meal was a special occasion. Three times a day, people dressed as if they were going to an event. My sister and I just wore sundresses and sandals, since they were a little lax on the dress code with children, but there were no exceptions to the menu. We ate the same meal as everyone else. Breakfast was a bowl of white rice with either a piece of canned peach or pineapple. With lunch came a bowl of white rice with three ounces of dry chicken and a little bit of stewed tomatoes. Dinner consisted of — you guessed it — white rice and three ounces of fish with no seasoning.

The white rice gave me a stomachache, but I quite liked the plain fish and chicken. It was a low-sodium, low-fat diet. Nothing had salt or oil, and it made a huge difference in my health. Whenever I ate something salty, I swelled up. “I’m dizzy and my toes are popping out of my shoes,” I would tell my mother. But she was skeptical. “You’re being picky,” she would say. Maybe she didn’t want to change our meals at home, which mainly consisted of salty prepackaged frozen foods or greasy fast food.

But at Duke, I talked to a dietitian about my strange symptoms and she diagnosed my iodine sensitivity. I have never added salt to my food since.

Although I was fine with the strict fat-farm food, my mother and my sister were getting sick of it. Once a week we went off campus to a restaurant that Duke University had approved. I remember my father putting some kind of weird stick in his soda to make sure it was really a diet soda. The stick turned colors if the beverage contained sugar. I remember one meal when we ordered grilled mushrooms and grilled white fish. It was the best meal my family ever had together, then and now.

There are two things I remember most about my month on the fat farm: the validation and relief I felt when the dietitian diagnosed my problems with salt, and the experience of sitting down to three meals a day with both of my parents at a table. That had never happened before.

When we came back from the fat farm, my mother was horrified to learn she had gained 10 pounds. She immediately went back to her usual pattern of eating one small meal a day while talking on the phone and pursuing acting jobs. Although my father’s weight eventually crept back on, he learned some healthy eating habits that he was able to maintain for a while, and for the first time in his life, he was able to shop in a regular department store.

My sister and I started a new school year with lots of stories to share and a new appreciation for what was missing from our lives. We pinky-swore that when we were grown-ups, we always would eat with our children — seated at the table.

Dawn Lerman is a New York-based health and nutrition consultant and founder of Magnificent Mommies, which provides school lectures, cooking classes and workshops. Her series on growing up with a fat father will appear on occasional Fridays on Well in June and July.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/going-to-the-fat-farm-with-dad/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Fat Betty Was Mad Men’s Most Genius Idea

Just when I was getting used to having that dreamy, complex bastard, Don Draper, back in my life, he’s gone again. I confess that when Mad Men finally returned, I was underwhelmed. It seemed slow; we had to put so many pieces back together after so long. It was like seeing your very best friends from high school 20 years later, then realizing that, once you got through the “Oh. My. God.” hello’s and hugfest, you didn’t have much to say to each other anymore because too much time had passed. Reworking the connections is taxing, and who needs that with a TV show?

Right out of the gate, the “Zou Bisou Bisou” debacle concerned me. I was worried that Megan and Don would turn into a cliched plot, another standard midlife-crisis-relationship-gone-wrong story with a predictable outcome. It turns out that their dysfunction transcends cliche. Thank god. I should know better than to expect cliche from the man who also helped birth Tony Soprano.

So, let’s discuss. I’ll tell you what I think, and then you clog up the comments section with what you think. Feel free to disagree. This is only one woman’s opinion.

1. I can’t be the only one who sees Tony Soprano in Don Draper. Though Don exists in a different walk of life, he’s a white-collar gangster. Are they not two of the most malignantly immoral protagonists in the history of protagonists? Sometimes they go into remission, but most of the time they’re terminally depraved. A very Sopranoesque sequence was when Don dismissively threw money in Peggy’s face and told her to go to Paris, even though she was the one who saved the account and deserved to go to Paris. An episode later she resigns, and he takes her hand and kisses it. Can anyone describe the kiss? My take: not exactly paternal, not exactly romantic, perhaps remorseful because he’s losing one of the few people who grounds him.

2. Cool Joan is a hot mess. There isn’t a bra with enough hooks to contain all of her new foibles. Awkward Moment of the Season Award is her staying in the partners’ meeting as a partner, not a secretary. Even the extraneous characters are impeccably played against her, like Herb, the hairy Jaguar douche. Couldn’t you feel his wormy fingers when he put the emerald necklace on her? Joan’s mother, also a peripheral character, is perfectly and superbly annoying and dumb. The placement of her in this season subtly reveals more about Joan; her mother is who Joan doesn’t want to become, a woman who depends on the attention of men for her survival.

3. Fat Betty was genius. She could have easily been written in as pregnant, since January Jones really was. Betty’s bossy husband, Henry, would be all for having her barefoot and tied down, but wasn’t it better to see her cheat on her cigarette diet and binge her way right under her covers?

4. Roger is supposed to be the cliche, and isn’t he the best? Only a man-hack like Roger could trip on acid and manipulate his wife at the same time. His interlude with Megan’s mother at the advertising awards dinner (as seen by Sally) is classic man whore. Can you think of a better-played player than Roger?

5. Sally under the settee. The best example yet of why the self-absorbed Drapers should’ve remained childless is their daughter snowed on sleeping pills and passed out under a piece of furniture. Poor Sally became a woman, just as she was learning that most of the adults in her life are crackpots.

6. Peter is a prick. This isn’t a revelation. He’s been an arrogant, condescending, frat boy since season one, but this season he’s outdone himself. It’s not just the pimping, the hookers, and his general failure to take responsibility for his my-life-isn’t-what-I-thought-it-would-be crisis, but the true declaration of his cowardice was when he left Lane’s body in the noose. Peter is best at making everything about him.

Sort of like the premiere, the finale was vague and loose, and I think this was intentional. Mad Men doesn’t subscribe to a formula plot that’s always leaving us on the edge of our seats. Instead, the story is told through finely nuanced characters and how they constantly grapple with their insecurities and disappointments with themselves and others.

What now on Sunday nights? Definitely not summer TV. I’d rather play Bananagrams with my dog.

Article source: http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2012/06/12/fat-betty-mad-mens-genius-idea/

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Fat Betty Draper Video Goes Viral

AMC’s madly addictive and popular show “Mad Men” has garnered attention for lots of things over the past few years; Don Draper’s double life has always been a topic of water-cooler conversation, as have the electric curves of actress Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan Holloway on the show. The episode in which an unfortunate client gets his foot sheared off by a wayward John Deere tractor–in the office, no less–is still regarded as one of the best moments in recent television.

But perhaps the breakout hit to come from this season–which is only four episodes in–is Fat Betty Draper, which has spawned a song that parodies “Black Betty” by Ram Jam. “Fat Betty” has gone viral and is interspersed with scenes from the episode which addresses Betty Draper’s trip to the doctor and subsequent cancer scare.

It may be the fact that Betty is notoriously self-absorbed that makes her weight gain such a wickedly gleeful moment for us “Mad Men” fans; I can’t help but recall a scene in the first season in which Sally, Betty and Don’s daughter, runs into the kitchen with a dry-cleaning bag over her head and Betty calls her over sternly. The viewer fully expects the kid to get reamed for being so careless with a dangerous plastic bag, but Betty surprises us.

“Sally Draper,” she says between puffs on her cigarette, “If the clothes from that dry cleaning bag are laying on the floor of my closet, you’re going to be a very sorry young lady.”

This negligent parenting moment seems to sum up Don’s ex-wife in a small, sad way, and it’s probably a factor in the sick satisfaction some fans got from seeing her get the news from her doctor that she was going to be okay.

“Nice to be put through the ringer,” she says to her husband, “And find out I’m just fat.”

Article source: http://www.webpronews.com/fat-betty-draper-video-goes-viral-2012-04

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