Daphne Oz has been dishing out healthy living tips since she was a student at Princeton and writing her first book, “The Dorm Room Diet,” which brought wholesome eating to college campuses everywhere. Fast-forward to 2020 and she’s penned three bestselling cookbooks, won an Emmy, hosted hit television shows by the likes of “The Chew” and "Dish on Oz," and served as a “MasterChef Junior” judge.
But that’s just her day job. As a mother of four, she’s proven that you can have a very successful career and be a present mother, but as she’d say, “even on the most challenging days, you get to go to sleep and start fresh in the morning.” Ahead, Oz fills C&C in what it took to build her impressive career, how she navigates being a working mom, and why she believes that healthy eating should be a priority, not an obsession.
Take us back to the beginning—what was the lightbulb moment for your career in food and what inspired you to pursue this path? Did growing up with Dr. Oz as your dad, influence you to lead a healthy lifestyle?
Most people would probably have assumed growing up at Dr. Oz’s dinner table meant I only ever made excellent eating choices. The reality is, I was also the oldest child (and grandchild) in a giant family where cooking and eating together was our favorite way to bond, to share heritage, and to take good care of one another. I was always at my mother and grandmother’s elbows as they cooked, sneaking tastes, learning the recipes, listening in on the chatter; a busy, happy kitchen is still one of my favorite sounds in the world.
It took me a very long time to separate the joy I felt from being a part of this family communing from the need to be overindulging at every turn, and so I grew up the very overweight kid in a family full of health nuts. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to figure out ways to keep my love of cooking and eating and feeding without sacrificing my own health in the process. I ended up losing 40 pounds my freshman and sophomore years and published a book chronicling my healthy lifestyle called “The Dorm Room Diet.”
On book tour, as I was speaking to college students across the country about how they could seize this newfound freedom and responsibility to make amazing choices in their lives (and how prioritizing their own health would yield major rewards on many levels), I realized how much our eating really is a choice we make every day—and frequently, it’s a choice we make out of habit or desperation. My inspiration is always the way our grandmothers did things efficiently, beautifully in balance.
Real food has to nurture and nourish us, and that means there has to be room for indulgence and room to make health a priority and not an obsession. I love being able to offer people recipes that get them excited to sit down, enjoy, and feed themselves emotionally and physically—and to feel the incredible confidence of putting a gorgeous meal down on the table! The kitchen should be your kingdom, with total freedom to explore and create and reward yourself and the people you love.
You have a unique approach to food and eating that is more about making choices and allowing yourself to indulge “just enough.” Can you share your food philosophy with us and how it’s been the foundation of your career in the industry?
I think it took people a while to understand why I wasn’t happy just to be defined as “the healthy one.” It felt extremely limiting, not because I wasn’t healthy, but because I wasn’t purely healthy all the time. If you know me, you know I am heavily driven by a need to fill up my memory box with incredible, rich, meaningful moments in my life—and many of those moments center around sharing a beautiful meal. I would never want to deprive myself of something special just because it wasn’t purely fuel.
I think people are much more willing to embrace the idea of an 80/20 split (80% of the time you eat well so that 20% of the time you can eat whatever you want), but at the start of my career in food television, people joked that quinoa was a loofah and assumed all healthy food had to taste bad. My goal for myself was to give each viewer even one recipe they could reliably make and love that was more good for them than bad. Slowly but surely, I’ve tried to offer recipes that make clear: if it’s not delicious, I don’t care if it’s healthy. Life is way too short to waste on bad meals, so we should make them good for us in more ways than one.
You’ve also written several New York Times bestselling cookbooks that tap into this philosophy. How has this approach made a difference and helped to push the industry and culture forward? What has been the response from readers and your community?
The beauty of food is that we’re all always learning, always looking for fresh inspiration! I have been a lifelong collector of favorite cookbooks. I keep them by my bed to relaxingly peruse and get inspired for what to make. I feel happy to have collected these personalities around me when I get into the kitchen and try to channel all the ease and proficient calm they share, though I might look a little more barefoot, a little louder and messier, with a few crazy kids nearby. I write cookbooks for other people like me. People who are busy, but want to make time to feed themselves and their nearest and dearest well. People who are interested in exploring through food, but also love the comfort of old favorites. People for whom health is a priority and who actually like a lot of fresh produce and whole grains and flavorful protein but maybe get a little too locked into the same preparation and could use some fresh insight, bold flavor, and an easy upgrade to turn these promisingly simple staples into truly memorable meals.
Can you tell me about the process of writing the cookbooks and what goes into creating a successful cookbook today for those who aspire to one day?
For me, writing a cookbook starts with keeping a running list of all the meals I eat and love. Then, I try to synthesize the key elements of what I enjoyed the most and see if there are easy swaps to lighten it up or make it a little more me. I love herbs, citrus, spice, and salty, creamy, fatty things, though I have found some ways to moderate this last urge since joining Weight Watchers last winter! My friend and Iron Chef Michael Symon taught me years ago that a very few simple ingredients prepared correctly often makes for the most satisfying meal—it also tends to keep it less complicated. I try to simplify all my recipes down to the bare bones of what is going to be the easiest to make for the best possible outcome—basically, what’s the least we have to do to make this meal great. Once I have the recipes or ideas for recipes created, I work with my amazing recipe tester to test and tweak and perfect until it’s ready to join you at home for a, hopefully, wildly delicious meal of your own making.
2020 presented everybody around the globe with new, unprecedented challenges. How did you #FindNewRoads + switch gears towards your new version of success?
The biggest gear shift I had to make was changing what “efficiency” and “schedule” meant to me every day. A lot of days, I just had to get through distance learning and most of my work wasn’t going to happen. I had to figure out how to prioritize what actually couldn’t wait and get used to letting a decent amount of what I would have liked to get done slide. I’m so grateful we’ve been able to figure out how to shoot “The Dish on Oz,” a weekly cooking series I host with Gail Simmons and Jamika Pessoa that airs on “The Dr. Oz Show” every Wednesday, via Zoom, and we do the same for “Mom Brain,” the podcast I co-host. The entertainment and content world has really pulled together such amazing opportunities to collaborate even while we wait to get back together in person again. At the end of the day, I think just making it through this year with your health and your family’s happiness intact is a success by all accounts.
Going after what you deserve in life takes confidence and guts. Does confidence come naturally to you or did you have to learn it? What advice can you share for women on cultivating confidence and going after their dreams?
To me, confidence isn’t a destination. You don’t arrive there. You work at it daily. People can be born with more or less of a desire to be the center of attention, but the most confident people I know are often quiet and unassuming. My feeling is that confidence is actually a dedication to being true to whoever you are and whatever gift you have to share with the world. It is about doing the work, day in and day out, to be prepared with the best information, the best skills, and the most practice. Then, once you have laid this groundwork, you can not only be proud of what you have accomplished (confidence!), but you can also trust yourself to perform a task you’ve performed a million times before. Confidence is ease, and the irony is that ease takes work. Don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t feel easy at first. Every time you practice feeling great in your skin, you set yourself up for success with preparation, and you put your best self forward, you are gaining confidence.
How have you remained true and authentic to who you are and what advice can you share for others to do the same?
I’ve learned to pay really close attention to how I feel in one circumstance versus another; how I handled a situation or how I took a risk, or how I learned through something painful. Life experience contextualizes everything, so I definitely felt more emboldened to have these inner conversations as I’ve gotten older. The more in tune I can be with how things sit, the better I am at making choices that feel right and authentic for me.
It’s easy to celebrate the wins, but how do you handle failure or when something hasn’t worked out for you?
Failure isn’t fun for anyone, but it also doesn’t need to be scary. Growth and healing often happen just by putting one foot in front of the other moving toward the next goal. Only in that action do you realize that something is different. There’s a great Tracee Ellis Ross quote I found on Instagram recently: “I am learning every day to allow the space between where I am and where I want to be to inspire me and not terrify me.”
With success comes opportunity, but that also means you have your hands full. What keeps you inspired and motivated to keep going even on your most challenging days?
I get inspired every time someone cooks one of my recipes, or I hear from someone using their Loum Beauty products (the clean, vegan, and cruelty-free skincare line I am a co-owner of) who is getting compliments from friends and feeling so great in their skin! I get motivated every time my kids have questions my experience can answer. I want to be a part of showing them what it looks like to live life fully and overcome setbacks so they can create that for themselves.
But the most important thing I’ve found that helps me stay inspired and motivated is to, as much as I can, only say yes to the things I know I can pour my all into and hope to excel. I still have weeks where I feel burnt out and like I’m not doing my best because I’m scattered in a million directions. These periods remind me to double down on my commitment to dream big, focus small. Break the tasks at hand down into bite-sized pieces you can tackle. Even on the most challenging days, you get to go to sleep and start fresh in the morning with renewed dedication to prioritizing what is going to serve you best.
If you could go back to the beginning of your career journey—with the knowledge you have now—what advice would you give yourself?
Have fun! I think I did a pretty good job of this, but just a reminder to myself that everything happens very fast and there is no time to waste with early bedtimes.
Fill in the blanks:
The best career advice I always give is…
Know your goals. Know your value (and values!). Stay organized. Stay thoughtful. Stay sane. The most rudderless I’ve ever felt was when I hadn’t taken the time to really know what I wanted.
I turn bad days around by…
Counting blessings and dance parties with my kids. Outkast, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, and Dua Lipa are always top on the list.
If there were more hours in the day, I would…
Sleep (but really travel, if that were available—I would rather sleep sitting up on the plane and wake up somewhere new to explore). Cook more. Read more than two pages of a book at a time. Learn Turkish again.
Three qualities that got me to where I am today are…
Curiosity. Playfulness. Insight.
The change I’d like to see in my industry is…
I remember listening to Nancy Silverton on a podcast describing what it took to parent her small children while running La Brea Bakery. I don’t know if she slept more than two hours at a time for a decade. Creative, inventive, resourceful women have been feeding humanity since the beginning. I’d like to see more ways the culinary and television industry could enable mothers to lend their meaningful skills and commentary to the conversation.
My perfect day begins with…
Kisses and coffee. It ends with a dinner party with friends and family with excellent food and tequila.
The craziest thing I’ve done for work is…
I hosted MasterChef Junior while eight months pregnant with my fourth child. We moved our family cross country to Los Angeles for the summer and soaked up every moment of those wildly intense (read: large and hot and pregnant in L.A.! In the stadium kitchen! Omg!) and ridiculously fun two months. P.S. That MasterChef Junior season will air in 2021!
My first ever job was as a product tester for ElleGirl magazine in high school, and I had to stand in Times Square spraying people with the newly launched fragrance Beach by Bobbi Brown! I loved it because it smelled like Coppertone sunscreen. My job was to write up real people’s hot takes on that and other burgeoning trends like fur strip lashes and rhinestone lips. It was weird and wonderful.
I have also eaten some really crazy things over my years hosting food TV—everything from fried Kool-Aid to smoked salmon ice cream (it’s as awful as it sounds).
