People who meet Sherri today see the nutrition expert, the fitness competitor, the transformation coach. They see an incredible woman who has spent much of her adult life helping other people change their bodies and their lives. What they cannot see is how many times she has had to begin again herself.
Sherri’s understanding of transformation was earned long before she began teaching it. After struggling with eating disorders as a teenager, she lost more than 100 pounds in her twenties, transformed her body composition and went on to compete in fitness competitions. She built successful businesses and eventually made transformation her profession—helping other people create changes she understood from the inside.
For years, transformation was something she understood through action: see what is not working, make a plan, do the work, change the result. Sherri was very good at moving forward.
During one successful period in her career, a photograph unsettled her. She was standing inside one of her businesses beside a client she had helped lose weight. The business was thriving. Clients trusted her. By every visible measure, she was doing well. Yet when Sherri looked at herself in the picture, something felt wrong. “I didn’t feel aligned with who I saw in the picture,” she remembers.
She stepped back from taking new clients for a time and focused on herself. At first, that meant another physical transformation: changing her body composition and eventually entering fitness competitions. But success at changing her body did not answer everything the photograph had stirred.
Sherri had spent years learning how to transform what could be seen. The next work would take her somewhere less visible.
The Strong Woman
For as long as she can remember, Sherri was the strong woman. It was how people saw her—and how she had learned to see herself.
People brought her their problems. She knew what was happening in everyone else’s life while giving them remarkably little access to her own. “I was there, I was helping everyone, but nobody really had access to me,” she says. People knew Sherri as capable, warm, fun to be around. Very few knew what she carried.
Strength had served her well. It helped her build businesses, care for clients and keep moving through difficult years. Eventually, though, she felt responsible for maintaining that image at all times: “I was closed and keeping my guard so much that it became my identity,” she says. “The moment I released this identity, it took so much weight off my shoulders.”
Behind her strength, she carried vulnerability and pain. Sherri’s parents had a painful marriage, and their divorce in her early twenties was bitter. She left Israel, where she was raised, partly because she could no longer absorb what was happening around her.
Her father became deeply lonely after the divorce. He later died of cancer, about 18 years ago, but when Sherri remembers those years she returns to his isolation. “I really do feel that he passed away from a broken heart. He was so sad,” she says.
After he died, Sherri kept going. Some of his belongings went into a box in her closet that she could barely open. She rarely spoke about him. The stories hurt too much. In her mind, she says, she had done something similar with the grief itself: rolled it into a small ball, put it away and continued living around it.
But grief put away does not disappear. For years, Sherri carried her father’s sadness alongside her own life.
The Day She Let Herself Cry
Years later, Sherri began looking for healing beyond the physical. Her search led her to spiritual practices, including shamanic traditions, where she was drawn to the connection with nature and the earth and to practices of release.
At her first healing ceremony, Sherri saw her father during meditation. He had been gone for many years, and seeing him brought up emotions she had kept buried for a long time. She wanted to cry, but even then she held herself back.
“I remember holding that cry,” she says.
Her husband and best friend were in the room, and Sherri was conscious of them seeing her cry. She had spent too many years being the strong one, and showing that kind of vulnerability was still difficult for her.
Eventually, the need to hold herself together became less important than what she was feeling. “I don’t care. I just want to cry right now,” she remembers thinking.
So she let herself cry.
For Sherri, that moment opened something she had kept closed for years. She began to understand that allowing people to see her vulnerability did not make her less strong. It allowed her to be more open about who she was and what she was carrying.
The grief around her father took longer. For years after he died, Sherri could hardly think about him without returning to the sadness of his final years—the loneliness she had witnessed and the pain she wished she could have taken away. Without realizing it, she had carried much of that sadness with her.
“I was still living this life carrying his pain, not even mine—his pain,” she says.
It took Sherri years to understand that she could let go of her father’s pain without letting go of him. She could miss him, remember him and keep what he had given her without allowing the sadness of his final years to define every memory.
Only recently, she says, did she feel she had reached that place. For the first time in many years, there was room for other memories of her father too.
When you heal, you heal
By then, Sherri’s definition of transformation had widened far beyond a before-and-after photograph. “When you heal, you heal,” she says. Her own healing changed the way she understood the people who came to her for help.
She still works with nutrition, fitness and wellness, and for clients who seek it she also draws on spiritual and energy-based practices she has studied. What changed most is the way she listens. Before deciding where someone should go, she wants to understand where that person actually is.
Her rule is simple: change has to meet you there. You would never ask a beginner to lift 100 pounds before teaching the form. Sherri believes inner change deserves the same patience. “You can’t push anyone for healing if they’re not ready,” she says.
Her own life is proof. Sherri’s own life has taught her that transformation is never finished. It has touched her body, her grief, her identity, her spirituality and, more recently, her relationship with ambition. Since childhood, she believed she had to be the best. That drive helped her accomplish a great deal, but it also kept her measuring herself against others. Today, she wants to do exceptional work without comparison. “Nobody is the best,” she says. “At the same time, I love everyone to be the best.” Letting go of the need to be the best became one more transformation.
What Her Daughters Will Carry
One vivid expression of everything Sherri has learned may be around her Friday-night table.
She and her husband are raising two teenage daughters. As the girls grew older, Sherri felt the family needed a point of return - one evening protected from schedules and the pull of teenage life. She also wanted her daughters to feel the roots of their heritage as something lived at home.
It wasn’t an obvious move, as Sherri was raised secular, and there was some family resistance, but in hindsight, this ritual has been very meaningful for her family.
They light candles. There is challah, sometimes made with her daughters and sometimes bought, and the kind of food Sherri likes to make: fresh, delicious, easy to create and simple - chicken and potatoes, Persian rice, steak, salads, vegetables and tahini (full menu follows this article).
Another Friday night tradition Sherri introduced is the appreciation circle. Each person names three things they appreciated that week. Sometimes it is gratitude for someone at the table. Sometimes it is a small victory, a kindness, an opportunity. Challenges are welcome too. Once a week, the family makes room for things that might otherwise go unsaid.
As a holistic nutritionist, Sherri asks everyone at the Friday dinner table to be mindful and notice the food as they eat it - what she calls “blessing the food with every chew.” Presence, for her, has become part of nourishment.
On other days, Sherri teaches her girls to be problem solvers, rather than problem keepers. The lesson she most wants her daughters to take into adulthood is that “Every problem has a solution.” Her method is simple: when a problem feels overwhelming, write down three possible solutions. Try one. If it fails, try the next. The goal is to move the mind from the problem toward possibility.
Five Minutes
For a woman who has spent so much of her life moving, building, competing, helping and transforming, one of Sherri’s favorite practices now is remarkably simple.
Five minutes.
Turn off the phone. Sit outside. Look at a tree, the sky, a bird. Do not solve anything. Do not replay yesterday or organize tomorrow. Stay where you are.
“The healing is mostly in the present,” she says.
The advice is striking coming from Sherri. Her life has been shaped by the instinct to find the next thing that can be improved. Now she deliberately creates moments in which nothing needs to improve at all.
Five minutes, she says, can be enough.
The Book She Was Already Writing
For years, Sherri has been keeping something else: the words she wants her daughters to remember. It is something she has kept quietly to herself—until now.
She writes down the mantras, observations and pieces of advice that surface while raising them—the lessons that seem obvious inside a family until time passes and no one can quite remember the exact words anymore. Sherri had already imagined those notes becoming a book someday. During our conversation about Pass It Forward, that someday moved closer. Pass It Forward inspired her to begin gathering those pieces more intentionally and move forward with the book she now plans to publish.
The moment felt wonderfully fitting. We had been talking about the knowledge a person gathers through a life and what deserves to reach the next generation. Sherri had already been keeping hers.
The book does not yet have a title. “Every problem has a solution” will be in it, and perhaps some of the lessons that took Sherri years to earn: strength can make room for vulnerability; love does not require carrying another person’s pain forever; change cannot be forced; sometimes moving forward begins with becoming still.
Her daughters have heard these things around the dinner table, in difficult moments and in the ordinary conversations of growing up. The book will give those words somewhere to live after the moments themselves are gone.
And perhaps that is Sherri’s most meaningful transformation yet: turning what life taught her into something another person can keep.
Pass It Forward
Sherri is a Keeper of transformation: the practical knowledge of how change actually happens over a lifetime. She passes forward the idea that transformation is gradual, personal and unfinished—that strength can include vulnerability, that love does not require carrying another person’s pain, and that problems can move toward solutions.
Her knowledge is practical, too. As a nutritionist, she has spent years helping people transform their bodies and make healthier choices through the food they prepare and the habits they build. At home, she creates small traditions that bring her own family together. Sometimes transformation begins with something as simple as a family tradition—one small practice, repeated and preserved, that can change how a family connects and what they carry forward.
These are the things worth keeping: the recipes, practices and lessons that work in real life, so they can be shared, repeated and carried forward.
