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‘Pretty Little Liars’ Alum Sasha Pieterse Reflects on 70-Pound Weight Gain From PCOS When She Was 17
Former Pretty Little Liars star Sasha Pieterse opened up about her PCOS-related weight gain, revealing that she gained 70 pounds as a teenager while filming the hit Freeform series.
“When I turned, it was probably around 15, 16, I started noticing a difference in just my metabolism in general,” Sasha, 27, told Twilight alum Taylor Lautner and his wife, Taylor Lautner (née Dome), during an appearance on their podcast, “The Squeeze,” on Wednesday, August 9. “At 17, I gained 70 pounds in the year for no reason. There was no explanation for it.”
Sasha then explained that she “never had a regular period” and, despite speaking up about her symptoms, she was “always just told by gynecologists that [she] was just young. Like, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll regulate.’”
“It was the most frustrating experience and disheartening because, no matter what I did, no matter how well I behaved, no matter how great I treated my body, things were actually getting worse rather than better,” she explained. “It was very, very confusing. So, after a long process, someone recommended that I go to an endocrinologist.”
Upon visiting a specialist, Sasha was diagnosed with the condition, and she remembered thinking that she had “never heard of PCOS before.”
“And it’s a disease, it’s not curable, it can be dormant,” she added. “And the most frustrating part about this is that it’s fairly easy to diagnose. It’s a hormone imbalance. It’s a hormone disease, and it’s so easy to see because your testosterone or your estrogen will be really high, you’ll have really low vitamin D levels, you’ll be deficient in a lot of things.”
PCOS — polycystic ovary syndrome — is a hormonal disorder that causes enlarged ovaries and cysts in a woman, according to Mayo Clinic. Symptoms include irregular menstruation, excess facial and/or body hair from high levels of androgen and weight gain. The condition can also lead to infertility.
“You won’t have a regular period, but the catch is, a lot of other things look different,” Sasha continued when defining PCOS. “So, every woman has a different experience with it. It could be your period, it could be weird hair growth, it could major gastro issues, it could be crazy cysts on your ovaries, it could be weight gain. I had a lot of those outward symptoms that everyone could see.”
While reflecting on the “health issues” that she was “speaking of while going through Pretty Little Liars,” Sasha noted that her physical changes from the hormonal disorder played out during her time working on the drama show.
“The changes that were happening to me were documented on camera,” she concluded.
Sasha portrayed the main teenage bully Alison DiLaurentis on PLL. The South Africa native was cast in the role at just 13 years old. She starred on the show from 2010 through 2017 and reprised her role for the PLL spinoff, Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists in 2019. Since the, Sasha welcomed her son, Hendrix, with husband Hudson Sheaffer. The couple married in May 2018.
This wasn’t the first time that Sasha has gotten candid about her health. Previously, she emphasized how difficult it was for her to receive the proper diagnosis during a video interview with theSkimm in 2019.
“If you think about how many women could have prevented this if they only knew what was going on their body and had someone listen to them and not think that they were going crazy, it’s so sad,” Sasha said at the time. “I have felt so much freer explaining my story and what has been going on. And so, I highly encourage you to do the same.”
