A Mother/Daughter Success Story (PCOS Mentioned)

ONE FAMILY
She weighed 240, her daughter hit 230, and Oakland mother Susan Pierpoint realized she had to reverse the trend

Joshunda Sanders, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004

For most of her life, Susan Pierpoint had an unbalanced relationship to food. She used it as the solution for everything, especially when it came to her two daughters.

If they whined about going to church, she quieted their complaints with doughnuts. Any other signs of distress could be quelled with ice cream. Once, when her oldest daughter skinned her knee, Susan offered her a cookie.

That’s why Susan, an attorney in Oakland, spent much of her adult life battling obesity. When she weighed her heaviest, she was nearly 240 pounds. Her oldest child never had a weight problem, but her youngest daughter, Annie, did: When Annie turned 16, she was about 230 pounds.

"Part of what we’ve had to deal with is how to express love for each other without saying, ‘Let me buy you a treat,’ “ Annie, 19, said. Annie’s love of overeating mirrored her mother’s food issues and started when she was just 4 years old. Annie, who described her demeanor as a child as “fat and jolly,” often stole Reese’s Peanut Butter cups from the au pairs who took care of her. As she got older, she continued to blow up, Susan said.

But a series of fractured wrists sent mother and child to a pediatrician, who warned them of other problems that could surface. Annie could be at risk for Type 2 diabetes if she didn’t control her weight.

An endocrinologist later found that Annie had developed polycystic ovarian disease—a chronic condition that affects some people who are obese. And there was a host of other problems that she could develop if they didn’t do something immediately.

“I finally decided that the only way I could help (Annie) was to solve my own problem and not talk about it, just do it,” Susan said.

So she joined a 12-step program. She did a lot of research. She tried a lot of different food plans until she found one that she liked. And with a lot of patience and planning, she lost more than 100 pounds—and kept it off.

Then, she turned her focus to Annie. Together, they found a dietary plan that was similar to Susan’s, but more flexible. A physician, Dr. Robert Lustig, who had seen Annie at the clinic when she was morbidly obese, suggested diet, exercise and medicine. Because both mother and daughter were committed to a low-glycemic diet, and because they both wanted success, they achieved it. “Anything short of that won’t work, because the sabotage is too easy,” he said. Although Annie took Metformin for her special medical needs, Susan helped her daughter through the herculean task of changing her lifestyle. Within 10 months, Annie lost 70 pounds. She has kept it off by staying active—doing inner tube water polo, for instance, at UC Davis, where she’s a freshman.

And she sticks to her food plan religiously, even though she is constantly confronted with greasy temptation in the cafeteria. Her happy-go- lucky peers eat pizza and other fatty foods like they’ve never seen a food pyramid. Every now and then, she has to escape the pressure by taking herself downtown for salad. But she’s good at making adjustments. Instead of indulging in a keg at frat parties, for instance, she would bring bottles of root beer with her to parties.

It’s intense for a young woman, she said, but it’s worth the effort.

“You get this new life, and that sounds kind of corny,” Annie said, “like something they might say to advertise some kind of fad diet. But I went white- water rafting this weekend ... and I had the time of my life. It was something that I wouldn’t have even considered when I was overweight.” Susan said that for both her and Annie, the lifestyle change is “an act of love—directed at ourselves.”

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...MNGEV6OGL61.DTL