Sasha Pieterse is showing off her post-workout glow with Lucy Hale – in her workout gear. In a new social media post the Pretty Little Liars alums hit the Alo studio for a sweat session. “Starting the day off right,” she wrote on the Instagram Stories image. How does she approach diet, fitness, and self-care? Here is everything you need to know about her lifestyle habits.
Sasha struggled with her weight at 17, gaining 70 pounds in a single year. “I went to 17 gynecologists,” Pieterse told E Online about how she couldn’t figure out what was going on with her metabolism. “I finally went to an endocrinologist who took me seriously and was the one that told me about PCOS. I’d never heard about it before.” She explains that “doing all the right things, or at least the ones that I thought were right,” like doing lots of cardio and eating healthy greens, did nothing to address the sudden weight gain. “In fact, it was getting worse. I would do cardio and I would almost faint every time. I would go and throw up almost immediately after I ate something healthy.”
Sasha traded in her restrictive, low-fat diet for a high-protein, low-carb eating style that helped kickstart her metabolism and regulate her hormones.
Sasha loves going kayaking with her husband and son. “My favorite adventures are with my guys 🤙🏼 ,” she captioned an Instagram post. Kayaking is a great workout. Not only is it great for building upper body strength and helps reduce stress, but can burn up to 400 calories per hour, translating to 1,600 calories in four hours of paddling.
Sasha lost 15 pounds while rehearsing with her Dancing with the Stars partner Gleb Savchenko. “Having Gleb as a partner. He’s amazing. But just the process in general — how hard we’re working and how healthy I feel. I really feel like myself again,” she told Us. Dancing is a great workout for many reasons. Not only does it build strength and promote flexibility, but helps you lose weight and even promotes cardiovascular function. A 2016 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine determined that people who engaged in moderate-intensity dancing were 46 percent less likely to develop heart disease or die from it than non-dancers. In comparison, moderate-intensity walkers were just 25 percent less likely to suffer heart health issues.
“When I got my diagnosis, my doctor was like, okay, so you need to look at this differently,” she said told E Online. One thing she did was change her approach to exercise, swapping out cardio-heavy sessions for low-impact workouts.