A mother-daughter makeover story: living to eat, not eating to live: our Redo You! '09 Contest winners are a busy family of four whose transformation may inspire you and your family to make healthy changes in 2009.

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Meet the Olivera family--mother Susie, father Jorge, and daughters Kendall, 15, and Jordan, 9. This Phoenix-based family has made a name for themselves in the world of dog shows. In fact, they boast more national "best in show" awards than any other family in the business. But the grueling life of dog handlers was starting to take a toll on the family's health and nutrition.

Recently, Susie realized her daughters were gaining weight and developing a skewed perception of food and body image. Having secretly battled an eating disorder all of her life, Susie became frightened that her daughters would share the same fate. On top of that, Kendall was diagnosed with ADHD. Susie wanted to find a more natural solution to conventional prescription medication.

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"For most of my life, food controlled me," says Susie, who used to wake up every day feeling hungover from the previous day's binge. "I'd promise myself that today I wouldn't devour junk foods, but the food always won in the end. I would often drive quickly to get my secret fix and eat it in the car alone." The compulsion was overwhelming and shameful for Susie, who would have occasional breaks in the bingeing cycle, only to do crazy starvation schemes. "I lost weight very rapidly following a 500-calorie-per-day diet that involved injections of a fertility drag, but I also started losing handfuls of hair." Susie knew the diet was ridiculous, but she felt desperate.

When Susie came across Kat James's The Truth About Beauty at an airport, she could immediately tell the diet it described wasn't a self-destructive one. "My one fear was that I would not lose weight fast enough," she says. Susie dabbled with the nutritional plan outlined in James's book, but never fully committed to the program for one reason or another. When she learned about James's retreat near Asheville, N.C., however, she decided to attend with her two daughters and really commit to a new lifestyle.

Raising Healthy Girls