KEEPING FIT : First-Ever Ms. Fitness U.S.A. Never Took Training Lightly

Debbie Kruck was the kind of little girl who wouldn’t eat her vegetables.

“I used to hide the lima beans in a napkin,” she says.

In high school, she used to feign illness to get out of gym class. At about the same time, she developed “a bit of a weight problem.” So she tried every fad diet she could think of, only to end up gaining back more than she’d lost.

Whoever imagined back then that someday she’d grow up to be named the first-ever “Ms. Fitness U.S.A.”?

Debbie Kruck, that’s who.

“You have to kind of like, dream a little,” she says. “I always knew what I wanted to be.” The 27-year-old Las Vegas resident was in Anaheim last week to promote a preliminary competition for this year’s title.

Of course, back then there were no titles such as Ms. Fitness. The only choices were traditional beauty pageants or female bodybuilding competitions. Ms. Fitness, sponsored by Coors Light beer, is one of several recent attempts to split the difference, with contestants who have trim, fit bodies, but without the bulked-up biceps.

“I don’t want to be, like, a she-man,” Kruck says.

Ms. Fitness contestants substitute cocktail dresses for evening gowns as they stand on stage and discuss their fitness philosophies.

“I’ve been an athlete since I was 6,” says one contestant. “I also speak seven languages, fluently.”

The thong bikinis they wear for the swimsuit competition allow the judges an unobstructed view of their gluteus maximus development. Instead of walking down a runway, they perform a series of slow quarter turns.

In the third portion of the program, the contestants perform routines to show their “ability to express fitness,” working in dance, gymnastics, “whatever they want to do,” Kruck says.

Five of the 12 competitors in the preliminaries at the Anaheim Convention Center, who came from as far away as Columbus, Ohio, will go on to the national finals in Las Vegas in December.

Kruck tried the beauty pageant route at age 14--before the onset of her weight problem--and placed second in the Ms. Teen-Age Connecticut contest. After high school, she married Dave Kruck, who happened to own a gym. But she never considered picking up a weight herself until five years ago.

“I decided it was time to get into shape,” she says, “But my husband wasn’t into me being into the weights. And it was a real hard-core gym. We got into a little argument about it. But I went ahead and started working out early in the mornings when nobody else was there.

In addition to using the weights and machines, Kruck began taking long walks to burn off some of her excess fat and improve her cardiovascular fitness.

“Walking is so much less taxing to your body,” she says. “So many people think that when you exercise, it has to be painful. But that’s not true.”

She also started taking classes in nutrition and changed her diet in light of what she learned. She abandoned some of her favorite foods--”fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, pizza”--in favor of fruit, egg whites, oatmeal, skim milk and lots and lots of the very foods she had avoided for so long: vegetables.

Soon she began to see results.

“I prefer to go by dress size rather than weight,” she says. “When I started, I was about a size 11 or 12. Now I’m a 4, 5, or 6.”

Kruck’s husband soon became supportive of her fitness efforts, but she says she is glad now that he didn’t encourage her in the beginning. “It doesn’t work if you do it for somebody else,” she says. “You have to do it for yourself. Too many people, especially women, put the emphasis on everything but themselves. They feel guilty taking time out for exercise. If I can accomplish only one thing with being Ms. Fitness, I want to encourage them to do that for themselves.

“I hope I can inspire people.”

It was her husband, in fact, who suggested that Kruck try her first fitness competition. He saw an ad in a trade journal for the Ms. National Fitness contest (not connected to the Coors Light contest) and showed it to her.

“I only had three weeks’ notice,” she says. “But I worked out, dieted down, got a dress, a goofy pink (swim)suit and some of that fake tan stuff. And I made the top 10.”

That was three years ago. Last year, Kruck made first runner-up in that contest.

When she’s not on the road, Kruck works out about an hour and a half to two hours daily, six days a week.

“I like to do my cardiovascular workout in the morning,” she says. “It gets your metabolism going.”

She alternates between a 4-mile walk, an 8-mile bike ride and running up stadium stairs, “100 sets.” Then she moves on to the weights.

Kruck, who is 5-foot-5, says she doesn’t weigh herself regularly. In fact, her recommendation is “just throw the scales away. That’s not what matters. If I had to guess, I’d say I weigh probably about 138 right now.”