Bio: A former couch potato who’s now training for a marathon, Suzanne McMillan, 35, is a classic soccer mom, with two sons, age 10 and 13, plus two stepdaughters, 10 and 14. When she’s not out running or shepherding kids around, she may be found at work, hauling mail as a contract delivery driver for five Coors Tech facilities in Golden. A graduate of Sheridan High School and former student at Metro State, she lives in west Littleton with the children and her husband, Luke, a mechanical engineer.
The Challenge: “I was always a big kid, probably 175 to 185 pounds in high school, but after I had kids I really packed it on,” she says. “I would eat two or three McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches almost daily, and almost everything I cooked was centered around ground beef: meatloaf, spaghetti, lasagna, tacos – lots of fatty, rich, fried foods. My specialty was fried chicken, with gravy made out of the pan drippings.” In 2001, with her weight topping out at 248, she sized up her situation and decided that if she wanted to live long enough to become a grandmother, she had to get healthy.
How She Did It: “I lost the first 30 pounds in 11 months, by moving off the couch and walking – about 3 miles a day,” she says. “Then I got a trainer, went to the gym and learned everything I could about exercise and nutrition, and lost another 70 pounds in nine months” – partly by working out, and partly by hewing so faithfully to a diet of 1,500 calories per day that she even refused a bite of cake on her birthday. She also gave up a pack-a-day cigarette habit.
As she slimmed down, McMillan dropped from a size 22 to size 10, her triglyceride level – once “through the roof” – fell to a healthy 58, and she started running, spurred on by her younger son, Derek. Teaching him to ride a bike, she offered him five bucks if he could go a mile around a lake near their house without stopping. But he responded, “I’ll give you five bucks if you can run around the lake.” So she did. “And a few weeks later,” she says, “I thought, if I can run 1 mile, I can run 3.”
Then she began entering races – 5 kilometers at first, then 10Ks, then a half-marathon. And now, at 5-feet-8 and 150 pounds, she’s gearing up for what “just seemed to be the next thing” – the 26.2-mile Denver Marathon on Oct. 15. “I’ve actually gained some weight in training,” she says. “You’re burning so much energy you’re hungry all the time. But I’m trying not to make the marathon weight-related. My goal is just the finish line.”
Still Working On: “I sometimes have trouble getting out of the fat-woman mentality. For a long time, whenever I heard people laughing, I always thought it was me they were laughing at. I still look around and check,” McMillan says. “Now, it’s the opposite extreme. I feel like I’m going through what 14-year-old girls do when they first notice they’re attractive. It’s confusing.”
Beyond this, she says, “The food issues will always be there. As a heavy woman, I used food as a reward. Now I try to see it as sustenance. This has definitely changed the way I feed my family. You can’t find a can of soda in the house. My kids will whine, but they understand that it’s for their well- being, not as punishment.”
Best Advice: “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.”
-Jack Cox
