BOUNTIFUL — Of all the reasons Deni Hill is signed up to run in the Deseret News 5K on Monday — the calories she'll burn, the endorphin rush, how good it will feel when it's over — the biggest of them all is this:
Because she can.
A year ago, running 3.1 miles was unimaginable; as out of the question as a space walk or climbing Everest.
Walking a 5K was a pipe dream.
When Deni would embark on a morning stroll with her friends in the Bountiful foothills, she'd stop after a block. "You guys go ahead," she'd say, "I'm going to have a heart attack."
Then, a modern miracle.
Also known as a TV show.
Deni and her daughter, Sarah Nitta, appeared on this past season's couples edition of "The Biggest Loser." They started out weighing 256 pounds (Deni) and 261 pounds (Sarah). Their body fat was nearly 60 percent each. Between the two of them they were the entire ice cream aisle at Smith's.
The only reason we can get away with talking about their weight now is because so much of it is gone.
Sarah lost 106 pounds and her mom even topped that.
At the show's final weigh-in at the end of May, Deni checked in at 131 pounds, and that included her size four dress.
In eight months she lost 125 pounds and 10 dress sizes.
Not only did that get her wild applause and silent congratulations all over America, it got her the $100,000 check the show gives to the contestant who loses the most weight "at-home" after being eliminated from the competition before the finale.
Deni, 59, was dropped after spending three months on-air at "The Biggest Loser" ranch in California. She spent the next five months back home in Bountiful, diligently sticking to her program and continuing to shed serious pounds.
She could have returned to what she was doing before the competition — working the desk for $13 an hour at a company that repossessed cars — but she decided to make losing weight her full-time job. If all went well, she said in her pitch to her salesman husband, Dell, it would pay better. Much better.
But as big a deal as the money is, it's not the biggest deal for Deni.
"I think — I hope — that I've finally figured it out," she says. "I've finally changed my lifestyle."
She's lost weight before — "about a million pounds" is her conservative estimate — but it kept coming back like the swallows to Capistrano.
"I'll bet you can't name the diet I didn't do," she says.
But instead of just watching what she ate at "The Biggest Loser" competition, she watched what she did. She added exercise, a lot of it, to her daily routine, she changed the foods she eats, and she faced the fact that she was a foodaholic who used eating to combat stress.
"I was an emotional eater," she says. "Any stress and it was straight to the fridge."
Now, she combats stress with a workout at the gym, or a 5K.
Becoming half the woman she used to be has opened her eyes, Deni says, to the vastness of her potential.
"For 30 years I was constantly living in the future," she says. "It was always, well, when I get to this size or to this weight. I did that for so many years. Deep down, I knew that when I lost the weight I'd have to show up for life."
Now, she says, holding a pair of triple-XL blue jeans she wore a year ago that she could now wrap around her waist twice, "I've started living."
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday. Email: benson@desnews.com