Serious Training Through Diet And Exercise, Stacy Riggiola Gets Ready For Fitness Competition

It’s noon on a Friday. Stacy Riggiola has been up since 5 a.m., sweated through a two-hour workout, and hasn’t eaten a bite.

She’s starving.

Right now, though, she sips on a Maximum Fat Burner drink with zero calories, and plans to run next door to Halpin’s for a can of water-packed tuna.

Riggiola, co-owner of Fitness Unlimited, a private fitness center in the Spokane Valley, is in training, a drastic regimen of low-calorie, high-protein meals and endless exercise. She plans to represent Spokane in the national Fitness America Pageant in Redondo Beach, Calif., Nov. 15-18. She’ll join approximately 150 other contestants, showing off her strength, flexibility and agility.

Once 178 pounds, Riggiola is now down to 116 pounds and 10 percent body fat. Her goal by contest time is 114 pounds, 8 percent body fat. Her diet these days consists primarily of lean protein: Egg Beaters, Healthy Choice cheese sticks and tuna fish.

On a recent Monday morning, she wrote down in her appointment book everything she ate. She started with a low-fat muffin with protein powder and 8 ounces of water at 6 a.m., one-half of a rice cake at 8 a.m., one-fourth of a serving of oatmeal with a scoop of protein powder at 8:45, the other half of the rice cake at 10:30 a.m., a cheese stick at 11, and a spaghetti squash at 12:30 p.m. That’s 340 calories.

Riggiola rotates her calorie counts each day, attempting, she says, to foil her body’s starvation-detection system. She eats 900 calories the first day, 1,000 the second, 1,100 the third and 1,200 the fourth. Then she starts over.

She trains at least five hours a day. This morning it was stair climber, 40 minutes; treadmill, 30 minutes; weight-training, an hour.

This afternoon it’ll be stationary bike, 80 minutes; weight-training, 30 minutes; and a 2-mile run.

Every night she ends her schedule with an hour-long session at Northwest Gymnastics, practicing her fitness routine for the contest with coach Nancy Armstrong.

She’s so revved up that by bedtime she’s still racing. She sips hot tea and drifts into a restless sleep, dreaming of her routine: the front straddle jumps, the push-ups with her left leg extended up past her ear, the Chinese splits, all to driving technopop music.

Why does Riggiola push herself so hard?

The easy answer, the one she gives most often, is that she looked at the fitness magazines, found most of the women pictured were 96-pounders who had to work to gain weight, and decided to prove a former 178-pounder could do it, too.

The more complex answer, to which she also alludes, involves a troubled childhood, poverty and her own health problems.

“It’s not a pretty story,” Riggiola, 30, says.

In her junior year in high school, Riggiola shot from 135 to 178 pounds. Her family moved to Seattle and she fumed and ate all summer.

She moved back to Spokane her senior year, graduated from Rogers High School and enrolled at Eastern Washington University.

“That’s when I really got into trouble,” she says. She realized how heavy she’d become, and adopted the dangerous college-girl’s solution: bulimia.

She began vomiting eight times a day. “I could just think, ‘throw up,’ and I’d do it.”

She quit school and began teaching eight classes a day of aerobics. People admired her figure. “A lot of times what you see and what is real are two different things,” Riggiola says ruefully.

She learned that after a bulimic woman vomits, her stomach bloats for 48 hours. Most bulimics look in the mirror, think they’re fat and make themselves throw up again. “They don’t realize they got bloated just like an Ethiopian,” Riggiola says.

Eventually, Riggiola dropped the bulimia. She later returned to Eastern for exercise and nutrition classes that helped her to find healthier foods than Snickers and Pepsi.

She opened Fitness Unlimited with her fiance, Ken Benoscek, a sports medicine/physical education grad from Whitworth. They act as personal trainers to dentists with shoulder problems, young mothers getting in shape after pregnancy, professional models struggling to match a designer’s waif-like image.

“A lot of these girls start at age 12 and all of a sudden they have hips they need to get rid of,” Riggiola says.

Right now, Riggiola trains herself between appointments. She has a lot to accomplish in the next 10 days: complete a sequined costume, polish those straddle jumps, cut even more carbohydrates from her diet.

Judging will be weighted 45 percent for her appearance in a swimsuit, 45 percent on her fitness routine and 10 percent on her answers to impromptu questions.

She has a doctor check her body fat percentages.

“By no means should anyone set up a program like this without checking with her physician,” she says.

Her 8 percent body fat goal is extremely lean for a female.

Betts Byrd, a fitness consultant at Sacred Heart Medical Center, says that for women, anything under 10 percent is dangerously low. The ideal level for most women is 18 to 22 percent.

Riggiola says after the competition she’ll aim for 16 percent.

Riggiola struggles with epilepsy, hypoglycemia, an irregular heartbeat and anemia. She drinks aloe vera juice to soothe a bad colon, damaged from the bulimia, and wears the scars of two knee surgeries on each knee, caused partly by conducting too many aerobics classes on a concrete floor.

“I’m not the picture of health,” she says. “I can do it, anybody can.”

On a recent night, she pounded through her routine at Northwest Gymnastics, leaping off the back of a weighted chair, wincing and snapping a wad of Juicy Fruit gum.

A 9-year-old girl finished her gymnastics class and paused to gaze at Riggiola.

The girl’s mother, beaming, bent down and whispered into her ear, “Is this what you want to do someday?”

The little girl didn’t answer. She stood still and solemn, watching Riggiola through wide brown eyes.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 color photos