There’s More to Heidi Than Meets the Eye : Successful Body Builder and Businesswoman Also Says No to Drug Use

There’s more to Heidi Miller than just a pretty face and trim body.

The 33-year-old is not just a prominent body builder, she is also a big-time success story in the business world.

And because of it, Miller has been chosen as the American Body building Coordinating Committee’s woman of the year. She’ll receive the award Saturday at the Mr. and Ms. California body building contest at Aviation Center in Redondo Beach.

Among other things, says Jack O’Bleness, president of the ABCC and owner of the Monster Maker gym in Inglewood, Miller is admired for never taking drugs often used by body builders to get big.

“We appreciate the fact that she stayed clear of all that stuff,” he said, “and she was her own person. She didn’t sell her soul like some body builders, yet she was very successful.”

Miller is also a famous entrepreneur. More than 100 frozen yogurt stores throughout the country bear her name. Many in the Southland have probably eaten Heidi’s “frogen yozurt” and know the cutesy stores with the cheery red wallpaper where the low-fat frozen dessert can be purchased.

To the yuppie generation to which Miller directed her fructose, skim milk and all-natural-flavor recipe, she is the “yogurt queen.”

A lot of her customers probably don’t know that she’s a former athlete who has used her background to promote her product.

Before becoming the president of Heidi’s Frogen Yozurt--which has 110 stores throughout six states--the petite blond was a nationally ranked collegiate gymnast and body builder.

Miller seems to succeed at whatever she does. She didn’t start body building until she was 26 but dedicated enough time and energy to win about 30 natural titles before retiring last year. In natural body building, contestants undergo drug and lie detector tests before competing.

“Drugs are against my whole philosophy,” Miller said in her Laguna Hills office, which is decorated like her yogurt shops. “I would never take them and never have. I don’t take any medication. Besides, a symmetrical, finely chiseled, all-natural physique is beautiful.”

She should know. In six years as a competitive natural body builder, Miller won three of the biggest titles: Ms. Natural America, Ms. Western America and Ms. Amateur Grand Prix.

Pete Samra, who promoted the first drug-free body building contest on the West Coast in 1983 and is promoting Saturday’s event, said Miller won the titles because she had the “perfect woman’s physique.”

“I was one of the judges when she won the Ms. America,” said Samra, who lives in Torrance, “and she was very complete, very all-around. Not only was her physique great, she had a great personality.”

That combination, Miller says, she owes to gymnastics. She started the sport, along with track and swimming, in high school. At Cal State Sacramento in her hometown, she was a nationally ranked gymnast and competed in the NCAA Division II nationals for four years. She also placed second in the all-around exercise at the World University Games in 1976.

After college, she competed in the U.S. Gymnastics Federation Class I category. The 5-foot-2 athlete found it difficult to be inactive after quitting the USGF at 26, so in 1981 she joined a gym in Sacramento and it wasn’t long before her muscles started bulging.

“I knew nothing about it,” Miller said. “I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger (six-time Mr. Olympia) was a summer sausage.”

Miller won the first body building competition she entered in 1981 and now she’s an expert in sculpting the body. She has written a fitness book and produced a video.

Miller’s stores are opening around the country at a rate of five a month, and negotiations are under way to open 350 stores in Japan, she said. The company that started in 1982 as a cozy, 520-foot store in Irvine grossed $20 million last year, she said.

“I’ve been eating frozen yogurt for 15 years,” Miller said. “Nobody made it right, but I ate it. It tasted grainy and just not smooth. I wanted to change that.”

And not many people thought Miller could do it.

Brenda Johnson, her long-time friend and workout partner, said she thought Miller was crazy when she gave up her job as a sporting-good sales representative and beautiful home in Northern California to open a yogurt shop in Orange County.

“I thought it was a nice dream,” said Johnson, who now works for Heidi’s Frogen Yozurt Shoppes Inc. “But I didn’t think it was going to take off the way it did. I don’t think anybody did.”

Now business is so good that Miller quit competitive body building last year to dedicate her full attention to it. She still works out regularly and has one goal:

“I want to change the way Americans eat. I want to have 1,000 stores all over the U.S. and be a household word in every state and even in Europe. I want to be the Westerner that did good.”