Pete Loiselle is a big fat loser. He’s blessed with a competitive spirit and probably won’t like the way that sounds, but there’s just no denying facts. Between October 2001 and July 2004, the 40-year-old Ellsworth middle school math teacher shed close to 500 pounds in body fat, dropping to 270 from an awesome 757 pounds. At his heaviest, he weighed 763.

People who’ve watched the pounds melt away assume he has had gastric bypass surgery or that he has been very, very sick. What else could explain this dramatic change? The truth is, Loiselle has lost his weight the healthy, old-fashioned way, through diet and exercise.

“Big Pete” Loiselle is hard to recognize in photos taken just a few years ago, when his lanky 6-foot-6 frame, startling blue eyes and expressive features were buried in a mountain of fat. But despite his remarkable transformation – and quite a lot of local and national media attention – he says he’s still the same, regular guy inside.

“I don’t really feel like I’ve done anything special,” he said modestly during a conversation at the tidy hilltop home he shares with his wife, Cricket, and a paunchy tiger-striped cat named Mickey.

A national scourge

Mainers like Loiselle have contributed to the crisis of obesity, now officially designated an epidemic by health officials at state and federal levels. Following the nationwide trend, Maine’s rates of obesity – a body mass index of 30 or higher – have risen dramatically from just over 12 percent of adults in 1990 to almost 21 percent in 2002. Coupled with the incidence of less extreme overweight – a BMI between 25 and 29.9 – almost 60 percent of Maine adults were packing significant excess weight in 2002.

Solid data for youngsters is harder to come by, but according to a recent state survey, 30 to 36 percent of Maine children in kindergarten through 12th grade are seriously overweight or obese.

The health complications associated with obesity include heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic lung disease and diabetes. These conditions add an estimated $2.47 billion annually to Maine’s health care expenditures and kill an average of six Mainers each day.

For personal health and the economy, Mainers and other Americans need to lose weight, and they’re getting the message. Stores are doing a booming business in diet and exercise books. Internet weight loss sites have sprung up like chocolate truffles on a layer cake. Membership in health clubs has increased – though regular attendance is not necessarily implied. A growing number of very obese people have given up on dieting and are choosing instead a risky and life-altering surgical procedure that drastically limits how much food they can eat for the rest of their lives.

In the broader picture, public initiatives are backing up these individual efforts. In Maine, schools are stocking more healthful choices in lunchrooms and snack machines, communities are developing walking trails, and the governor recently launched a 12-week fitness challenge.

But for just about everyone, losing weight successfully comes down to eating less and exercising more and to reversing the relative importance of food and activity in our lives. For a lot of us, that’s much more easily said than done. But for Pete Loiselle, once he’d made up his mind, his obesity didn’t stand a chance.

Weighed down, weighing in

While he plays down his success, Loiselle readily admits to having been seriously inconvenienced and emotionally affected by his former weight. He wasn’t able to be in his sister’s wedding because it was impossible to find a tuxedo that fit and prohibitive to have one specially made. He couldn’t get to another family event in Chicago because he couldn’t afford the two airline seats he would have had to occupy.

Closer to home, he couldn’t go to the movies with Cricket or on field trips with his students. In fact, going out in public attracted so much attention – snickers, stares, pointing fingers and barefaced insults – that he pretty much stayed home when he wasn’t working. “The bigger you get, the less you can do,” he said.

Still he’d never really tried to lose weight, he said. Perhaps because he came from a comfortably well-fed family where carrying a few extra pounds was nothing to worry about; or because his weight didn’t derail affection when he met and fell in love with Cricket; or because he had never developed the most serious health concerns associated with morbid obesity – whatever the reason – he said the idea of deliberately, seriously slimming down just never stuck.

But in the past decade Loiselle had been hospitalized four times with cellulitis, a dangerous infection just below the skin often associated with poor circulation. Each time he was admitted, Loiselle recalled with a grimace, the hospital would arrange for a local trucking company to bring freight scales to weigh him. It was deeply humiliating.

“The last time, my doctor said he wouldn’t even admit me to the hospital until I agreed to look into gastric bypass,” Loiselle said. So when the cellulitis cleared, he made an appointment at the surgical weight loss program at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

At the time, dietitian Lynn Bolduc was dividing her professional energies between the surgical center and her general dietary consulting work for the hospital. When Loiselle first walked through her door, she said, “I was shocked. My first thought was that I didn’t have a set of scales that could weigh him.” With a BMI of 87, Loiselle was the most overweight person she’d ever worked with. She was convinced that gastric bypass surgery was the only way he could successfully slim down.

But when Bolduc started talking about the ramifications of surgery – the risks of the procedure itself, potential complications, and a lifetime of tricky dietary restrictions – Loiselle realized it wasn’t for him. For one thing, his family was worried about his safety if he had the surgery.

For another, “I come from a big family,” he said. “Food plays a big part in my life. I didn’t want to have to walk around with a long list of things I’d never be able to eat again.” When Bolduc told him he would need to lose 100 pounds before he could even be considered for surgery, his decision was made. “I thought, ‘If I can lose 100 pounds, why would I want to have the surgery?'”

Bolduc estimated that Loiselle must have been averaging 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day to have packed on so much extra weight over the years. She sent him home with a 2,500-calorie diet plan based on the familiar food pyramid developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was a drastic reduction, and she wasn’t convinced he would stick with it.

When he came back a month later, Loiselle had dropped 15 pounds. Bolduc guessed that her new client was holding the line at closer to 1,600 calories a day, the recommended intake for a moderately active 150-pound adult. “He had a ton of diet and exercise questions. It was really clear that he was serious,” Bolduc said.

At the end of the second month, he had lost another 20 pounds. A month after that, at Christmastime, he was down a total of 57 pounds, to an even 700 pounds. He gave a 50-cent piece to every member of his family to mark the occasion, but made no promises to himself or anyone else.

“I didn’t tell anyone in case I had a bad month,” he said. “When I started, I didn’t think I’d lose a ton of weight. I didn’t set goals. I just went month to month, and I celebrated the milestones.”

Exercise, surgery, limelight

As successful as Loiselle has been in sticking to his diet, he says exercise has played a key role in his weight loss. He was so heavy when he first started his diet that almost any kind of intentional exercise was out of the question. He was self-conscious about working out in public and too big to move much anyway. Another obstacle was the lack of an indoor track or even a covered shopping mall in the Ellsworth area. The YMCA gym was crowded and intimidating, Loiselle said.

So after Christmas that first winter, he started using a lap-held “arm bike,” pedaling slowly as he and Cricket watched television in the evenings. By April, when the weather started to break, he was able to start a solitary after-work walking program at the middle school track. His initial challenge was to walk one lap – a quarter-mile – without stopping. It was slow going – he would get breathless and exhausted, and his muscles would burn and cramp up in protest to the unaccustomed strain. But within a few months he could make two laps and then three. A year later, he said, “I was measuring by the mile, not the laps.”

Now Loiselle walks four or five miles three times a week. On the days he’s not out burning up the back roads, he lifts weights at a local physical therapy center – the Y is still too crowded and competitive for his comfort. His workout routine takes priority over just about everything else in his life.

In April of this year, weighing in at an airy 290, Loiselle underwent surgery to remove the “apron” of empty, excess skin that hung from his belly to midthigh. Making a hip-to-hip incision, a Portland plastic surgeon removed about 8 pounds of hanging skin and other tissue, carefully repositioned Loiselle’s bellybutton and stitched him back together in a sleek new profile. He may not ever be a swimsuit model – he still has plenty of extra epidermis on his arms and legs, he said – but he looks good in his khakis and feels more agile and confident.

While this procedure, known as a panniculectomy, is often considered purely cosmetic, Loiselle’s insurance covered it because he was experiencing frequent superficial skin infections. He speculates that insurance adjusters may have realized how much they saved when he decided not to have the risky gastric bypass operation, as well as the many chronic diseases he’ll likely avoid because of his dramatic weight loss.

Loiselle’s metamorphosis has not gone unnoticed in his community. How could it? “My students have always been my greatest defenders,” he said. Former students have looked him up to tell him how great he looks and how his dogged determination has impressed them.

A dedicated fan of the University of Maine men’s hockey team, Loiselle recalls the time an assistant coach from the opposing team approached him between periods to introduce himself. “He said, ‘I’ve been seeing you here for a long time, but I’ve been seeing a whole lot less of you recently,'” Loiselle said, grinning.

A local television station has featured him twice on the evening news. And, with a little prodding from Loiselle’s sister in Chicago, talk show host Oprah Winfrey is planning to feature him in a future episode. Winfrey’s crews interviewed him in Portland before his panniculectomy in April, and, if all goes according to plan, he’ll fly out next spring to the Windy City to tape another interview.

“Someone said, ‘Now you’ll have to keep the weight off until then,'” Loiselle said. “It didn’t really bother me; it was just a little ignorant.” He has no intention of gaining back his weight. “My competitive nature won’t let me,” he said.

Winning at life

All of the hoopla seems surreal to the down-to-earth Eddington native, who credits the support of his close-knit family with his success. “I was really doing it for them,” Loiselle said. In direct and indirect ways, they made it easier. Loiselle chose to allow himself token servings of even the most egregiously fattening foods served up at family functions, but family members supported him by providing more-healthful choices as well. Pretty soon everyone was eating a little better, Loiselle said, benefiting from the lifetime nutritional strategies he was learning.

The nonrestrictive diet, with an emphasis on smaller portions, less fat and plenty of fruits and vegetables, has given him the tools to eat right for the rest of his life, he said. He keeps a small supply of sweet treats on hand, for example, because he knows he can have a cookie or two without scoffing down the whole bag.

Cricket, who also struggles with her weight, says his self-control is sometimes frustrating. She doesn’t have the same degree of restraint and would prefer to keep cookies and other snacks out of the house.

But overall, she said, her husband’s diet hasn’t changed their dining habits much, and they often eat together. She doesn’t try to keep up with his exercise regimen, though. “I just sit back and watch him go,” she said.

Cricket said she used to fret about her husband’s health. “I was always worried about him overdoing – hurting his back or dropping dead of a heart attack,” she said. “I always mowed the lawn and shoveled the snow.” Now she’s content to find him doing yardwork as well as housework.

For his part, Loiselle is glad finally to be pulling his weight at home and is enjoying life as a slender man. He and Cricket have been going to the movies (“Rocky 2” was the last time he had been able to squeeze into a theater seat) and have gone to concerts featuring Canadian singer Anne Murray, country rocker Alan Jackson and the rock band Boston. Just before school ended last spring, he accompanied his graduating eighth-graders on a class trip to a New Hampshire amusement park and even rode the roller coasters. He has flown to New York to visit one sister and is looking forward to seeing another sister when he flies to Chicago this month to meet Oprah.

He wants to take a cruise, try sea kayaking and start riding a bicycle, none of which he could do when he weighed close to 800 pounds.

So ultimately, “Big Pete” Loiselle, the big fat loser, is really a winner – and an inspiration to others struggling to control their weight and their lives.

Meg Haskell can be reached at 990-8291 and mhaskell@bangordailynews.net.