ELLSWORTH (AP) – Call Peter Loiselle a big fat loser and he’d have to agree.

Between October 2001 and July 2004, the Surry Elementary School teacher lost nearly 500 pounds, and he did it without gastric bypass surgery. He dropped the pounds the old-fashioned way – with diet and exercise.

These days, he’s a shell of his old self. At his peak, he weighed 763 pounds. Now 6-foot-6 “Big Pete” weighs in around 270.

Mainers like Loiselle have contributed to an obesity crisis now officially designated as an epidemic. A recent survey shows that 30 to 36 percent of children from kindergarten through high school are overweight or obese.

While Loiselle plays down his success, he readily admits having been inconvenienced and emotionally affected by his weight. He wasn’t able to be in his sister’s wedding because it was impossible to find a tuxedo that fit.

Going out in public before he lost the weight attracted so much attention – snickers, stares, pointing fingers and barefaced insults – that he stayed home when he wasn’t working.

Loiselle never considered getting serious about losing weight until he began suffering health problems. In the past decade Loiselle had been hospitalized four times with a dangerous infection just below the skin.

Each time he was admitted, the hospital arranged for a trucking company to bring freight scales to weigh him, Loiselle recalled.

“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.

He made an appointment at the surgical weight loss program at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. When he first visited dietitian Lynn Bolduc, she was convinced 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.

And 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. She sent him home with a 2,500-calorie diet plan based on the government’s food pyramid.

A month later, he had lost 15 pounds. At the end of the second month, he had lost another 20 pounds. Another month and he was down to an even 700 pounds.

As successful as Loiselle has been in sticking to his diet, he says exercise played a key role in his weight loss.

He was so heavy when he first started dieting that almost any kind of exercise was out of the question. After Christmas that first winter, he started using a lap-held “arm bike,” pedaling slowly as he watched television in the evenings.

When the weather broke in April, he was able to start walking after work. 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.”

Last April, weighing in at 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 skin, carefully repositioned his bellybutton and stitched him up in a sleek new profile.

Loiselle’s metamorphosis has not gone unnoticed in his community.

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 plans to feature him in a future episode.

Winfrey’s crews interviewed him in Portland before his surgery. If all goes according to plan, he’ll fly out next spring to Chicago 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.