HEALTH & FITNESS : ATTAINING THE BODY BEAUTIFUL : BIG LOSERS : After Taking Off Weight, They Feel Like Winners

Remember the first time you saw yourself in one of those fun-house mirrors?

You giggled. You wiggled, watching yourself change from short and fat to tall and skinny. And you couldn’t believe that that was really you staring back.

For Steve Brigandy, Paul Dunfee and Pat Rowe, every mirror has that effect these days. After losing 140, 158 and 220 pounds, respectively, they hardly recognize their own reflections.

“I was window-shopping one day and saw myself in the glass,” says Rowe. “I started looking around to see who that person was. It took me a minute to realize it was me.”

“I do one of those classic cartoon double takes,” Dunfee says. “I’m like, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ ”

“I’m still not used to it,” Brigandy says. “When I wake up in the morning, it takes a few minutes to remember I’m not fat anymore.”

Most people would take offense at being called losers. But after years of frustration, ridicule and failure, losing in a big way has made Brigandy, Rowe and Dunfee feel like winners at last.

Dr. Marvin Rofsky, a psychologist in Orange who himself has lost more than 50 pounds in the past year, says that strange feeling is a normal part of the process. “It takes a long time for your visual perception to catch up with reality,” he says. “When you’re overweight, you’re used to looking at yourself and not looking because you want to avoid the gross blob that you’ve become.”

Being overweight is a problem no matter where you live. But Rofsky says it’s especially difficult in body-conscious Southern California. “You feel like an outsider here,” he says. “There’s so much pressure to be slim and beautiful. Fat people are discriminated against; they feel alienated. As a fat psychologist, I had some patients comment on my weight, even eating-disorder patients, because I obviously wasn’t dealing with my own eating disorder.”

And the pressure rarely has a positive effect, he says. “It didn’t motivate me to lose weight. It just made me feel worse about myself.

“All the comments and teasing just make you more inclined to eat more. You learn to soothe yourself with food. Then you feel guilty, so you comfort yourself by eating more. And if you’re already fat, you think, ‘Oh, what the hell? What’s another 500 calories?’ ”

The motivation to lose has to come from within, Rofsky says, and Rowe, Brigandy and Dunfee agree.

“You can’t just go on a diet or decide to exercise more,” Rofsky says. “You have to decide to change your lifestyle. Permanently.”

Once the decision is made, Rofsky says, it’s important to give yourself small goals, such as five pounds at a time. “If you set your goals too far ahead, there’s no reinforcement until you get there, and you probably won’t. But if you have mini-goals, you can make them and you get constant reinforcement. You can see your progress.”

But if you’ve lost as much as 100 pounds--the equivalent of an adult human being--isn’t it only natural to feel you’ve lost part of yourself as well?

It does feel strange at first, big losers say. But Rowe says she thinks of the weight she lost as padding that protected her from reality, and not part of who she was.

“A lot of heavy people, myself included, think they can do things, but they’re afraid they can’t, so their weight is like a cushion. It was a daydream. I lived in a little world of my own. But after you lose the weight, you don’t have that to fall back on anymore.”

With a new body come new problems. “I have one patient who was using fat as a defense, to keep men away,” Rofsky says. “She had to deal with being attractive for the first time, and it was frightening for her. And if people are using food to stuff their feelings--as a lot of people do--then once they stop eating they need to deal with those feelings they’ve been stuffing.”

And even after the weight is gone, there is always the fear that it will come back. “It’s just like being a recovering alcoholic,” Dunfee says.

A year ago, Brigandy weighed in at 370 pounds. “I had tried all kinds of diets, but every time, I ended up gaining,” says the 6-foot, 7-inch San Clemente resident.

“It doesn’t matter what diet you try. It won’t work until you’re ready,” he says.

Brigandy, 24, remembers clearly the moment he knew he was ready. “I was in a restaurant with a friend of mine,” he says. “We were in a booth, and I realized I could see all this space between his stomach and the table. But my stomach was hitting the table. And I thought, ‘Steve, what are you doing to yourself?’ I just got motivated. I decided I was killing myself, and I wanted to live.”

The next day he called Weight Watchers and joined its Inner Circle, a small group within the organization. “I was so embarrassed. Their scale only went up to 350 pounds, so they had to use all this extra stuff just to weigh me.”

Seven months later, Brigandy had lost 140 pounds, “and that’s the fastest loss on record” with his group, he says. “I didn’t use any drugs or anything. It was totally natural.

“I learned to eat food that’s better for you, and I learned not to eat so much. Before, I couldn’t take just one Oreo. I had to finish the bag. I ate a lot of burgers and fries and only had a salad about once a month. Now I have a huge salad every night. And I keep track of what I eat. Now I can have a cookie if I want, and then I can stop.

“What I eat isn’t just a diet, it’s a way of life. I think that’s the secret to making it work. It’s all in your head.”

In addition to dieting, Brigandy started exercising regularly. “First I walked three days a week, then I got a mountain bike, and after that I joined a health club. Now I do an hour and a half cardiovascular workout, I lift weights and cross-train. Also, the day they told me I hit goal weight, I went out and bought a new Jetski.”

After he lost weight, Brigandy threw away all his old clothes. “That was a way of telling myself I can’t go back,” he says.

As a reminder, Brigandy keeps a four-foot-tall picture of his “before” self in the office of his San Clemente auto repair shop. “I don’t want to forget,” he says.

When Pat Rowe of Garden Grove reached her goal of 136 pounds 14 months ago, she didn’t feel quite at home in her own body. “I really have no reference,” she says. “I can’t say, ‘I remember when I was this weight,’ because I never was. I must have been at some point, but that was when I was a child.”

When she was growing up, Rowe was teased constantly by the other children for being fat. She dieted her way down to 160 as a teen-ager, “enough to make me a chubette, not quite so blimpo. But by the end of my senior year, I was back up to 240.”

That’s what she weighed the day she was married. Her husband, Dennis, never complained about her weight. “All he said was, ‘The only thing I worry about is your health,’ ” she said.

“I tried diets on and off; I joined Weight Watchers at least four times. But I just wasn’t ready.”

Turning 40 two years ago was what brought on the change for Rowe.

“You know how men in their middle-age crisis go out and buy a little red sports car?” she says. “I decided I was going to get a better body.”

But the day she decided to lose weight, Rowe wasn’t feeling nearly so flippant. “Suddenly I realized I wasn’t going to live forever. And I decided if I couldn’t live some other way, I didn’t want to live at all.

“I realized that at that weight--356 pounds--I would never live to see my grandchildren. And I’d never be able to do so many of the things I wanted to do, like dancing, camping, or taking long walks on the beach. I wanted to travel after we retired, but I realized I’d never live long enough to retire.”

At first, Rowe was so large that she couldn’t exercise much. But as she shed the pounds with help from Weight Watchers, she started walking. Now she walks four miles every day “and more on the weekends.”

One day her daughter, 15-year-old Jennifer, was shocked when she came home from school and saw that her mother had borrowed her bicycle. “She didn’t even think I knew how to ride,” Rowe says. “And it had been 30 years since I had.”

“I ran up and down the street yelling, ‘My mom can ride a bike!’ ” Jennifer says. “I was so proud of her.”

Rowe says looking in the mirror feels strange not only because the person looking back is so different, but because over a lifetime of being fat, she learned not to look at all. “I always would just look at my eyes. Everything else was just a blur.”

Her new body has given Rowe new confidence. “Before, I was always the kind of woman who would say, ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’ ” Now I negotiate. If we’re going out to dinner, I’ll say, ‘OK, let’s go to my place this time, and we’ll go to yours the next time.’ ”

But she still has the fear, just under the surface, that the weight will come back.

“You know how most people have nightmares about falling or being chased by monsters? In my nightmares, I eat ice cream.”

Age 40 was also the trigger for Dunfee.

But unlike Brigandy and Rowe, he remembered what it felt like to be thin because he had lost more than 150 pounds a decade before, only to gain it back two years later.

“I never had a weight problem until I was 26,” he says. “But then I became a compulsive overeater. It’s not a conscious choice; it’s an addiction--just like alcoholism. The fact that you’re getting bigger, that it’s killing you, doesn’t matter.”

At age 30 and 357 pounds, Dunfee went to the UC Irvine Weight Management Program, where he was put on a liquid diet.

“When I started eating food again, the first thing I ate was a couple of boxes of brownie mix,” he says.

Ten years later, he decided that it was time to take the weight off for good, so he called UCI again.

This time, Dunfee feels confident that he’ll be able to maintain his new weight. “I’ve been going to the maintenance meetings, and I go to Overeaters Anonymous three times a week. I’ve got more confidence, but I’m not smug about it. I know I have a life problem. It’s sort of like being a sober drunk.”

“Everybody treats you different when you’re thin,” he says. “People feel more comfortable toward you; it shows in their body language. I’ve noticed people stand closer to me now than they did before. With fat people, they meet your eyes and then look away.”

Dunfee says he’s now in the process of redefining himself to go along with his new image. “It’s like I’ve joined the real world. I don’t sit home by myself anymore and eat doughnuts and burritos. I’m a lot more focused, and my life has changed in other ways too. I always lived with bad credit, and now I’m getting that taken care of. I feel really lucky. I didn’t just lose weight. I discovered something about myself.

“But it’s very scary. You feel like you’re out there, you’re vulnerable. Now that you’ve lost the weight, it’s time to go do all the things you’ve put on hold for so long.”