Bob Harper

How Bob Harper changed his life after surviving a widowmaker heart attack

- Devon Preston

Close your eyes. Now imagine the type of lifestyle which makes an individual susceptible to a heart attack. Open your eyes. Standing before you is Bob Harper, who at 54-years-old has trained overweight Americans on The Biggest Loser for the past 15 years, was once an avid CrossFit athlete and overall, has maintained a near perfect physical physique throughout his lifetime. But, on February 12th of 2017, Harper’s life was thrown off balance when he suffered a widowmaker heart attack, which according to the Institute of Medicine has a survival rate of less than 10 percent.

“The last thing that I can remember was February 11th,” shares Harper, who’d spent the evening at a West Village restaurant with friends. “It was an early night, I left them, went home and the next thing that I remember, I was in a hospital two days later being told that I’d not only had a heart attack but went into cardiac arrest.” From what Harper had been told by friends afterwaking up in the hospital, he complained about being dizzy and not himself during the morning of the attack. Then, partway through his workout, he laid down and rolled onto his side. Luckily for Harper, there was a doctor in the building who went into full attack mode after seeing Harper blue on the ground. While performing CPR, the doctor struggled to get the defibrillator to go off, as Harper had already flatlined. “I’ve been told that could have been it for some people, but he was so persistent and kept performing CPR until he got some sort of current going through my heart,” explains Harper. “By that time, paramedics came and gave me their full on jolt.”