Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels were a dynamic duo for 13 seasons of The Biggest Loser, but when Harper suffered a near-death experience, Michaels was nowhere to be found.
That’s what Harper, one of the weight-loss show’s original trainers who eventually hosted the final two seasons, told The Guardian in an interview published on Thursday.
In 2017, Harper suffered a heart attack at age 51 due to an undiagnosed genetic condition. He was clinically dead for nine minutes on the floor of his gym, only surviving thanks to a doctor who was present to administer CPR.
He said that many of his Biggest Loser colleagues reached out, but that he never got a call from Michaels.
“We weren’t besties, but we were partners on a television show for a very long time,” Harper said, adding that it “spoke volumes to me” that she didn’t reach out.
Harper and Michaels were both present at the show’s inception in 2004, and competed against each other to help the show’s contestants lose as much weight as possible.
The two were the primary trainers on the show for its first eight seasons, coaxing and prodding contestants to lose upwards of 250 pounds in 30 weeks.
Harper is featured in a new documentary about the show, Fit for TV, which debuted on Netflix earlier this month.
In the documentary, Harper defends the controversial tactics and premises of the show—which has come under fire in recent years as multiple former contestants have spoken about the physical and mental toll it exacted.
“I would never put anyone in harm’s way,” Harper said in the doc, even as contestants described how producers encouraged them to go to extreme lengths to drop pounds.
Michaels, who became known as the more aggressive of the two trainers, broke the rules of the show when she gave her team appetite-suppressing caffeine pills in 2013.
She left the show in 2013, and has built up her own independent fitness brand since then.
In 2024, during an appearance on Fox and Friends, Michaels expressed her support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and echoed some of his talking points about autism and infertility.
She has since become a MAHA advocate, visiting the White House in May to attend the release of “The MAHA Report,” a 78-page document that was filled with citations to journal articles that do not exist (and might have been AI-generated).
She has also made appearances on the shows of several right-leaning podcast hosts, including Benny Johnson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan.
Apart from The Biggest Loser, Harper has also advised on The New Celebrity and competed on the reality TV The Traitors.
