David Harbour says his weight loss ‘felt like a rebirth’

THANKS to his acting job, David Harbour has acquired a new relationship with physical activity. The actor said that improving his health “felt like a rebirth” because he was able to accomplish “simple little things” such as running away from oncoming traffic.

The 47-year-old said to People magazine: “There was a moment where I was crossing the street in New York and there was a car coming and I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta sprint a little bit across the street,‘ and I just couldn’t sprint.

“And I was like, ‘Oh I guess that’s gone. I guess I’ll just never sort of run across the street.’ I mean at this point I was like 270lbs (122.5kg) and my knees were kind of shot. And I just sort of thought that that’s the way life was, that was the trajectory of your body.”

The actor “established a new relationship” with his body only in recent years, when he had to lose 80 pounds for his role as Sheriff Jim Hopper in the Netflix series Stranger Things. He describes his weight loss and new workout experience as eye-opening.

“It opened up a whole new world, [I’m] a lot more pliable and a lot more teachable, even in my mid 40s, than I ever imagined it could be. And it felt like a rebirth. It was really refreshing and really exciting to feel like after months of training like, Oh now I can just sprint across the street if a car comes. Just simple little things like that that were really exciting for me.”

Harbour spent eight months training for the most recent season of Stranger Things, committing to an exercise programme and initiating intermittent fasting. He appreciates the career-long physique transformations he is able to achieve.