TOM ARNOLD CHEATED DEATH.LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING NOW.

The comedian lost 80 pounds while keeping his sense of humor with the help of his life coach, Charles D'Angelo.

- ALEX BHATTACHARJI

FADE TO BLACK. Tom Arnold had seen the cinematic device countless times in his nearly 40-year TV-and-film career, but this scene wasn't in the script: At home on the night of January 16, 2022, the vision in Arnold's right eye went dark as he was waiting for his children to get out of the bathtub. "I felt a curtain come down, and it was black," the 63-year-old actor and comedian recalls. "I could feel it in my brain, too. I was like, 'That's weird.""

The following morning, Arnold drove himself to his doctor's office, thinking perhaps he had floaters in his eye. The staff told him to go to the UCLA medical center immediately and enter the 24-hour stroke protocol. The diagnosis left him reeling. "Hearing 'You had a stroke,' it puts you in a dark place," Arnold says. "It shakes you." A battery of tests determined he had suffered an ischemic attack, blocking blood to part of his brain, categorized as level 1 on the NIH Stroke Scale. It wasn't severe enough to take his life, but it was serious enough to change it. "What have I done to myself? I've let myself go," Arnold recalls thinking. Most of all, he wondered what was next. "I kept thinking, Oh crap, now what?"

Nine months after the incident, Arnold feels and looks reborn. He's seated on a sofa in his home in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley beside Charles D'Angelo, a well-known weight-loss and motivational coach. A few hours earlier, on this late-September day, client and coach met in person for the first time since they began working together virtually eight months prior. Arnold, who weighed 285 pounds at the time of his stroke, is a lean 205. More telling than what he's lost is what he's gained: a renewed sense of awareness, accountability, and affirmation from D'Angelo, his life and weight-loss coach and buddy.