Neha Pathak, MD, FACP, DipABLM: Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast. I'm Dr Neha Pathak, WebMD's chief Physician Editor for Health and Lifestyle Medicine. Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. About one in five heart attacks are silent, meaning that the damage is done, but the person is not aware of it.
Very often on this podcast, we highlight prevention, but today we're going to talk about what happens after a heart attack. A heart attack can change everything. It's not just a single medical event. For many of us, it can bring up uncertainty, fear, and there can be a lot of unanswered questions.
We will talk about what's going on inside your heart and blood vessels and how some of those changes can differ between men and women. We will highlight the signs and symptoms to watch out for, including what could signal another cardiac event, and talk about the physical and emotional side effects that often go undiscussed but are also so important to understand.
We will explore what long-term recovery looks like, the lifestyle shifts that matter most, how to make small, realistic changes that truly stick, and how loved ones can best support someone rebuilding their strength and confidence after a heart attack.
Whether you've recently experienced a heart attack or are supporting someone who has, this episode offers guidance, reassurance, and the knowledge you need to face what comes next, one step at a time. First, let me introduce my guest, Dr Harmony Reynolds. Dr Reynolds is the director of both the Center for Women's Cardiovascular Health and the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center at NYU Langone Health. She's also a professor of cardiology in the Department of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Welcome to the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast.

Harmony R. Reynolds, MD: Thank you so much, Dr Pathak. It's a pleasure to be here.

Pathak: I think it is really important that we're discussing this topic, so thank you so much for joining us to have this conversation. But before we jump into exploring our topic, I'd love to ask about your own health discovery when it comes to treating patients who've experienced a heart attack.

Reynolds: Patients who've experienced a heart attack really have a wide variety of reactions, but something that I've seen quite a bit and wasn't aware of before is that there are a number of people who really feel like they're made of glass after a heart attack, and even more than they feel it, their families feel it.
So they may find themselves wanting to see what they can handle, and the families may be holding them back out of an abundance of love and care. But it can actually impede recovery when people are trying to tell you, “No, no, you can't do that.” It kind of perpetuates a sick role, and it might not be so beneficial.

Pathak: What's happening in the body when someone is having a heart attack?

Reynolds: When we use the phrase “heart attack,” as you know, we're talking about the medical term myocardial infarction, and that is death of heart muscle because of compromise in blood flow. Now, there are many other abrupt heart events that happen, like sudden cardiac death, and this may be a very dramatic and important thing, and I can understand why lay folks might call that a heart attack too.
But when we as physicians talk about heart attack, we are talking again about death of heart muscle cells because of a lack of blood flow, and it doesn't specify the reason for the lack of blood flow. And there are a number of them.

Pathak: So let's talk about that in terms of the types of symptoms that you might experience because of a lack of blood flow.

Reynolds: Those symptoms of heart attack include a variety of things that are sensed in the chest, but generally there's going to be some kind of pain or discomfort in the chest in the large majority of cases. The thing is, though, that it may be subtle. One of my patients said it, I think, in the best way. She said she thought her heart attack would be so overwhelming that she couldn't stand it, and when that was a symptom that she could stand, she thought maybe she didn't need to go to the hospital for that — that it would be a bother.
But that's heart attack pain for you. It does not have to be terribly severe or overwhelming. Sometimes it is, and it certainly is in the movies, but it isn't that way for everyone.
And it might not be exactly in the chest. It could be in the jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, back, upper stomach. But often there will be a component in the chest. That might come with shortness of breath — a feeling that the breathing is just wrong. It might come with nausea, vomiting, sweating, dizziness, that feeling that something is terribly wrong.
You could have any of those things. You could have only one of those things. You could have none of them, and that's a lot of symptoms. So people may find it confusing.

Pathak: I think you also highlight a critical point, which is that sometimes your body just doesn't follow the rules that you've heard from everyone else. And so it's really, really important to trust yourself. And if it doesn't feel like yourself, and it's something where you just have this feeling that it's not right and you don't feel well, it's better to get it checked out.

Reynolds: Absolutely — and better to get it checked out in an emergency room where we do not only an EKG but also troponin testing. They need to do more than one troponin test in the blood in order to be sure. And I think there used to be more of a reliance on an EKG for larger old-school type heart attacks, but now we know that lots of people who have heart attacks have a normal EKG, and you need to stay for those blood tests.

Pathak: So I want to pull on two threads of things that you said earlier. So one was that a heart attack is essentially lack of blood flow to parts of the heart, but it could happen for a variety of reasons. So talk about some of those reasons that might be causing a heart attack.

Reynolds: Sure. The most common reason is lack of blood flow because of a combination of plaque buildup and blood clotting. Plaque is that stuff that builds up in the arteries out of cholesterol and inflammation, building up over many years. And then, for reasons that we don't always understand, some plaques are more vulnerable than others.
Even vulnerable plaques — we don't know why the day, but someday sometimes they burst. And as that interior of this stuff is almost like a pimple that pops, as one of my colleagues says, as it's exposed to the flowing blood, the blood will clot, and that clot can completely close the artery. And then there's not enough blood flow for the heart to function.
So that's the most common cause — that's atherosclerosis or coronary artery disease.
Another reason might be that there's blood clotting without plaque, or maybe there's a plaque that's pretty small. So when it becomes unstable, there's a small blood clot, and it travels down the vessel, knocks out a small branch.
That's important to think about because in such a case with a small plaque and small blood clot that travels, when we do the traditional test to look at the arteries — an angiogram — those arteries are going to look open because we might not notice a small branch. And that syndrome's called heart attack with open arteries, or the medical term is myocardial infarction with no obstructive coronary arteries.
That's an area of research of mine, and it's an area of interest because it disproportionately impacts women. Women are about three times more likely than men to get that type of heart attack. In years past, they were told, “Oh, your arteries are fine, and nothing's wrong with you,” and that…

Pathak: I am so glad you brought this up because this kind of leads into the other thread that I wanted to pull on, which is differences between men and women. And so you described one, which is there may be underlying differences in just the types of heart attacks we're having. Can you then extrapolate to the types of symptoms and what might be lesser-known, less common symptoms? Are there differences based on gender? And then if you could just sort of also talk to us about lesser-known symptoms.

Reynolds: The symptoms are actually more similar in men and women than they are different. When we were just talking about how chest discomfort is the central symptom — that's true in men, it's true in women — but by a small percentage, there’ll be more chest pain among men. Women are a little less likely when they have a heart attack to come in without chest discomfort.
And when I say pain, I really mean discomfort, right? I should avoid the word pain because it's not painful for everybody.
The effect of age is actually bigger than the effect of sex differences for that. So among older people compared to younger people, it's more likely to come in with your heart attack and not have chest pain.
But at every age, women are a little less likely to report chest discomfort than men. And women are a little more likely to report the extra symptoms we talked about — the breathing trouble, the nausea, vomiting, etc. — and to report more of them.
I don't know — if we could just get in the head of a male patient versus a female patient, would I know that I feel something different? Or are women just reporting it differently? Impossible to tell and a really interesting thought experiment. But regardless, for us as physicians, women report more symptoms.

Pathak: That's really helpful. And then can you talk to us about patients that have diabetes or other comorbidities that might change the way they feel, quote unquote, their heart attack pain.

Reynolds: Yeah, there are a number of problems that can deaden nerve endings and make it difficult for us to feel the things that are going on inside the body, just as it can be difficult to feel the fingers and toes with advanced diabetes. Some of those are known, like diabetes; others, like a problem called amyloidosis that's increasingly recognized, people might not even know they have.
So it does sometimes happen that you don't sense when something is wrong inside in terms of a discomfort or pain. And then we're relying much more on the extra symptoms like vomiting or that feeling of being really off.

Pathak: So this is really helpful in terms of someone who might be experiencing these symptoms, or these are the symptoms to look out for that would indicate the need for emergency care. So let's talk about that patient that's now in the emergency room. You mentioned a couple of tests that are critical to evaluate for heart attack.
Tell us a little bit more about what those tests are and what they're looking for.

Reynolds: The tests—the first—maybe we talk about it in terms of the time course of when people arrive in the emergency room. Within 10 minutes, we would expect that somebody who comes to the emergency room with possible heart attack symptoms will have an EKG. And that's just a bunch of stickers applied to the chest and the arms and legs with some wires attached.
And there's a recording that's painless of the electrical function of the heart that is very informative in certain cases. Sometimes there are gonna be red flag signs on that ECG that will make them rush you to additional testing. Most of the time, not. So most of the time it will rely on waiting for blood test reports, especially the troponin test, to see if there's any evidence of heart damage, because troponin generally reflects heart damage.
If any heart damage is seen with troponin, for example, then it's likely that the physician will recommend an angiogram, also called cardiac cath or cardiac catheterization. And that's a test where the person is lying on an X-ray table with an X-ray camera that moves around to take pictures. And we put a long, thin tube called a catheter into the arteries and snake it up to the heart, usually by entering at the wrist but sometimes at the groin, under a local anesthetic.
And people are awake for that. And they don't generally feel anything amiss. You see your arteries on the screen, which people say is usually pretty cool. And that's done to figure out if there is an artery that is closed or very badly narrowed, because in that case, it's important to open that artery with a stent before or in addition to giving a number of medications.

Pathak: So I think that's really helpful, sort of step by step, what you might expect if you come into the hospital with chest pain or chest discomfort—heart attack symptoms. This is the normal trajectory of what you could expect with regard to testing and evaluation. And so now let's say you have been told you had a heart attack, you had a stent placed. What is the next step in that process?

Reynolds: Next step is instituting proper medications. Even for people who don't need stents placed, who've had heart events, it's important to get on a proper regimen of medications to prevent any problems from happening. For some people, this is a big adjustment. Some of the people who come in with a heart attack have never taken medication before,
and it might take some mental getting used to, but the medicines that we offer have been proven in large clinical trials to reduce the risk of another event happening and, in many cases, to extend life.

Pathak: So talk to us a little bit about the classes of medicines that you're likely going to need to start once you've been diagnosed with—or you've had—a heart attack.

Reynolds: The different classes of medicines attack the problem from different angles, and it's useful, I think, for people to ask, “What is this pill doing for me?” so that you can understand it and understand why there are multiple medicines being prescribed. One class will be the antiplatelet drugs. They prevent blood clotting.
So imagine that there isn't generally one plaque in the arteries; there's generally plaque in multiple spots and sometimes throughout the arteries. This spot may have flared up today, but another spot could flare up next week. And if that happens, we don't want the blood to be so prone to clotting in that area.
That's the reason we give aspirin and other antiplatelet drugs like clopidogrel, ticagrelor, prasugrel. Another class is cholesterol-lowering—extremely important to stabilize whatever other plaque is there so that it should not cause problems later. And you can really firm up these soft, vulnerable plaques into a safer thing by depleting them of cholesterol, and they really become quieter.
So we want to drive the cholesterol very low. People say, “Isn't that too low? My LDL cholesterol just came back…” Somebody asked me today, “My LDL cholesterol came back at 31, and my internist asked if I'm taking too much medication.” Oh, no, that number was perfect. People, you know, who have hunter-gatherer lifestyles, who live the way our old ancestors did—
that's what the LDL cholesterol looks like. It's 30 to 50. It's these unhealthy diets and unhealthy sedentary lifestyles we have that drive the cholesterol too high, and we've just become accustomed to seeing numbers like an LDL of 130. One-thirty is too high, and it's way too high after a heart attack.
So we drive the cholesterol super low to freeze any plaque where it is and prevent new plaque from forming. Then we've got—if somebody has high blood pressure—we have medications to offer to lower blood pressure. We didn't talk about artery spasm, but that's a contributor to heart attack, with plaque or even without plaque, where the artery muscle can go into a cramp and temporarily narrow the artery.
We have medicines that deal with that. Those are also good for lowering blood pressure. If somebody has diabetes, we want to get that under control, because the high blood sugar basically sort of rusts the arteries from the inside. Now what am I forgetting? If the heart muscle's been weakened, we have medicines that we know support the heart muscle to function better and to extend life.

Pathak: So can you tell us a little bit about what we know around beta blockers?

Reynolds: So often people will come away with four medicines. Beta blockers—super interesting story because we're constantly doing new research, and the results are always changing. And it's one of the interesting things about clinical trials in medical science that when you test something—let's say that beta blockers were tested, I think, more like 1970s, 1980s, 1990s—at that time, we did not have the effective cholesterol lowering we have now.
We didn't have the generation of stents and opening-artery procedures that we have now, and we didn't get to people early in the way that we do now, with more public health campaigns, including education like this podcast. So people were only having really big heart attacks, and big heart attack patients benefited from beta blockers.
Now we have many more smaller heart attacks, and the latest research, as you know, is that smaller heart attack patients probably don't benefit so much from beta blockers. They may not be necessary. But you needed to retest that—even though it was old news; it was settled law. You’ve gotta think about it again because the background of how patients are treated now and the kinds of heart attacks we can find now is so different.

Pathak: So I think this is really, really helpful, and I'd love to talk also around lifestyle changes that people need to take, because as we know in all of our clinical practice guidelines for heart attacks—but also for all of those other conditions that can travel along from high blood pressure to high cholesterol to diabetes—lifestyle changes are really the foundation on which all of these other therapies rest. So can you talk to us a little bit about shifts and changes that you talk to your patients about when it comes to tobacco, when it comes to the nutrition that they put into their bodies, physical activity? Talk a little bit about those prescriptions as well.

Reynolds: Healthy lifestyle makes such a difference. I mean, they call it healthy lifestyle because it improves health if you have the proper lifestyle habits. You mentioned tobacco. Tobacco is still public enemy number one—killed my mother with lung cancer. I hate it. The goal is not smoking. And when people come with a heart attack, it's a really good time to make a commitment not to smoke.
So we prefer that people leave the hospital and never pick up a cigarette again. For some people, that is not achievable. And then it's important to keep in mind that every single cigarette you don't smoke lowers your risk. This is knowledge from a study called INTERHEART that included, I believe, more than a hundred thousand patients around the world.
And because they had so many people, they could track the risk and show that it was better to smoke five cigarettes than seven cigarettes, which was better than ten, which was not as good as two. So really, for the smokers, every single time you reach for a cigarette and you don't smoke it, your risk is lower.
But of course, we want no smoke whatsoever of any sort. Diet and exercise are important and are something that people who've never had a heart attack can focus on, and it'll lower your risk. I'm a big proponent of healthy diet, and I think it's important to talk about what we should do before we even talk about what we shouldn't do.
Because if we're eating lots of healthy food, there isn't a ton of room for all of the junk. Vegetables are very important. They say “Eat the rainbow.” I saw a nutritionist give a lecture recently—I thought this was a really interesting way of putting it. She said, “These plants are making chemicals that protect them in a hostile environment, and if we eat vegetables, we're getting all the benefit of how the plants defended themselves.”
So I thought that was kind of a cool way of thinking about it. Fortunately for me, I just like green vegetables. So eat whatever it is that you like. We're aiming for vegetables to be half your dinner plate, assuming that dinner is your biggest meal. But if you eat a salad, you can imagine it's on the plate, and those are really important.
Increase fiber in your diet, which can lower cholesterol. They're generally heart healthy, and they prevent cancer. So eating vegetables would be a number-one great thing to do. We believe that eating fish is healthy in heart disease prevention—ideally two servings a week. The Mediterranean diet has been shown to improve heart risk, especially when it includes olive oil.
So olive oil should be the main fat, in my opinion, that people are eating in their diet. Main thing that you're cooking with—if you have it on a salad, that's great. I aim for people to get about a tablespoon of olive oil in the food or in the cooking a day because that amount seems to be associated with lower risk.
It's great to eat whole grains instead of white grains. The legume family seems to be real healthy—chickpeas, beans, lentils, nuts—and nuts themselves, whether tree nuts or legumes, are really healthy. So focusing on eating all those things is wonderful. I also think—not every physician believes in low-fat dairy—I'm a proponent that low-fat dairy is a good source of protein and calcium, but I understand that there is a variance of opinion on that.

Pathak: So if you're thinking about what you said as green-light foods, these are just green light — go, don't think about it. You can have it now. Talk to us about some of those red lights and the “really think about this and really try to crowd it out.”

Reynolds: Oh, green light — I like that. So bad stuff. The worst is processed meats: bacon, sausage, salami, ham. Even deli meat that doesn't look like meat, I think, is probably quite bad for us. Desserts, especially the super processed stuff, are probably all dessert 'cause it's made with high saturated fat. So cookies, muffins, ice cream, pastries. I'm sorry to take these foods away from people. I always ask about muffins, and people say, “Muffins? Really?” Cake for breakfast — come on. What else is bad?

I worry about high-fat dairy, full-fat dairy, full-fat yogurt, whole milk, especially half-and-half. I worry a bit about cheese, although I have a soft spot for it because it's a good source of protein and calcium. I'd really like people to move toward low-fat cheese. And then all the fried stuff — unfortunately, a lot of easily available options.

Pathak: So I'd love to then kind of shift our conversation to what we started with, which is caring for our loved ones. So we've talked a lot about how someone's life might change after a heart attack. We've talked about really important interventions from lifestyle to some of the new medicines that you might be put on. Now let's talk about the loved ones in our lives. How can they help us?

Reynolds: I think they can help by supporting the lifestyle changes. For some people, these are really big changes — eating healthier, getting out to exercise regularly — and it's a shift, it's a challenge for some people. If your family supports you, it's so much easier. So if you are in a day where you sort of don't feel like going out for that walk and somebody in the family is saying, “Come on, I really want you to be healthy. Let's walk together.”

That is going to be more likely to get you out. “Let's go to the gym together.” “What's my gift to you? I want to give you a treat. Let me bring a fruit salad to this holiday so that you can have something healthy to eat. And let's show my children also that this is — we eat these foods 'cause they make us feel good and we like them.”

So I think just setting a culture in the community, in the family, or in the friend group of saying, “I wanna help you be healthy. Let me give you all this great stuff and go with you to exercise.” That is a wonderful support.

Pathak: For the loved ones out there who are sort of really worried about pushing their loved one too far, what are the questions that they should be asking of the healthcare team? How do they figure out what's the best way to progress when it comes to physical activity, for example?

Reynolds: I think it's great when family members accompany patients to office visits. I like to have somebody with me for important office visits because I get nervous when I'm in the patient role and I forget stuff, so people can then remind me what the doctor said. Asking questions is great. Bring a list, and important questions would be: What should my family member be eating? Which of these medicines is most important? Often they're all important — but what are they for? Why are we doing this? How long is this treatment going to last? Often it's lifelong, and that's fine, so we know that upfront.

“How much exercise can we do? What's safe?” And sometimes a person who's in the patient role may be afraid to ask a question because the answer might feel scary. So if you know that your family member has a concern — whatever it is. “Is it safe to have sex? Is it safe to fly? Can I go to this family reunion?” Whatever it might be — if you forward that question to the doctor so the patient doesn't have to give voice to something that's frightening, that can be helpful too.

Pathak: Tell us a little bit about that first year out. What are things that people should really be expecting from themselves physically, emotionally? We know that heart attacks can take a big toll on your mental health. What can we expect a year out for day-to-day life to look like?

Reynolds: My expectation for people a year out is that they should feel back to themselves, and often much sooner than that. But there may be things you look back on and say, “Oh, I do this better now. I feel better because I'm exercising more. I didn't use to do that before.” So I think it would be nice if we achieve a lower stress level by figuring out which things were triggering us that maybe didn't need to, and learning to let those things go.

So some people wind up feeling even better a year out from a heart attack because they're taking better care of themselves. But certainly, I would expect a heart attack patient — most people — to feel normal by a year.

Pathak: And we've also talked about a lot of changes that are hopefully going to happen in someone's life when it comes to lifestyle, but also the fact that someone's going to be on a lot of medications coming out of that heart attack. For someone who's feeling overwhelmed with all of this change, what is the advice that you give to them and to their loved ones as they're going through this journey?

Reynolds: The advice that I will give is often: Let's pick something that you feel you can change. Let's start with that. I like to give people swaps when it comes to diet, for example, and say, “Oh, okay, you were eating red meat three times a week — that's a lot. You weren't eating fish every week. Could you swap one red meat meal for a fish meal?”

Now you'd be doing two good things. Now, that's not cutting red meat out of the diet. It's not getting to the two servings of fish I'm looking for a week, but it's a step in the right direction. And I try to give things that wind up making two steps in the right direction. When it comes to exercise, I find it helpful to plan ahead.

Here we're getting to the cold weather, and I need people to plan ahead so that they can exercise — do something that they're willing to do indoors — when it's too rainy, it's too hot, it's too cold, it's too windy, because I need exercise from that patient every day.

Pathak: I'd love to also talk about complications. So when things aren't going well, what are some of the signs or symptoms someone should be looking out for in the aftermath of a heart attack in the first few weeks, let's say, that suggest, “Okay, this is time to go back for another emergency evaluation”?

Reynolds: The biggest thing is if the heart attack symptoms are coming back. If there was chest discomfort, and there's chest discomfort again — might not be exactly the same, but if there's something else that doesn't feel familiar, and certainly if you have the familiar heart attack symptoms — time to go right back to the hospital.

It is not wise to sit and wait those out at home. Once in a while we get complications, and you need to run right back in. A false alarm is perfectly acceptable. And it is true that people tend to be a bit turned inward after a heart attack, and it's not surprising if we get a false alarm sometimes, but better safe than sorry — come in and get checked out.

Another complication of heart attack that comes up fairly commonly is a condition called heart failure. Heart failure is a syndrome in which the body takes on extra fluid because the heart and the kidneys are sending bad messages back and forth that are unhelpful. The heart has been a bit weakened. It tells the kidneys to turn on things that absorb extra salt and water, and that can go into the lungs, leaving people feeling short of breath or tired, and into the legs leading to swelling.

We combat that with medication. And people hear the term “heart failure” and often find it scary — it sounds like your heart's gonna give out on you — but we treat heart failure all the time, and people live with it. So it's just a matter of getting some additional medication to feel better.

Pathak: I would love to give you the last few minutes of our time together. If you don't mind closing out the episode by speaking directly to our audience and just giving us some concrete advice — your biggest tips for what someone should do after they or a loved one has experienced a heart attack.

Reynolds: It's really encouraging to think about the people out there who are going to use this information in their daily lives. Lifestyle changes are the one thing I usually focus on because they're so personal. It takes a village to get people to do what they know they should do.

Often I talk about diet and people say, “I know I shouldn't be eating this,” but it can be hard to do it. So, getting the right support. Make sure that you have healthy food in the house that you like. Explore new recipes. Find different ways to exercise. Get people who support you. Sometimes there are folks in your life that are stressful and there are situations that are stressful.

Very helpful to work with your cardiac rehab specialist, and with other family members, with friends, to try and figure out which things you should let go of — and sometimes which people you should let go of — in order to be able to recover well. I would love to see people out there who had a heart attack or have a loved one who've had a heart attack really focusing on how to be healthy instead of focusing on being sick.

We talked at the beginning of the episode about that feeling that people are made of glass and it's almost like children who are starting to walk — they're gonna stumble, and it's okay. You're there to catch them when they fall and set them right. And I think that's the kind of mind frame we want to use with heart attack.

Also, please, please get a seven-day pill box and take your medicine every day. Everybody forgets. Once you get used to it, everybody forgets if they took their medicine on Tuesday or not some of the time, and you just look at the box and then you know if you took it or not, and it's all there for you, and it's all in one go.

It feels less daunting for most people to just take the little thing, put it in your hand, drink it down, and then that's it — you know you're done for that day or that half of the day. If cardiac rehabilitation is offered, please take that offer and go to cardiac rehab. It's a supervised exercise program combined with education about how to be healthy — diet, exercise, stress management.

There's often psychotherapy available, so you can talk through your feelings with somebody neutral about the heart event — and it saves lives. And if you haven't been offered cardiac rehab, ask for it.

Pathak: I find, especially with women, that people focus on weight. It's definitely true that weight reduction for people who are overweight or obese reduces your risk. But diet, exercise, cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, and weight — they're linked, but they're each independent risk factors for heart disease.

Reynolds: So if you eat healthier and you don't lose a pound, you're still healthier. If you're exercising more but that scale doesn't shift one bit, you're still healthier. So please don't expect the weight to be the metric by which you judge how well you're doing lifestyle. It doesn't always work that way. I...

Pathak: Such a critical point. Thank you so much for addressing that.

Reynolds: Well, thank you. This has been such a wonderful conversation.

Pathak: As we close this episode, I'd like to share three key takeaways. First, after a heart attack, recovery doesn't end in the hospital. The weeks and months following will include new medications, cardiac rehabilitation, and follow-up care, which play a powerful role in helping your heart heal and preventing future events.
If you're offered cardiac rehab, please take it. It's one of the most effective tools we have for long-term recovery after heart attack. And if you're not offered cardiac rehab, ask about it.

Second, making lifestyle changes will have an impact, but it's important not to set yourself up to fail or expect significant, permanent lifestyle changes to happen overnight.
Sustainable recovery is about progress, not perfection. That means focusing on small, steady steps to lifestyle changes — whether that's adjusting your diet, becoming more active, or reducing stress. Break it down into manageable steps. Replace one meal, take one walk, build one new habit at a time, and you'll be amazed by how much changes just with those small steps.

Finally, support, connection, and consistency are very important for recovery. Loved ones can play a huge role by encouraging healthy routines, joining in with the lifestyle changes that your loved one is making, helping prepare heart-healthy meals, and asking questions during medical appointments.
There is so much you can do to help support your loved one during their recovery. To find out more information about Dr Harmony Reynolds, make sure to check out our show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Please take a moment to follow, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite listening platform.

If you'd like to send me an email about topics you are interested in or questions for future guests, please send me a note at [email protected]. This is Dr Neha Pathak for the WebMD Health Discovered Podcast.