Can fasting for 20 hours become a way of life? Sonali Bendre believes it works for her, but her latest revelations about diet, autophagy and cancer recovery are certain to divide opinions.
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Sonali Bendre is having a moment right now. Her crime thriller “Raakh” has landed her praise from critics, industry folks and regular viewers alike. But amid all this attention on her acting, the 51-year-old actor has also been talking about something more personal, her health, her daily routine, and what she picked up while fighting stage IV cancer.
In a few recent interviews, she got pretty candid about her eating habits and the mental shifts that got her through one of the hardest periods of her life.
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Turns out Bendre doesn’t just eat clean, she barely eats at all for most of the day. She told Mashable India that her fasting window usually runs 18 to 20 hours. That’s not a typo. Most people struggle with 16 hours.
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She’s cut down her meals too. Instead of the usual three or four, she sticks to one and a half meals a day. Sometimes she manages two full meals, but that’s rare. One and a half is her norm, paired with that long stretch of fasting.
At one point during an interview, the host noticed she barely touched her food. Bendre explained she’d just come off a long fast. She even mentioned that the last time they met for a meal, she was probably already 16 hours into fasting by then too. This isn’t something she does occasionally. It’s just how she lives now.
Bendre has talked before about autophagy, basically the body’s own way of cleaning out damaged cells and recycling them. She’s said this idea became a big part of how she approached treatment after her cancer diagnosis in 2018.
In an old post on X, she credited her naturopath for first pointing her toward the research on autophagy. She didn’t just take it at face value though, she went and read up on it herself before deciding to build it into her healing process.
According to her, it helped a lot during treatment. And she hasn’t dropped it since. It’s still part of how she eats and lives today, cancer-free and all.
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