Bhumi Pednekar: Fit Hai Hit Hai

Bhumi Pednekar shares her holistic fitness techniques with Raghavendra Singh.

- Raghavendra Singh

Remember the plump Sandhya Varma from last year’s superhit Dum Laga Ke Haisha? Well, the young debutante had to pile on 23 kilos for that role in the Yash Raj Film. That’s a brave decision for any actor and could have proved disastrous for a newbie. But Bhumi did it all – from hogging pizzas to snacking on ghee-laden parathas without regrets. It took her almost a year to get to the required weight. She confides she had the time of her life gorging on whatever she could lay her hands on during that period.

Her tour de force performance as Sandhya Varma was universally lauded and she even won the Filmfare Best Debut Award (Female). To our pleasant surprise she looked svelte and fit and a completely different person altogether at the Filmfare Awards. Tell her that and she blushes. She reveals she managed to lose the extra flab in five months – in considerably lesser time than it took her to put it on. And she did it not by starving herself but making healthy changes in her food routine and working out extensively.

She says her health did suffer because of the excessive weight. “My back started hurting. My ankles hurt. Earlier I could wear heels and move around for 16 hours but with all that weight I couldn’t. My biggest motivation to lose weight was the possibility of getting good work. I didn’t want to miss out on opportunities. Unfortunately, there aren’t roles for plus-size actors in our industry.” She adds,

“My mother and I came up with a plan to get back in shape.”

The first thing that needed changing was her