Months before Ananda Lewis lost her battle with breast cancer, the former MTV VJ offered insight into why she opted not to have a double mastectomy.
Ananda’s sister, Lakshmi Lewis, announced the news of her death via Facebook on Wednesday, June 11, writing, “She’s free, and in His Heavenly arms.”
Ananda, who was 52, had shared her cancer journey in an essay for Essence that was published in January.
“Do everything in your power to avoid my story becoming yours,” she advised readers. “If I had known what I know now 10 years ago, perhaps I wouldn’t have ended up here. I would have been cold plunging, exercising consistently, making sure my vitamin D levels were good, detoxing my body on a monthly and yearly basis, and sleeping better. I would’ve been doing all the things I’ve been forced to do now, to keep my body from creating more cancer and remove what it has already made.”
Ananda was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in January 2019.
“I was told my tumor was growing at a moderate rate — and the full scope of what they suggested I do to handle it was pretty radical,” she wrote in Essence. “I was clearly hesitant and was told I could take the time I needed to decide.”
“I dove into the research and learned that environmental and lifestyle factors influence 90 percent of what causes cancer,” she continued. “So I stopped drinking alcohol. I stopped consuming sugar. I did a cleanse to get the buildup of toxins in my body out. I began to shift the way I manage stress. My goal was to do things that supported my body’s ability to continue to be whole enough to heal, instead of destroying it up front.”
She added, “I also couldn’t figure out how to fit the double mastectomy, the full chemotherapy and, potentially, the radiation they were telling me to have into my already overwhelmed life. More importantly, these methods went against what I believed was right for my body.”
During the summer of 2020, she “felt the tumor growing again” and received treatment at an integrative health facility in Arizona.
“I was heartbroken to leave my son,” she wrote, referencing 14-year-old Langston, whom she welcomed with Harry Smith, the brother of Will Smith. “I had never been without him, not even for a weekend. But I was in warrior mode, determined to get my health back for the both of us.”
By that December, “I had gone down from stage 3 to stage 2. The cancer was out of my lymph nodes and the tumor significantly reduced.”
Ananda later struggled to pay for further treatment and lost her health insurance. In January 2023, she got her insurance back and a scan showed that the tumor had grown “a little bigger” but “hadn’t spread anywhere else.”
However, that October, another scan revealed “that the cancer had gone wild in my body,” she wrote. “Once it spreads to a site outside the original location, that puts you in stage 4. I called on my loved ones again and got back into treatment at an integrative facility closer to home, in Southern California. By January 2024, I had completed about 12 weeks of therapy and had greatly improved.”
That year, Ananda appeared on CNN and revealed her regret in deciding to “keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way. … I wish I could go back. It’s important for me to admit where I went wrong with this.”
She told Essence that as of January 2025, she was “on regular standard-of-care meds” and “continuing the integrative approach, which includes traditional Chinese medicine and more. When needed, I will go in for more insulin-potentiated chemo.”
In bypassing traditional modes of treating cancer, Ananda seemingly wanted to avoid becoming a cautionary tale.
“Am I in the clear? No,” she wrote in her essay. “But I could have ended up here no matter what route I took, because I didn’t come in this with the resources that I needed to stay the course the whole time. So, it is what it is for now. I don’t want the story to be that because I said no to the conventional path I was initially offered, that’s why I ended up at stage 4. That’s not true. Sometimes, people end up here whether they do conventional or not.”
