How Shepherd overcame ‘the sugar’

Bill San Antonio

Sherri Shepherd, an Emmy Award-winning co-host of the daytime talk show “The View,” visited Bryant Library Monday in promotion of her recent book, “Plan D: How to Lose Weight and Beat Diabetes.”

In the book, Shepherd, 45, reveals the strategies she used for living with Type 2 diabetes and implementing healthy foods and exercise into her everyday routine despite her busy schedule, which also includes appearances on television and in major motion pictures.

Shepherd has lived with diabetes for most of her life, as many members of her family had the disease, which had earned the nickname “the sugar.” Because of what she called its “cute nickname,” Shepherd said the illness wasn’t taken seriously.

“I grew up in a family where if there was any kind of problem, my grandmother had a pie to fix it,” Shepherd said. “If you were getting bullied at school, she had lasagna or spaghetti and meatballs or sweet potato pie or something fried and with cheese on it, so I grew up thinking food could solve anything. I ate everything and my mother’s death didn’t stop that.”

Shepherd’s mother died at 41 of complications due to diabetes after she stopped taking insulin and her internal organs began shutting down, sending her into a coma.

“What I do remember about my mother is that she was very irritable, always tired, she always wanted to sleep, which I now know were the effects of not taking care of herself and eating the wrong foods and not taking her insulin like she was supposed to,” Shepherd said.

Doctors told Shepherd and her sister that they’d have to amputate her mother’s toe, which didn’t seem like a big deal to Shepherd or her sister because their uncle had his entire leg amputated as a result of diabetes complications.

“He said, ‘no, it’ll start with the toe and continue,’” Shepherd said.

Despite her mother’s death, Shepherd did not change her own eating habits. She said she had long known she was pre-diabetic, and after feeling numbness in her fingers and toes and always tired and in need of going to the bathroom, she went to the doctor and learned that she, too, had developed the illness that, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control, affects 25.8 million Americans.

But even the diagnosis did not lead to a dramatic overhaul of her lifestyle habits, as Shepherd said after she filled the prescriptions doctors put her on to treat her diabetes, she went to the International House of Pancakes and ordered all-you-can-eat pancakes with maple syrup and strawberry syrup, with a ton of butter and a side of sausage and extra bacon.

“I just kept thinking, if I continue to ignore it, it’ll just go away,” she said. 

Also at this time, Shepherd was going through a divorce and custody battle of her young son Jeffrey, and Barbara Walters had recently contacted her about joining the panel on “The View.” Her stress mounted, she said, though she continued to ignore her diabetes.

But Shepherd realized she could no longer ignore the disease when she said she had a vision of Jeffrey crying and holding his teddy bear, trying to figure out where heaven was because people had told him that’s where his mother had gone.

“It was that vision of my son alone and not having his mother that made my head snap up,” Shepherd said. “I said I can’t do to my son what my mother did to me.”

Jeffrey, she said, was born prematurely and with health complications, requiring therapy treatments and his own medication.

“I said, if I leave, who’s going to take care of my son the way I’m going to take care of my son?” Shepherd said. “Who’s going to know everything about his nervous system the way I know about it?”

Shepherd joined “The View” in 2007 and said she weighed 190 pounds at the time and even more stressed as she adjusted to working in Manhattan. 

To deal with stress in the past, Shepherd said she’d usually eat a quart of Haagen Dazs or drink a pina colada, but that was no longer an option for her now that she was living with diabetes, and her stresses spilled over onto the air as, in her first week, she became distracted from the conversation and said she wasn’t sure whether the earth was round or flat. 

“Bill O’Reilly called me a pinhead, Bill Maher said I should be fired with the stupid stick, and I didn’t have my Haagen Dazs,” Shepherd said. “I had diabetes. I was going about it completely wrong.”

All the while, Shepherd said she began making little lifestyle changes to make her healthier. She began favoring water over diet soda and found different ways of preparing vegetables, cutting the unhealthier foods out of her regular diet.

“If you would have told me I’d have been addicted to kale, I’d have laughed you in the face,” Shepherd said. “I love me some kale.”

Before long, Shepherd lost 40 pounds, and her doctors took her off medication but suggested she go to the gym to send oxygen to the brain and lessen her blood sugar.

“I don’t like going to the gym, I don’t like it,” Shepherd said. “It takes me longer to pick out a cute outfit for the gym than actually being at the gym, and I go to the gym and go right to the smoothie bar and get my shake and then leave.” 

Like her dietary changes, Shepherd took what she called “little steps in my journey” to maximize her time in the gym, using the elliptical machine for five minutes and gradually adding two minutes to each session. 

Because her schedule does not afford her a lot of time to spend in the gym, Shepherd participates in a boot camp fitness program once or twice a week and plays with Jeffrey at the park across the street from their New Jersey home as often as she can, setting up cones they shuffle through or climbing on playground monkey bars. 

Shepherd became more confident as the weight came off, and she participated in season 13 of the ABC reality series “Dancing With the Stars” last spring.

“It’s great because when you rehearse eight, nine hours a day, you’re going to lose weight,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd did not win the reality program, and said she eventually gained the weight the show helped her lose, but she implemented dancing into her exercise program, turning on salsa music in the kitchen as she’d cook with her husband or fast-paced tunes to “go crazy” with her son, just another small change among the many she’s made in living with diabetes.

“I’ve learned to make little changes and the little changes help because after a year you look up and they become big changes,” Shepherd said.

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