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Sherri Shepherd cares about Black people. “The View” co-host and comedienne doesn’t want to see diabetes, which affects Blacks and Hispanics in disproportionate numbers, become your reality. So she’s penned a new book “Plan D: How to Lose Weight and Beat Diabetes (Even If You Don’t Have It).” She says that after being diagnosed with diabetes herself in 2007.

“I wrote the book because I was diagnosed with diabetes a couple of weeks before I started “The View,” she told the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “When I started “The View,” I was 197 pounds.  I had the vision of [her son] Jeffrey being here without me to raise him and I thought I gotta change my life.

My mom passed away at 41 from complications of diabetes. And I said I cannot not be here and leave my son. You know, I had a divorce because of an extramarital affair, and I’ll be damned if another woman is raising my child. I just had to change my life, my eating, exercise look at food a different way and lost weight.”

While she says sweets and taffy apples in particular were her weakness, she’s learned to curb those impulses to continue leading a healthy life.

“I like sweets. I love taffy apples. But you have to find alternatives. I do apples, organic peanut butter and walnuts that’s my sweet. The food that I love I send to other people. They can eat it. I live vicariously through everybody else.”

Shepherd lost 40 pounds in over a year. Although she put back on 10, she says she keeps the weight down with eating habits and exercising regularly by going to boot camp and spinning.

“Elizabeth Hasselback told me it releases endorphins when you exercise. I though she meant orgasms. I kept adjusting the seat at Soul Cycle but it didn’t make a difference!”

As a Type 2 diabetic, who was diagnosed after years of pre-diabetes, Shepherd says diet and exercise has changed her life and appearance and it can do the same for you, too.

“I was on three differnet medications for my diabetes now I’m on none. I have Type 2 diabetes so it’s controlled through diet and exercise which is why for Type 2 diabetes diet and exercise is so important. We used to call it the sugar. That’s what Black people call it. There’s no urgency to change anything. I was so used to people in my family being blind or not having a foot and eating the same way. Diabetes is the fourth highest killer in the African-American and Latino community. We’ve got to do something different from what we’ve been doing, leaving our children with no parents.”

In “The View” news, Shepherd will be there today when the 83-year-old creator of “The View” Barbara Walters, announces her official retirement from broadcasting after a five decade career. Co-host Joy Behar will also leave “The View” after this season.

“The two Black women are staying,” Shepherd says of her and co-host Whoopi Goldberg. “Usually we get killed off!”

Buy “Plan D” here.