Sherri Shepherd is giving credit where credit’s due for being off sugar for 276 days — and her resulting 25-pound weight loss.
“My mom passed away at 41 years of age,” Shepherd, 51, told Us at weTV’s Love After Lockup event in Beverly Hills on Tuesday, December 11. “And I realized… I kept picturing myself going, I wish I would have changed. I wish I would have did something different. And it was like God was saying, ‘You can do something different right now.’” From that moment on, her faith helped her focus on her health, revealed Shepherd: “Right there, I just completely dropped sugar from my life, because it was stopping me from doing so many things.”
For the former View host, who has type-2 diabetes, it was thinking about her son Jeffrey Tarpley’s future that triggered the introspection. “My son said to me when I was eating a candy bar, he said, ‘Mommy’ — he was born at five and a half months, a pound ten ounces, and he’s got unique challenges — ‘He said, ‘Mommy, if you die, who’s going to be my bodyguard?’” she recalled. “And that was like a cold bucket of water in my face, and I got this vision of, like, the doctor saying that I had something irreversible.”
She’s fully committed these days — “I’m pretty strict. I’m pretty strict. I don’t do any sugar,” she said — but she admitted the change to a largely keto diet was initially difficult. “When I first started, I [cheated],” she said. Now, she has a strategy. Before reaching for a bag of chips or candy, she continued, “I do a lot of self-talk of, ‘Sherri, how are you going to feel? Do you want the emotion of already feeling bad with whatever you’re going through?’”
The Trial & Error actress has also found a trick for successful dining out. “It’s hard if you go to a restaurant,” she said. “I look for things that are less than one gram of sugar. I don’t use the salad dressing from the restaurant. I use olive oil. I get a lot of steamed vegetables and protein.”
Now that she’s dropped pounds, she’s got a new goal. “I just want to be healthy,” she said. She then joked, “I can’t afford $75,000 to get my stomach flat and booty injections and boobies. If I get my bobbies lifted, if I get an old rich man to pay for my boobies to get lifted. But otherwise, I’ve got to do it all myself.”
Her focus on diet has also inspired her to develop a weight-lifting fitness routine: “I’m going to go to the gym and trying to work on getting a little booty pop in there, and get some squat action and get a little cut in my arms.” Added the star, who has frequently spoken about her Christianity, “The perk is being able to fit into a size 8 jeans. That’s the perk, but the benefit is I’ve got my life. I’m excited about life. I think we all get a purpose in life and we all got something we’re supposed to do, and I don’t think God wants you to do it tired.”
With reporting by Taylor Ferber
