29 Celebrities You Might Not Know Have Diabetes

Despite being known for her fat- and sugar-filled Southern dishes, celebrity chef Paula Deen was stunned when she was given a type 2 diabetes diagnosis in 2002. Now at 69 years old, she's coping just fine with an adjustment to her diet.

"I ignored it the first couple years. I thought the doctor was wrong," she said during a segment on The View. "But I have rearranged my plate now. Do I still eat comfort food? Absolutely. But I don't do it as often."

One of the younger celebrities to open up about his diabetes, musician Nick Jonas, now 24, has lived with type 1 since he was 13 years old.

"As I've grown into a young man and my body has changed, I'm definitely noticing changes in my diabetes," Jonas told Diabetes Forecast. "It's continually changing — it's not like I get in a good place and it stays there. Every day I have to watch, to look at it, to make sure that everything is cool and still intact, to make sure I'm doing the best I can to manage it. There are definitely times, though, that I feel like saying, 'I don't want to deal with this; I just want to have this Gatorade or slice of pizza and not have to deal,' but I have to take it one step at a time, and I do."

Black-ish star Anthony Anderson, 46, doesn't stay hush-hush about the type 2 diabetes he was diagnosed with 14 years ago. Not only does his character in the ABC sitcom share the same diagnosis, but he's a known activist off camera, too.

"One day you're not feeling well and the next thing you know, the doctor's telling you that you have this life-changing condition," he told Parade. "Nothing can prepare you for that, but I rolled through the punches, and I'm making the most of it."

Tom Hanks' doctor diagnosed him with type 2 diabetes just a few years ago. Now, at 60, he wishes he would have made more of an effort to lower his blood sugar levels when he was younger.

"I'm part of the lazy American generation that has blindly kept dancing through the party and now finds ourselves with a malady," he told Radio Times. "I was heavy. You've seen me in movies, you know what I looked like. I was a total idiot. I thought I could avoid it by removing the buns from my cheeseburgers. Well, it takes a little bit more than that." Now, his doctor is urging him to lose weight in an attempt to potentially reverse his condition, Hanks said.

Salma Hayek, 50, didn't have any issues with her blood sugar before becoming pregnant at 41. But during those nine months, the problems started.

"I got gestational diabetes, which I didn't realize at first. It occurs in women who have high blood sugar levels during pregnancy," she told Parents. "I didn't know whether I was feeling bad because I was pregnant or whether something was seriously wrong. I was nauseated for nine months, which can be one of the symptoms. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't eat so much fruit at the beginning. I didn't know that eating fruit that is high in sugar is not recommended when you have gestational diabetes."

Luckily, this type of diabetes usually goes away after giving birth.

Rocker Bret Michaels was told he had type 1 diabetes when he was just a child. "I was 6 years old when I was diagnosed with diabetes," he told USA Today. "I remember I was in between kindergarten and first grade. I'll never forget how extremely sick and dehydrated I was. Everything I drank or ate immediately came out of me."

Now with children of his own, Michaels says one of his own daughters, Raine, was told she has borderline diabetes herself. "We're battling it with diet right now, and we're hoping that eventually when she gets in her teen years, she doesn't develop type 1 diabetes," he told Parents.

The 66-year-old actor has been living with type 1 since age 12, but he's refused to let anything slow him down from accomplishing his acting dreams. We'd say he was pretty successful at that, considering Garber went on to star in some of the most popular movies and TV shows like the CW's "Legends of Tomorrow" and "Titanic."

"I think the worst feeling for any kid is to think that their life has been cut short or diminished in some way by this disease," he told People. "What we need is a cure, but in the meantime we're here to say, you can live with it and thrive. Type 1 diabetes does not define who you are."

James Earl Jones, 85, who is best known as the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars and Mufasa in The Lion King, kept his type 2 diabetes under wraps for 20 years. Now, he's speaking about his diagnosis freely in hopes of helping others going through the same thing.

"I didn't notice any symptoms," Jones said last March. "I had gone to a diet and exercise program hoping to lose some weight and ended up falling asleep sitting on a bench in the gymnasium. My doctor, who happened to be there, said that's not normal. He encouraged me to go get a test, and I did — and there it was: type 2 diabetes. It hit me like a thunderbolt."

Grammy winner Patti LaBelle found out she had diabetes in the most inopportune of ways: on stage during a performance. Although it was hard changing her diet and exercise habits, she's now 72 and feeling good as a result of those choices.

"There's no way I'm going to be a completely good girl. I have to cheat now and then," she told Diabetic Living. "Before, my body was just a body. I was always worried about my hair, my makeup, and my clothes. If you have all that going for you and the inside is breaking down, what good is that? Today, my body means the world to me — those other things are secondary. The most important thing now is my body on the inside, not the outside. My body is a temple, not an amusement park!"

The U.S. Supreme Court Justice may sit on the highest court in the land, but Sotomayor can't hear any cases without one thing in her robe pocket: her insulin tubes. Having battled type 1 since she was 7 years old, every year she trains her new staff aides and law clerks what to do if she hits a "sugar low."

"It's what I wish [for] every young diabetic, every person with diabetes: that moment of understanding the difference that you feel between control and no control." When you're not in control of diabetes, you just don't feel good," she told Diabetes Forecast. "And that feeling drags your spirits down, it robs you of energy, it takes away — not just from your life but from the quality of just enjoying life."

The actress and former beauty queen may be known for her Hollywood roles, but after her type 1 diagnosis, she became especially concerned with keeping a healthy lifestyle.

"After my epiphany, I was on the path to do whatever I could to make my life even greener and healthier," Williams wrote on Facebook. "I started using exclusively non-toxic cleaners in my kitchen, bathroom, and laundry. Living as we do, perhaps there's no way to avoid toxic chemicals altogether. But taking action to reduce our risk is imperative."

Grammy award-winning producer and former American Idol judge Randy Jackson, 60, made some huge changes after being diagnosed with diabetes.

"I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes [during my time on American Idol]. Even though it ran in my family and my dad had it, I never thought it would happen to me," he revealed in a segment on The Doctors. "I remember I thought I had a cold — I was tired and lethargic. I met him at the emergency room and my blood sugar was over 500."

To get his life back on track, he focused on the one thing people had been telling him all along. "All my life you've heard your doctors say diet and exercise actually works, but as I look back on it, I was never really doing it," he continued. "I had to change my diet completely, and you combine that with the exercise. I like tennis, yoga, cardio — I had to find things that were interesting to me."

The comedian hasn't always paid close attention to following a healthy lifestyle for his diabetes, but his life-threatening car accident a few years ago changed everything — including how carefully he managed his blood sugar. Even as he walked the Emmy's red carpet in 2015, he posed with his girlfriend and his blood glucose monitor, keeping tabs on his blood sugar levels throughout the award show.

Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, 33, was diagnosed with diabetes in 2008. Since then, he's come out on top — but it wasn't easy.

"It's something you go to sleep with and you wake up with every day. It's not something that you can just be like, 'Hey, I'm going to take a day off here, and I'll catch back up with it tomorrow.' It's difficult to deal with," he said during an episode of The Jay Cutler Show on ESPN. "I think more than anything over the past three, four, five years is I've changed my diet a lot. I think that's made the biggest impact on me being able to control my numbers and being able to control diabetes."

Broadway icon Ben Vereen is considered one of the greats of stage and screen, but monitoring his sugar levels always comes first. One lesson he's learned? Diabetes is not a "death sentence," he toldDiabetes Forecast, as long as you change your lifestyle, you can manage it quite well.

"It's all part of it. I get up in the morning and check my sugar. Check whenever I have to. I do what I have to do medically. I do my exercises, and I watch what I eat. And I don't like extremes. The thing was making it part of your daily routine. I told people: Look at it as brushing your teeth every day. This is what you've got to do. It's getting into a routine for your cadence, for your lifestyle," he told Diabetes Forecast.

Queen of R-E-S-P-E-C-T Aretha Franklin, 74, once had to cancel shows due to her type 2 diabetes. Now, after changing her lifestyle and dropping pounds, she's back to singing her heart out.

"I have diabetes, really, from years ago when I was really badly and grossly overweight. Now, I'm back to my natural size and thrilled about it," Franklin told Click On Detroit. "The weight that I am at now, I said, 'I am going to own this weight. I will never, ever, be the size that I was again.'"

The Grammy-winning legend was always at the top of her game — until a really rough breakup years ago, which led to the singer to overeating and, eventually, a diabetes diagnosis. She was determined not to let the news bring her legendary personality down, and decided to look at it as a "new beginning" and not an end. (We like her perspective!)

"The most important thing is the quality of your life — that you're living well and healthy," she told HealthMonitor. "I decided I was going to live life fully — and not just lie around. You have to do it for yourself or it's not going to work."

Funny guy Drew Carey, 58, didn't let a diabetes diagnosis stop him from living his best life. In fact, after losing more than 80 pounds through working out and eating healthy, he no longer relies on daily meds.

"It sucks being fat, you know," he told People. "I was diabetic with type 2 diabetes. I'm not diabetic anymore. No medication needed."

Halle Berry is an incredibly healthy 50-year-old. So healthy, in fact, that you've probably never been able to tell the actress has had type 1 diabetes since 19.

"I try to do my part as a role model, by openly talking about it, what I've gone through, how I handle it in my life… I hope I'm getting the message out there — that it's nothing to be ashamed of," Berry told Inquirer. "I just have a healthy diet, and I always exercise. As I'm getting older, that kind of attention to my health is paying off. I only work out three times a week, 30 minutes a pop."

Famed talk show host Larry King, now 82, has battled diabetes — as well as cancer and heart conditions — in the past, but the lifestyle changes he's made have kept him in good health.

"I've had the heart attack and heart surgery, I defeated prostate cancer, have type 2 diabetes, but I remain in good health. I follow my doctor's wishes, I take my prescription drugs, I take a lot of vitamins," he told the Los Angeles Times. "When I had the heart attack that scared me to death, I was 53 years old. I never smoked a cigarette again. I changed a lot of my habits. I lost a lot of weight. I've kept the weight down."