Yvette Nicole Brown Reveals She Got 'Full Blown Diabetes' While Filming 'Community'

Yvette Nicole Brown is opening up about being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

During her interview on Sean Hayes and Dr. Priyanka Wali‘s podcast Hypochondriactor, the 49-year-old actress said she had “full-blown diabetes” while working on her show Community.

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Yvette explained how she was “excessively eating sugar” during the long, 16-hour days on set while filming the NBC comedy.

“I got diabetes, or gave myself diabetes, by eating a lot of donuts on the set of Community,” Yvette shared. “I spent a lot of time at the craft services table, and I watched myself get bigger and bigger. And if you watch the show, you can see me get bigger and bigger. And I got a pre-diabetes diagnosis maybe in season one, and then by season three it was full-blown diabetes.”

Dr. Wali then reassured Yvette that, from a medical prospective, she doesn’t believe “it’s people’s faults that they contract diabetes.”

“We live in a society right now where one of the most addictive substances in the world is completely legal and socially accepted. I do believe sugar is the tobacco of our generation,” Dr. Wali said. “And so it’s not your fault that there were doughnuts lying around.”

Yvette understood what Dr. Wali was saying, while adding that she agreed that sugar is an “addiction.”

“I swear I would walk past the donuts and go, ‘You don’t have to eat five,’ and my body would go, ‘Yes, you do,’” Yvette recalled. “So I can imagine that it calls you the way drugs call the people that are addicted … I know that when I was on Community, I was excessively eating sugar.”

“I remember my skin got really dry,” Yvette said of her symptoms. “Everything was just itchy. I was scratchy and itchy, and I couldn’t put enough lotion on, but I never lost weight, I gained weight, and was thirsty.”

Yvette then shared how after her diagnosis, she cut down significantly on her sugar intake.

“Thankfully I’m not in a situation now where I have that much time on set, and I’m not walking by delicious donuts and cakes and whatever all day,” Yvette said. “I believe everything in moderation.”

She continued, “So I’m not someone that’s like, ‘I’m never going to have a piece of cake,’ but I don’t have a whole cake. And I don’t have a whole cake every day, or every week. And if I say, I want to go to Cheesecake Factory and I’m going to get this cheesecake, then I’ll make sure that I use the treadmill for an extra hour that day to try to burn off some of the sugar that’s now in my body, drink more water, and other simple things you can do.”