get their health aligned with their blood sugars, cholesterol, and get their hypertension under control.
So, it’s not just diabetes we’re focusing on. It’s hypertension, cholesterol, all those factors can be lowered to change your life. So, it’s really not about reversing diabetes at all, it’s about reversing the person. Once you reverse the person, then all of those things fall into line.
BDO: Just at a glance, Reversed seems to be a very compelling and enlightening journey. What was your main mission when the initial thought came to you to put this experience together?
CM: Diabetes in the medical industry can be very complicated. I didn’t know what a dietitian was or knew what diabetes educators did. I didn’t know anything about that. I didn’t know what an endocrinologist was, so I thought, you know what the best thing that I can do is put all these people in a house so that the participants not only visiting but the people watching would be able to understand all the facets of care for diabetes.
So, they would able to see an endocrinologist, a dietician, a diabetes educator, people that were in the field. They would be able to talk to them and get the information that they needed, so they wouldn’t have to go months and months of basically meeting with one person here and one person there, not seeing a nutritionist, because most people just get medication and that’s it and they go about their business. So, being able to bring all those people in there was great.
The key focus was actually the mental and emotional state because we have to be able to make those changes mentally before we can even do them physically. If you’re not emotionally and mentally prepared, you’re not going to stick to something. We wanted to make sure these people were sticking to it. They had to find out their “why” to begin their health journey.
BDO: What were some of the top hurdles that you consistently saw that each participant had to overcome first?
CM: They had to realize that the space that they were in was not