The Gridley Seventh-day Adventist Church in Gridley, Calif., recently sponsored a Wellspring Diabetes Program in their community. Peggy Morentin, who holds a master's degree in public health and is retired from the county health department, coordinated the program, which is developed by Wellspring Healthy Living and the Lifestyle Center of America (LCA), in Sulphur, Okla. Several other members of the Gridley church helped with the program, including Polly Matthews and Cheryl Andersen, a registered nurse.
Wellspring is a community-based version of the Lifestyle Center of America’s 19-day program for people with type-2 diabetes. For those who wish to present the program, Wellspring provides DVD presentations, coordinator manual, workbooks and related participant materials designed so that anyone, whether a healthcare professional or not, can easily present a Wellspring in their community.
“I became interested in the Wellspring program when I was attending a CHIP (Coronary Health Improvement Project) lifestyle change program in Vancouver, Wash., last November,” said Morentin. “One of the presenters was from LCA, and he mentioned that a Wellspring training program was scheduled in January for Northern California, so I scheduled to attend it.”
Morentin became excited about putting on the program, but wanted to first start out with a small group. “We placed two articles in the local newspaper,” she said, “put ads on cable TV, distributed flyers around town and in five local Adventist church bulletins. The result was five participants attending – exactly the right number for our first program. Participants were very impressed with the information and everyone learned something new each night – even those of us who are in the healthcare field.”
After the first two weeks, one participant had cut her oral medication in half. She stated that it opened her eyes to the fact that even just mild exercise in conjunction with diet was the key to lowering blood sugar.
Another participant noticed a tremendous gain in energy. Morentin says, “One day his wife was calling home to check on him, as she usually did, and couldn’t get an answer. She frantically drove home to see if something was wrong, and found that he had been outside working all day.”
Alumni follow up meetings are being held one night each week, and reports are that everyone is still reducing the amount of their meds, while one participant is controlling blood sugar completely without meds.
“What is really neat is that the physicians of these participants have seen the changes produced by the Wellspring Diabetes Program, a steady improvement that had not been accomplished previously,” says Morentin. “This has been a wonderful program, and an experience that we turned over to the Lord from the beginning. We plan to do it again!”
For those interested in coordinating a Wellspring Diabetes Program, you may contact Wellspring Healthy Living at 800-596-5480, or visit wellspringsource.org.
