Three things have just happened with NEWSTART® Insights. The first was that the creator of the group and original admin, Spencer Freed, said he is getting off Facebook but he created a “fake” Spencer Freed account that he said could be used to contact him “only in this group.” I’m not sure how that was supposed to work. Apparently Spencer Freed wasn’t either, because his new “fake” account is not showing in the members list nor anywhere on Facebook for that matter. So I checked the admins list and only Tom Baril is listed as a group admin.
Then I noticed that the nice banner graphic Spencer had used for the group is missing. There is, instead, just a collection of random profile pics of group members (what a group header defaults to when there is no banner graphic). Very unattractive and unprofessional, in my opinion.
So I wrote a post asking what happened to the nice banner graphic, and I got an immediate message that my post had been “submitted for approval by the admin(s).” I suppose I should not have been surprised, as earlier I had suggested to Spencer that if they were concerned that someone would post something that was inappropriate they should change the settings so that all posts had to be approved by an admin. I guess someone finally figured out how to do it!
Hardly anyone is posting in the group now, possibly because the group description is very vague about the purpose of the group and what posts are acceptable and what posts are not. At least now people will know whether or not what they post is acceptable by whether or not an admin approves it!
Well, I must say I am very disappointed with the group. I initially was hoping I would find alumni who had succeeded in reversing their diabetes through this Weimar program (high-carb low-fat strict vegan diet) and were successful in maintaining this reversal over a long period of time. But out of the current 194 members, only two have come forward as having reversed diabetes through the NEWSTART® program.
Of the 3 “success stories” on the NEWSTART® website, they are all white males (one is possibly Latino), no women, no people of color. They were all extremely obese, had severe health problems and nearly at death’s door, and had been eating a very unhealthy Standard American Diet (junk food, high-sugar, highly refined, etc.). No one was represented as being a more “normal” kind of diabetic, like the majority of Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics group members, who were trying to eat a reasonably healthy diet but just needed some tweaking!
Update [June 10, 2015]: It looks like the header graphic is back. And a “new member” named Spencer Jonathan has been added and made an admin. In my opinion, they should have figured this out before they started making public changes to the group! Guess I can’t expect Weimar people to be all that tech-savvy. *sigh*
