WEIGHT-LOSS STRUGGLES
Doc series follows eight attempts
The stories of Michelle Salt and Gio Amenta may not seem to have much in common.
She is a Calgary-based snowboarder currently competing in her second Paralympic Games in PyeongChang as part of Team Canada. He is a former member of the Canadian Tenors struggling with his weight and dreaming of a return to the spotlight.
But the two were paired up in the debut episode of the AMI-TV’s Mind Set Go, a documentary series that follows the attempts of eight Canadians to lose weight over a three-month period.
In every episode, the participant meets up with a Paralympian, who offers motivation by sharing a backstory involving his or her own triumph over adversity.
Salt wasn’t familiar with Amenta’s past musical career. But she was used to being a motivational speaker, having often been enlisted to talk about willpower, overcoming obstacles and life after tragedy.
So it may seem surprising Amenta proved just as motivating to her as she was to him.
“It wasn’t necessarily about a Paralympian coming in and mentoring someone on their journey to be healthy,” says Salt. “It was a Paralympian coming in as a person and learning about this other person on their journey and us feeding off each other, motivating each other. I learned that I can also be resilient. There was a lot about Gio I was inspired by and I saw a lot of resemblances, hard trials and tribulations and pushing through that. I was able to reflect, take a moment and be proud of where I’ve come from.”
Salt doesn’t get too much screen time on the half-hour episode. She eventually accompanies Amenta on a bike ride in Vancouver as prep before he embarks on his goal of climbing a mountain. But before that, audiences hear Salt’s own motivational story of perseverance. A former fitness model, Salt was in a horrifying motorcycle accident in 2011 and was on life support for days. She had broken more than a dozen bones in her body and had to have most of her right leg amputated. Nevertheless, three years later she participated in her first Winter Paralympics in Sochi.
Margaret Mardirossian, executive producer of Mind Set Go and president of Vancouver-based Anaid Productions, said teaming overweight participants with Paralympians was not simply a gimmick. She says Anaid is a pioneer in weight-loss documentary shows, having been behind series such as The Life Network’s Taking it Off and Slice’s X-Weighted. It has given producers some insight into the psychology of the struggle, she said.
“In the nine years that we’ve done weight-loss shows, we’ve discovered that it really is a complicated issue,” Mardirossian says. “There are so many layers to it. People who don’t have weight issues don’t understand. They think ‘Just eat less and exercise more.’ If it were that easy, people would do it. How is it that people lose the weight and then put it back on? We’ve discovered through research that it is very much a mindset.”
Salt is not the only Alberta connection to the show. Lethbridge’s Lowell and Julie Taylor appear in every episode. Lowell is a psychologist and para-triathlete and para-cyclist who suffers from a degenerative eye disease and is legally blind. The couple competed in the fourth season of Amazing Race Canada in 2016.
Other para-athletes participating in the show include swimmer Summer Mortimer, rower Victoria Nolan and sledge hockey player Greg Westlake.
“There are many factors affecting why people put on weight and a lot of the time it has to do with trauma in their life,” she said. “That’s what we’re hoping people understand when watching this series, you get a bit of a backstory of someone, whether it has to do with experiencing some sort of physical trauma in their background, whether it’s family genes or just cultural, where food is associated with love and comfort. All of these things play a very important role in your mindset. So when faced with adversity, some people use food as comfort because that has been their go-to security.”
Mind Set Go debuts Thursday on AMI-TV, which broadcasts all programs in open-format described video for those who are blind or partially sighted. It can also be viewed at www.ami.ca/category/ mind-set-go