Week 11: A Doctor’s 52 Week Journey to an Unprocessed Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdrWS9ro22g

Key Points and Decisions 

May successes included daily greens/berries, strong time-restricted feeding, good ethanol control, and realignment after setbacks; vegan days averaged 2–3 per week with some packaged-food lapses during on-call weeks. 

Biological age tested 14 years younger and cardiovascular age 5 years younger despite minor blood-work artifacts from fasting and allergies. 

Core stack limited to calcium, vitamin D, B12, omega-3, acarbose, and the five pillars (diet, movement, sleep, connection, plastics); rejected aesthetic interventions such as Botox or mTOR-inhibiting creams. 

Decision to avoid “grifting,” product sales, or extreme longevity-expert trends; focus remains on education and personal documentation. 

Acknowledged challenges from girlfriend’s baking and family sugar exposure while committing to natural mTOR inhibition via calorie restriction, fiber, and exercise.

Next Steps 

Increase vegan days to 3–5 per week with daily greens, berries, beans, and fermented foods (including new turmeric-ginger-onion-cabbage ferments). 

Add a fourth training day (two-a-day format) targeting 3 cardio + 3 resistance sessions plus tennis for balance and bone health. 

Install blackout drapes and maintain 66°F room; enforce 8 p.m. snack cutoff for improved sleep. 

Set up home gym, music corner (guitars, harmonica, saxophone), and pursue classes/clubs for social connection and creativity. 

Eliminate remaining plastics (bottles, pens, kitchen storage) by switching to glass, steel, and natural fabrics. 

Continue weekly resident teaching on microbiome and functional health; prepare for June 18 house closing while maintaining podcast consistency.

Announcer Lucas

[ 00:00:00,000 ]Welcome to the Go Unpro Podcast, a doctor's 52-week journey to an unprocessed life.

Announcer Lucas

[ 00:00:05,670 ] Now, here is your host, Dr. Brent W. Lartz, Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine, Neuroscientist, and Best-Selling Author.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:00:14,590 ] All right, everyone, welcome back to week 11 of a doctor's 52-week journey to an unprocessed life. I'm excited to have you guys here. May was a busy month. We're into June already. I'll tell you, May was a busy month that I had no time to do this podcast.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:00:33,330 ] We took a couple of weeks to regroup and get this back on track. We are going to be here all the month of June, and this is going to be another busy month because I just bought a house and we're closing on June 18th. And so, therefore, there's going to be a lot to do between now and then. Packing up. I'll tell you this: Great! I have this office here that I can separate from my living space, and I can maintain a clean, clear office and podcast studio. Great to have you here with me.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:01:10,300 ] Let's get started. May was a busy month, but I feel like I really had a lot of success in the month of May. There were some excuses, some procrastination, some sabotaging, but really, overall, when I fell off the bus, my behavior realigned with my goals. Speech, all aspects, aligning with every goal. I'll tell you, I really made an effort to get it there. I'll tell you, I was just looking at the tracking for the month of May, and I just barely kind of started my beans and fermenting. Did a pretty good job there for the start. But being vegan, I really was only about two to three days a week. And one day, one week, it was only one day. So there was a busy week of being on call and when you're on call in the hospital, they don't have the great food, and so, you were able to cheat a little bit too much perhaps. Ethanol really fell into good line.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:02:13,580 ] In the month of May, greens and berries really struck a chord with me to get that accomplished and got berries and greens every day through the month of May.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:02:26,029 ] Fitting for the month of May, spring, going into summer. Really getting it there, getting really ahead. Or exercise there was a little bit of a streak of a few days that I didn't have time for exercise during that same week of call right but and everybody has that but getting right back up on the bus and getting going. Getting the gear. Putting it into gear and getting going on the on the road to life and on our journey to an unprocessed life then again here we're looking at my trackers looking at my fasting. Really did a great job there. Didn't have the. Fasting only two full fasts. And then my time-restricted feeding was pretty good on almost all days. Sugar and soda really good except for again those couple of days that I was on deep deep in the weeds and call on that week. The great thing about my life now is that I am working now seven days on, seven days off.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:03:26,650 ] That means if I do fall off when I'm really busy, I can look forward to that Monday starting my week off and I can really get back on track with my life and getting to where I need to be. Packaged foods did okay, I felt like. But really could have been a little better with that. We're gonna really double down this month.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:03:47,130 ] I tell you, your goals really must align when you have your goals everything must align with your behavior and your speech everything must come together with that you know the manifesting of your longevity and That's what I'm trying to do is really just everything the people that surround me people that i'm trying to bring them along with this journey that's what's the important thing is having somebody as a part to help you along and look here's here's what was a little bit bothering me this past month is seeing a couple of longevity exo experts and seeing what they're doing especially in some of their social media and doing A lot of really just aesthetic things, creams and I'm not saying I don't use any creams. I have some moisturizers and I've had some. I've had some facial rashes and and rosacea that I've needed to put some stuff on my skin.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:04:50,230 ] Not saying that I'm talking about those people that are doing things like Botox and things things that really don't match. Okay, some things that they're they're using creams that, and you know, we went to this longevity conference back in November, and there were these people touting the use of these creams for skin aging. Your skin is going to age. And if you are along with a good natural process, of longevity and keeping yourself healthy, that skin will bring in itself along for the ride and get into its own longevity space. You don't need a... mTOR inhibition just in a cream in your skin because if you're inhibiting mTOR by your calorie restriction, by your nutrition and your vitamin levels, and your fiber, and your microbiome, your skin's going to tag along for the ride there, right? I don't really feel like I need to do anything like that. For my skin, you'll notice I have some wrinkles. So I don't, I don't really care. You notice? Hey, look at that—I've got some uh forehead wrinkles, uh and they are really pronounced, right?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:06:15,700 ] But I don't care. I I love um the fact that um my hairline is receding um I love um and and I may have some attempts at trying to regrow hair there, but let me tell you, my main goal here is really just my health overall, my body. So you won't see me doing Botox, you won't see me doing any kind of a lot of other creams and that kind of thing for prevention of aging of the skin. It's really about health and my diet, my exercise, my sleep, etc. Okay. So you won't see me doing a big stack of pills, you won't see me selling anything either. You will never see a product that is go on pros stack, right? So we're not going to sell you anything. What we may do is have some of the products that I am using, maybe on the side of GoOnPro. com, to show you what I'm using.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:07:19,710 ] You um, if anything there might be a um, a referral fee uh for that, but those you know, I don't know if you know about referral fees, but there are a lot— the lines of like maybe less than 1% or of the sale, or it might be even just 7 cents for a click, you know. So some like that. So these are things that you won't see here. Okay, I'm not and you see people, you know, the gym bros out there calling people grifters or something like that, if they say anything against what they espouse, their carnivore diets and their... and their protein.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:08:05,150 ] Hawking, that kind of thing. And you'll know, I will never be a grifter. This is not about grifting here. This is about education. This is really about just... documenting my own Longevity.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:08:18,890 ] journey. Okay, so my stack really consists of only a few things. Calcium and vitamin D, B12 and omega-3, and then there's my diet, my exercise. That's my stack. Five pillars and then I do do some acarbose. Okay, so and then I've also been educated on perhaps some SGPT2 inhibitors. Brinzavia, I've tried that, and I think it does have a good effect on my... My overall output here and seeing my hemoglobin A1c drop. I have some diabetes in my family— pretty significant diabetes— and some diabetes in my family where they are being uh seen by physicians. Who are telling them that a hemoglobin A1c of 7 is fantastic.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:09:18,690 ] And, you know, I go to my parents' house and my mom has sugar in the house. And so and obviously I have some, too. So I'm not going to lie. I have some sugar in my house and I am not going to completely devoid my life of any. Sugar, um, and my girlfriend is a baker. She bakes like the Dickens. Right, so she does a lot of pastries. She is a pastry chef trying to get her to try to use more glucose and dextrose and less table sugar in some of her recipes. And we're working on that. But she is an amazing cook, and so that's my challenge. Right there, my girlfriend, and how much of an amazing cook she is, we'll see if she listens to this, and to see what she says about that part. That could be where the rubber leads the road.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:10:23,620 ] There. So it is amazing what I've learned from her as far as cooking, because I think that... Thank you. In my cooking in the past has been a lot of good whole food things, but I've learned a lot from her. So it's great. And this is all natural inhibition of mTOR. So we talked about inhibition of mTOR in the past. mTOR is... what we need to inhibit for longevity. Okay. So serolimus inhibits mTOR. And if you're going to take that, and there is a lot. of longevity space hawkers out there trying to espouse the use of serolimus lower dose to inhibit mTOR but here we know that calorie restriction and potentially fasting and potentially protein restriction. And weight maintenance and exercise and sleep are inhibitors of mTOR.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:11:25,210 ] What are stimulators of mTOR? Increased protein intake. And if you want to grow, if you want to grow muscle, that's what you need to do. You need to stimulate mTOR. In those muscles, in order to make new muscle cells, but by the time you're 50 years of age, you don't really need to grow more muscle; you need to maintain what you have. Then your muscle needs to be a lean muscle without the intramuscular fat adipose tissue. And then you need to be strong. So obviously, there's a little caveat there— a little back and forth play between do you want to have growth of muscle, do you want to have maintenance, but you certainly don't want to have a loss of muscle. And if you inhibit mTOR too much, you might have... muscle wasting, and/ or sarcopenia. But I think some of sarcopenia in some of these tests that we can do on muscle. And a decrease in potential size of muscle.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:12:23,140 ] Is actually a loss of the adipose tissue in between the muscle fibers. And so that's something that is important to me as muscle strength. Into my next decades, okay, so weight maintenance, exercise, sleep, all of these five pillars that we've always talked about about our Um, life here, this unprocessed life, okay? I had a little bit of a scare. My biological age might not be accurate because of a couple things. I have allergies. And my eosinophil level on my blood work is high because I have allergies. I get allergy shots. And I am allergic to almost everything. Under the Sun, my allergy tests look like you know, four plus all throughout, and even after two years of allergy shots, there were still one two plus. I'm allergic to everything, still, especially molds. My total bilirubin is elevated, so you know, one of the things that can be said is he's got liver enzyme abnormalities, so that could be a point off, right?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:13:27,910 ] Of my biological age. My bilirubin has been ranging from 1. 9 to 3. 2 and it's an isolated bilirubin. I've known about it since I was 16 years of age and I know that that could impact things. So this most recent blood work I just got— I mistakenly did it on a fast. I was 36 to almost 48 hours of a fast at the time that I did my blood work. My LDL was high, and learned that potentially your LDL might be a little bit high when you do a fast over 24 hours. But my biological age was still 14 years younger. My biological age— or my cardiovascular age— is five years younger. Let's double check and make sure that's still the case. Let's see what it says here after this past week of good exercise. We're in six miles yesterday. Had a great day there. Um, to go to My Health, we're gonna look at cardiovascular, heart health, five years younger.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:14:34,150 ] Yeah. Five years younger, my VO2 max says high at 36.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:14:40,920 ] So pretty decent there. I'm trying to get to a peak there. I think we'll work on that over the next month.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:14:51,170 ] Next is going to be preparing for this new house. A couple things that I'm going to be doing proactively, because what I've had in my apartment so far is I have these nice wooden blinds, but I have a street light that shines right into my room, probably impacting my sleep a little bit, and so I'm going to work on the new house trying to get that shaped up. Um and what else? With a new house, I'm going to be preparing for that, some of the things I can do for my diet and movement, I'm going to be having a gym in the house now. Right now, I have a gym, but it's shared. It's got a little bit of a walk away. You know, the thing about a joining a gym is that you really have some comparison. You have a social aspect to it. And so I hope to have a little bit of best of both worlds there. Um, okay, so.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:15:50,650 ] This week, I had a great week with my residents. Resonance really decreased my biological age by helping me teach and really keeping me young, keeping me on my toes. I love teaching residents. I teach every week that I'm on.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:16:09,300 ] I assign them a little homework every day and this week I had them do some assignments on microbiome. We're going to have multiple different Sunday science episodes in this month of June, partially based on some of their research. I had already done the research before and this is why I assigned some of this research to them about your microbiome's effect on fitness and strength, your grip strength, and your muscle strength. Increasing. If you have a good microbiome, good fiber, and this is because of potentially the fatty free fatty acids that your microbiome produces, your microbiome um is responsible for the digestion of almost all of your food. Okay. And if you give it the right kind of food and the right kind of fibers, it produces free fatty acids. And these short chain fatty acids are food for muscle, especially in anaerobic times. And so they, and building muscle.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:17:13,760 ] Bye. using fiber. And I'll tell you, I was talking to my residents about the gym bros and the increased protein that they think everybody needs. And this is not necessarily the case. And the gym bros saying that fiber is an anti-nutrient and that you need to avoid fiber. And this couldn't be farther from the truth, okay? So here is where we're... Again, the rubber meets the road here. Is getting away from misinformation on the internet. And getting toward what really improves longevity, and people who really are starting to think about this now— the blue zones. All of that. All of these documentaries are really taking shape. Zoe in England. Really also touching base and promoting the effects of your microbiome on longevity and the blue zones, and Dan Buettner, and a little bit of Huberman. And Peter Attia actually highlights some of this, I think there's a lot of space where they They really go wrong here for some of their listeners.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:18:21,570 ] But I think overall, there's a lot of great information in every one of these people. Also, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Hyman and his lectures on the longevity space and function health. Really important, okay. So and I love the teaching of that function. Health to my internal medicine residents who are being taught, basically, in internal medicine residents in residency to react to illness and this is exactly the way that medicine is still Thank you. teaching to this day. And I really love getting with them and talking to them about functional health, talking to them about diet and its effects. And food as medicine and then movement as medicine as well. Love it and and that has really made May and the start of June here really an exciting time for me in teaching these residents some of this so really This month of June is going to be proactive, learning from my mistakes, surrounding myself with support.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:19:30,660 ] Accepting and seeking out help, I really have also been teaching my kids this. And, you know, they're young, just getting out of college and just getting... My daughter is going to be a senior in college. really knowing that they can seek out help. and being proactive about it and not sitting back and inside their shell, inside their internet, inside their phone and just... Trying to apply for jobs just online. You know, you can't just apply for jobs online. You've got to get out there. Okay, so Um... Some of that I think they've really learned.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:20:09,260 ] from me a bit here, seeking out help and then loving myself. So that is something that I am having a love affair with myself. I'm really getting into this mindfulness of where I need to be in the future. And I am. Loving every minute of where where I'm at with that, so I think that where we're headed toward is is that home, bringing things into the home to help yourself and you can be part of the time there, but also getting out to connect with others. With all of this. For diet. We talked about. Going to a vegan restaurant or vegan grocery store. And you can really meet people out there that have some of these same goals. And in a little bit of the vegan space is some of this animal cruelty and animal protection kind of thing.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:21:11,850 ] And I think some of them... um are not necessarily in it for the health and i think that that we really need to stay away from some of those people that are not necessarily in this for the health because even though they're there I went to I told you the story in Paris of going to the restaurant that was a vegan restaurant and they had fake meat and cheese almost in every single dish that I had there and I thought wow if they're really going to have artificial meat and cheese in everything that they're espousing there and serving to their customers they're definitely not in it for the health they're just in it just to have tasty things that don't have meat it so and and they're really Not doing their clientele a service there. So, all right, so we talked about the days in May that we had, and let's get into our five pillars here for what our goals are for this week.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:22:20,160 ] And so, and for the month of June, okay? So my basically, week 11 is basically starting into the fourth month, right? And getting, looking forward to the fourth month of where we're headed.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:22:37,230 ] And our goals now have been maybe two to three vegan days a week. And our goals have been to get two to three cardiovascular exercise days a week, two to three resistance training days a week. We're going to expound upon that and really improve on every aspect of this. Here's where we're going to be: we're going to have our diet improve seven days per week. We're going to have greens, berries, beans, and fermented foods, okay? And I'm going to attempt to have most days on greens and berries to include both and beans and fermented foods in both. So beans are a staple across the world of communities who live to be a hundred years of age. These blue zones use beans and nuts. Potentially, as their protein source. They, in general, don't eat a lot of meat.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:23:40,530 ] They eat meat on special occasions. and so once a week, and you know the Tom Brady 12— the TB12 diet— and what he did, and the whole food diet, and a little bit more vegan, a little bit more plant-based, and natural foods, and then some protein at the end. And his a lot of his protein came from very lean sources, okay, so And then our beans and fermented foods, we started this thing last month. Um, and um, and so we need some of our protein and the beans and the fermented foods for our microbiome. Okay, so you know this is more than just yoga. Uh, yogurt. I mean, so this is more than just yogurt and yogurt. Really has been shown when you eat yogurt, and that bacteria that's in the yogurt. Not a lot of it sticks in and remains in your intestines. That's called permanence, or that's called 'getting that bacteria to stay and affix to your uh basically inside of your ribs, kind of, as your mom said right.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:24:46,370 ] You want to the food to stick to your inside of your ribs. You want to get these fermented foods, you want to get these fermented bacteria to stick to the inside of your ribs. Not technically the ribs, right? So, but you want it to... to be incorporated into the full microbiome, right? And how do you do that? And that involves... That fermented food should be in there with a bunch of fiber so when you eat yogurt, it's got to be with some full oats and that's organic oats to me. I always espouse using the organic oats to avoid some of the pesticides that are that are sprayed on oats and can accumulate on oats. So I put a lot of fiber in my yogurt. Let's say, for example, but that's not it. Okay. So here I'm going to introduce a little bit. This is kind of, this is Lartsy's kimchi version, okay. So this is not exactly kimchi, but this is cabbage, but I have some cucumbers in here, some onions, some, and this orange here is not carrots, this is some turmeric you can see the bubbles coming up out of this. It's this is about three to four days into the ferment here. You can see the top of them.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:26:08,240 ] You can see the bubbles coming out here. And... This is where we are at for our I'm going to probably ferment this for about a week. This is turmeric, then there's ginger in here, and there's onion. And then I've got a little bit of pickle spice in here. And.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:26:28,460 ] All right, so that is that. That is, it's an amazing sight.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:26:33,490 ] Love it. I am. Looking forward to in about three or four days probably popping this open. I have two of these— I have four fermenting jars. Two of them that are quart jars that are a little bigger than this actually. I think it's bigger than a quart jar. I think this might be the quart one and it's got a weight you can see this weight there. It's got the fermenting. All right. Offloading of the gas there, here's my little pickle. So we're gonna have some pickles and a lot of antioxidants in here. We're going to love this. I can't wait to dwell into this, okay? I'm looking to try to get to three to five days vegan now. And better choices, whole foods, avoiding packaged foods. Okay, so I'm going to do an even better job at avoiding the packaged foods. Love it. Can't wait.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:27:33,800 ] Every Sunday, I tell you, you know, it's a very difficult thing when you are in a busy life to really capture everything that you need to do on a daily basis.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:27:47,930 ] If you're going to come home, if you're going to go to work at 6 a. m., come home at 6 or 7 p. M., there's not a lot of time to really do your meal prepping. And if you're 6 a. m. to 6 p. m., 7 p. m., and you are at the hospital, what do you do? Can you bring your own food? That's something that I need to start to even more. Prepare for and something that we'll talk a little bit about the plastics that I use because, if I am going to be drinking only water, and I bring a 32-ounce, uh, steel glass of water with me every day. But that's only part of the water I need to eat during a 12-hour day. And so I was adding bottled water. So I would get this smart water, the life water, and I would drink a bottle of water. So that's a plastic right there that I need to try to get rid of from my day. Okay. So that's something we're going to do in the month of June as well in the week and week 11. And I've already done a great job of that, but I think I've also maybe decreased my water intake this week because of that.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:28:54,830 ] I had a pretty busy week this week. Okay, better choices, whole foods, the fermented foods, maintaining the fiber that we've done. Okay, so movement. We're going to get into stretching in the morning. Maybe a class is a method of connection. My daughter, my girlfriend have been going to a class and I might get involved in that a little more. That is a social connection. And then, the weights at home, we talked about that and what we can do there.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:29:26,460 ] Amazing what we're going to be doing with this once I get my own weight machine at home, because really it allows you to not have to make a special trip to get to the gym, right? That's going to be everybody out there. Who wants to try to get to the gym and get resistance training, you really need to have some weights at home because that can be an impediment to getting that resistance. Training the other thing that we're going to do this week is adding a fourth day of one or the other of cardiovascular or resistance training. And really, it's going to be more on the cardiovascular side. We're going to try to get to that— three days a week of cardiovascular, three days a week of resistance training— and then adding a fourth day. Not saying we have to have seven days a week and no rest. I'm saying that you could still have that day of rest. But on one day, it's going to be a two-a-day. On one day, it's going to be a two-a-day workout. So you remember that when you were in high school and you're... Coach had you do two a-day sessions— one in the morning and one in the evening— before school and after school. This is what I'm doing this week. Okay, so this week we're adding a fourth day. This next week, um, we're uh doing it two a-day. Okay, so uh, most likely, what that's gonna entail this week is tennis. And again, tennis is a great way— and any kind of court sport or anything that gets you moving and gets you using some balance and gets you putting a lot of strength into your joints and your bones, a lot of weight.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:31:04,770 ] Shifting of weight that's going to get that bone growth and that bone strengthening that you're going to need in the future. So that's where we're headed with this for this week. Can't wait for that. Can't wait to get back on the tennis court. I used to have a at least twice a week with the Tennis Pro, can't wait for the C motion as my Tennis Pro, Betsy, used to teach me and getting that going. Okay, so sleep this week. We talked about my new home and what we're going to be doing with the blackout. I'm going to get some blackout drapes. And I think I've struggled in the past with... evening snacks getting to 10 p. m. And so, you know, that if I'm time-restricted feeding until one o'clock in the afternoon, hey, it's... pretty easy to wait until one in the afternoon if you have a midnight snack right but, but so I'm going to try to get my snacks uh no later than 8 p.m. M I'm having a little bit of a struggle because I think my girlfriend kind of is a little bit of a snacker and I'll tell you, yeah.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:32:12,180 ] So um and Really going to try to Put the, you know, put the stop on that, right? Put the stop at 8 p. m. Right there. Boom. Not going to do it, okay? So the other thing I've been doing lately is getting a much cooler room. I've been accepting of the ceiling fan being on in the room that my girlfriend loves. Um, and trying to get the cooler room, and I think that's improved my sleep score. I've had some issues on my tracking of my sleep with deep sleep. I've been really increasing my REM sleep and doing pretty good with that, but deep sleep. And I think that's probably the light in the room. Also, the little bit of it is... having someone in the bed who's a little bit of a tossing and turning also. So each of us waking each other up. And so... But I think getting the blackout drapes, getting a dark room, I think is really going to help with that in the new house.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:33:15,530 ] So I can't wait for that. 66-degree room. And then the connection okay so pillar number four so we've talked about diet movement sleep so there's our three pillars the fourth is connection and family and connection and creativity and These are things I'm going to be starting to really concentrate on is classes and clubs. Also another thing that I'll be concentrating on is music. Something I haven't done a lot of in the past. Is the my creativity, and we talked about my creativity for writing and and poems and some of that I've had some guitars and harmonicas that I've had going into the past.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:34:06,410 ] Those guitars have not been in my present house lately and have been stored off site. And so in this new house, I'm going to have a special area set aside for all my guitars. That I can get a real setup for that. And my girlfriend wants a piano. I think that that's gonna be something in the works too. Learning lifelong. And that's something that... That is really important, okay?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:34:35,810 ] If you're like me, you are... Uh, I hope you are. A creative, learning, being right so that's what I love being and I love that because I can do that on a daily basis with my residents. But also, I love that my kids are out there learning and I can learn along with them. My daughter being in Paris for the spring semester, and me getting over there and learning French even better than I had before. I once had a girlfriend who spoke French from Montreal, but I don't think that the French... French we learned was necessarily what I need. Now I'm really learning French and been to Paris twice in the last, sorry, been to France twice in the last two years. and really loving that i already even pretty Fluent en Spanish y mi español es un poquito, pero necesito más práctica. see haha see my Spanish is muy poquito all right so but it does me well enough that I can speak to patients and understand them I've had About once every month, I have a Spanish-speaking patient, Spanish-speaking only.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:35:51,190 ] that I can really practice my Spanish. And I love it. I always have someone there that can translate in case I need it. But I love speaking Spanish. With my patients, I feel like they love it too, because they, in general, have maybe perhaps a lot of nurses that speak Spanish with them, but I feel like they really appreciate the fact that somebody really cares enough to learn Spanish and I think they appreciate that. And I appreciate it too, because I love learning languages. I love learning things, music, and art, and writing, and poetry, and trying to get the rhythms right. And so, and I think that. I think that I did myself a disservice when I was younger. Sixth grade, I stopped playing the saxophone, and that is the next thing. The next thing. I've been already searching the internet looking for the saxophone I'm going to buy. I may even get every single one.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:36:52,070 ] I may get an alto tenor and a bass or a contrabass or something like that saxophone. Can't wait to get into that too. For my music. I love the blues. I love the harmonica. And I can't wait. I can't wait to retire so I can really learn this stuff too. So I can't wait for that. Okay, so that's our connection. Creativity and we're gonna be doing some classes and clubs also so we're gonna have our music corner set that up in your house. I hope that every [is] is that way that you can you can connect with learning in a way that you can also connect with people but connect with yourself. Okay, connect with to what makes you happy. If you don't like any of that, hey, you know, and if absolutely you abhor that, fine, but... Delve yourself into something that is an enriching thing.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:37:53,950 ] And I love that I am doing that in my older age here. Say not older age—I am. I feel like I feel like I'm 30 years old. I love life right now. So um and that—um, if that's old age, if I'm feeling like I'm 30, can't wait to see what the rest of my life does. Okay, so that's our connection. So the next part is the plastics, and we talked about that fifth pillar, right? So plastics. Plastics are all around us. I'm looking around the room, and I see a printer, and it is 100% made of plastic. I'm looking at a shredder made of plastic. It's made 100, made of plastic. My monitor, my computer, my microphone has quite a bit of metal on it. Right. Uh, but, my phone, my phone case. I think this is going to be one of the next things I replace and get to maybe a bamboo case. looked into that, but here is one thing. And we've been getting rid of our plastics in my life.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:38:56,300 ] And we've really done a great job. Partial. Okay, so we're getting there. I've got 52 weeks, right? I'm one-fifth, more than one-fifth of the way. Of the way. Um, that's got that. Gives me a lot of time to start, and you can see my my shirt here. Is not necessarily all cotton, right here, and I'm, I'm working on that. Um, I do have a lot of cotton clothes right now, but we're working on that. And this is the point. This is the 52 weeks. If you did all of what you really need to do to get rid of plastics in your house, like Day one. It would cost you a lot of money. But if you can slowly do it. Over 52 weeks. All the better. And here's what I did this week, okay? So we talked about that. I'm minimizing bottles, trying to get rid of bottles, trying to bring maybe what I think I'm going to do is get two glasses now into my... Into my car at the beginning of the day, but and the good thing is, for the most part, my cars.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:40:00,950 ] I think about what I'm doing in my car. I have a little bit of a commute— almost an hour to drive.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:40:09,270 ] But the... The nice thing, I've got leather. I've got a leather steering wheel. I've got a leather seat. That may be something that is a little bit of a luxury, everybody can't afford. But here is something. And I didn't bring my pen. normal pen with me, but I usually have a couple of pens in my shirt. And they are plastic pens. And they are rollerballs. And they have blue ink.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:40:36,800 ] That I'm sure is not the greatest either, but I've been turned on to these Schaefer pens, chrome pens. Fully, no plastic whatsoever. I used to basically... put the pen in my mouth to pull. The cap off and and so the good thing is this: I can just uh tap this and gonna avoid the contact with the plastic all day long with the pen and these have some good non-toxic ink that Schaefer makes and so this is something that we're going to be continuing to use. These are not um— These are not cheap: $18 for a pen. So that's something that that is an expense and you can't I can't throw away all of my pens and buy ten $18 pens.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:41:28,110 ] Uh... pens but this is the start of it. Okay, so getting rid of my plastic, getting rid of my plastic pens.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:41:37,440 ] That is the deal, and the bottles, okay? So here's a— and all right, so that's week 11 in a nutshell, okay? So thanks for joining me here on this journey. And uh... I think, wherever you get your podcasts, I want to make sure everybody's aware that now our podcast is available a bit wider. We've started doing even more. Of our podcast, let's get our seat over here even more of our podcast is video now. Okay, so if you're listening on an audio podcast, just know that you can see our podcast on a lot of different video sources. And we're improving that on a week to week basis. Right now, our Apple podcast, the video connection is in the video. Quality is not the greatest. We're going on 480p because of some limits that we're imposing on us that have been imposed upon us as far as the... uploads and so that's what the Apple Spotify video podcast, which is something great and up-and-coming, we have no limit there.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:42:49,780 ] So we're in 1080p there, pretty much sometimes 4K. That we've uploaded there, our YouTube um channel uh for a go on pro and brent w larts md you can search it on either one of them, but our podcast there is in 4K to 1080p. At the worst, and so that is fully there. What else do we have running? And then obviously, we have everywhere else that you do audio podcasts there. They are there. Okay, so we have it. We have our Apple audio podcast and we have our Apple video podcast. So wherever you get your podcast audio or video, you should Be able to get to us at any time and we're going to be doing a lot better a job in the month of June of getting a weekly podcast every week. And then we're going to be doing Sunday Science also potentially at least three out of the four of the week this month.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:43:51,100 ] So let's look at what we're doing and what we've done so far, what we've accomplished. So far, every week we're we're showing what we've accomplished, and we have accomplished an amazing things in our diet. We've started eating berries, and then we really improved upon that, and we've gotten rid of all fast food. I can't tell you when the last time I've ever been in a fast food restaurant at all— probably was at least a year ago. If and probably that was once for the entire year of that year, and that was I think I went into a McDonald's in Chile only because my girlfriend wanted to go, and I didn't need a darn thing there.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:44:38,330 ] Let's see, when else have I been? Probably a year ago with my daughter, and a Taco Bell used to eat a little bit of Taco Bell— No longer eat there anymore.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:44:48,440 ] Okay, so we've gotten rid of all that, gotten rid of almost all soda. We drink water daily, a lot of water. Having water delivered to the house in big five-gallon glass jars.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:45:01,320 ] And working on our microbiome, and I've gotten rid of almost all red meat, getting rid of dairy, and using poultry and seafood for my protein source, along with beans, obviously. We talked about that. We talked about home prep. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second about the home prep because every Sunday I am doing a home prep. And that's where this... day ferment is coming into play. Because if you start this Sunday and do a prep of this by the following Sunday the next week fermentations will be ready. So I'm doing a couple of those each week and so when the next week if I pull those out and I eat them, then I have that jar that I can use for the next fermentation. So I'm really starting that.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:45:50,960 ] We're doing greens, cabbage, spinach, kale, salads, a lot of that. We're doing— we started out with vegan one day a week. We're upping that to maybe three days a week, trying to even up that a little more. And. Bringing in the beans is an important thing there because if you're going to be vegan some of those days, you're not going to have that protein from your meat sources. And so I'm really doing poultry and fish and then the beans for my protein. And then we're avoiding processed oils using mostly olive and avocado oil. trying to stay away from the seed oils. But if I do do the seed oils, trying to get cold-pressed or organic and that kind of thing, just so that you can avoid the ultra-processing of anything. Let's see, making a lot of homemade foods. Okay, so buying that produce or going to Sprouts. Sprouts is my favorite grocery store.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:46:48,450 ] Because there's so much produce there and so much produce you can get for bulk and the beans in bulk that's something I've enjoyed doing is making my own beans from dried beans. Okay, so having my Home prep this week was making my own black beans and onion and some cayenne. And that's been a great. Of protein this week, let's see what else. And the 40 Whole Foods weekly this is something that I do a lot of— trying to get 40 different vegetables, fruits, nuts, and beans into your diet in one week. Okay, so 40 different ones that's going to be something great for my microbiome. That's something that I love doing. So now we're talking about getting the berries, beans, and the raw foods, and the fermented foods into my diet.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:47:52,180 ] Okay, so then we've talked about exercise and everything we're doing for cardiovascular and our resistance training and getting into some court sports to get that balance right so you need balance in older age and then we're talking about our sleep and our circadian rhythms getting that morning sunlight getting out of the light in the evening. And here, you know, we're at 9 o'clock p. m. here, and I've got this ring light and everything here that is shining, and this is not the best for me. You know, I procrastinated today to get this started.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:48:31,300 ] I had a lot of work, financial work to get done after and my notes to get finished. So I didn't have time to get an afternoon podcasting. So I'm going against my.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:48:42,260 ] My needs here for my evening red light and decreased light, but a lot of the different things we've already done for our sleep and um, and our um, training of our sleep and the entrainment using delta waves and looking at that, so that's something we've done. Let's see what else here. And our meditation, that's something that we've done here. Okay. So, all right. The next part is: We've talked about the three pillars here and the connection. Along the way, we just ran through a litany of everything I've done, connection, and getting back with some older friends that have fallen out of touch with. And we've talked about connecting with your parents with your family. Thank you. Bringing them in more often.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:49:43,460 ] Um, getting some creativity, painting and poetry, and really something I've really enjoyed doing is writing books and then journaling and that kind of thing. And then getting a connection to yourself. It's not connection and everything that is espoused for longevity. We know that family and friends and having connections, clubs and a community is important. But really, connection to yourself is important too. And so I've really paid attention to that and meditation and getting in touch with my feelings. Also volunteering. Something I've done now is a weekly thing I do every week, volunteering for a local soup kitchen, doing some cooking there as well. My girlfriend's been doing some cooking and doing some of her baking. They used to not have dessert every week, but now she brings in a big tray full of brownies and cooks them there.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:50:49,610 ] Now these people who wouldn't necessarily... get a good dessert—get a good dessert— now is that great for longevity? That sugar the ice cream and That, but this is once a week they're getting this, so. So I don't think we're ruining their longevity, but it is something they can look forward to.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:51:07,750 ] And I've started a kind of a poetry book that I'm doing. Getting involved with social and walking clubs and running clubs and getting out to vegan grocery stores and meeting people, meeting people who love this kind of thing, meeting people who love the health. Also, volunteering at a local, urban, farm a couple of times and and we haven't done that for a month or two but we need to get back there on a Saturday perhaps this next Saturday I'll get to that again what else and then the plastics right so Plastics, we've already gotten rid of a lot of our kitchen utensils. We've gotten rid of any of the plastic in our kitchen and our storage. That's important. Storage of your foods, your leftovers, right? If you are going to meal prep, Mule prep and your food processor should be glass and steel Your food processor should then be able to be that food should be able to be processed into a glass jar So my fermentation jar is glass got a little bit of silicone here The plastic up here shouldn't matter.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:52:16,540 ] So, you know, you've got a seal here, but everything is stainless steel and glass, right? So, and then the glass weight inside there, that's glass, all glass. So, and so here we are.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:52:32,010 ] with uh with everything we're doing here so lot of glass a lot of stainless steel a lot of wood in my kitchen and I we talked about the pens and every look around and then close to close and things that you wear things that you're using for your cosmetics your soaps shampoos the um Your laundry detergents. I've made a big switch there to less processed items there. The pods that have polyvinyl PVA and PVC. Those are... even though they're PVA and somebody says PVA is PVA alcohol you know what but it's polyvinyl okay so polyvinyl that means there's something there to make it solid that's why it's solid right so um all right so let's see what else uh so the clothes I think some of the most important things

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:53:32,520 ] are workout clothes that you wear trying to get that to be more cotton more natural fabrics okay so Let's see, what else did we talk about?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:53:49,230 ] canning jars, getting my bulk beans. I put them in a paper sack when I go. I try to avoid plastic items from the grocery store.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:54:02,220 ] glass mixing bowls, toothbrush. I've maintained to a bamboo toothbrush with boar's head boar's hair bristles. If you think about every time you brush your teeth, if one of those bristles and probably every time you brush your teeth, one of those bristles breaks off and you're going to swallow it. Right. So if you can avoid that, some of the travel hacks we've talked about— about bringing your own food, bringing some of your own packages along— so that you can avoid using plastics. Stainless steel pans, utensils, I think that's about it. I think so. That's where we're at. One getting to be upwards of.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:54:51,920 ] Of a fourth of the way almost to our goal here. And so we're going to be having a great time the rest of the year. We are going to be finishing this up hopefully by the end of the year.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:55:06,520 ] And I know that I'll be taking some time off, but here's to getting to where we're at and getting to where our future is. Life is looking more natural, more unprocessed, and we are at week 11 into this journey. Thanks for coming along with me, and thanks for joining me. Thanks for letting me show you what I'm doing. If you want to follow along and not do it yourself, that's fine. If you want to follow along and do some of this, make sure you um research yourself and you know the caveats at the end and the and the disclaimers at the end. Say, basically, you need to research this yourself. Talk to your doctor about anything that you try to do to yourself, okay? So don't take it from me just because I'm a doctor. This is not medical advice for anybody else except for myself, okay? So I'm only taking my own advice and I expect everybody else— not necessarily to take what I do.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:56:07,000 ] If you want to follow and see what I'm doing, that's great.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:56:12,570 ] Thanks a lot for following me. And you can follow us at GoOnPro. com. Every week, the video is there. Some of the summary is there; I haven't really been keeping up with adding the products. At some point, we're gonna get those added in there. The products that we use each week—get some examples in there so that you can track along, maybe on Amazon or wherever wherever we might try to get the links to some of these products that I use. And... So that GoOnPro. com has that there, okay? So the other thing I'm going to... try to set up even more. And this is something that is completely unrelated to this. And I've already about two thirds of the way into this is setting up all of my lectures onto an online repository. I do lectures for residents. At least once a month. And I've done those for 20-something years. And I have a whole host of lectures on infection prevention. Infection prevention is mainly in hospitals and healthcare facilities. That is great for healthcare providers, healthcare workers, and healthcare team members. I hope to contribute that. I'm not putting that out for free.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:57:28,620 ] This is potentially a... a pay item and these are on caribeid. com so I haven't really advertised this at all but caribeid. Com is where I is my publishing company that publishes my books. Okay, I have two actually, I have three books that have already been published and I have them available there. That's my publishing company. And they're obviously also available, all my books are available on Amazon, on Barnes & Noble, on anywhere you can get the solid book and anywhere you can get electronic books. I have one of my books so far on audiobook. I am actually, and this is something that I don't really want to pay for. I don't really want to pay for somebody narrating my book. And have somebody paid. Tens of thousands of dollars to narrate a book. They're just reading a book. And for those of you who do that for a living out there, all the more power to you because I'm doing it the cheap way. I am.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:58:34,530 ] Editing I am narrating my own books, and I've already done it for my scientific book, but that is an easy thing to do Narrating you're a scientific book because it doesn't involve emotion right you're just reading along and exactly giving advice, right?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:58:52,030 ] and But, Um, so.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 00:59:00,290 ] I have finished, I think it's 24 out of 42 chapters, fully edited, fully narrated. out of 42 and I'm dreading reading the next you have to set up a full studio the microphone has to be in this isolated box so that it doesn't have as much of a any echo from the room so I set up a blanket behind me and you should see the setup that I have and the blanket even comes over me so you don't have any um echo from the ceiling even. And I'll tell you, it is a setup and it is a pain in the butt, but hopefully that's going to be available. So my new book, my third book, which was published a whole year and almost a half ago, that should be available by the end of the summer on audiobook and I really I'm thinking about getting it done. But that's on Caribbeanid.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:00:00,420 ] com is where you can access that. And you can access those lectures. But I also have something that is more geared toward healthcare providers, who are learning about infectious disease and the treatment of infectious diseases. That's also on Caribbeanid. com. And we'll talk about that more in some later years about. About that, about all the books that I do and— but I'm looking at publishing this into a book. I'm looking at publishing my poetry into a book. And I can't wait for all of that.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:00:32,220 ] We'll see what happens with that.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:00:35,330 ] Can't wait for everybody to enjoy that. So again, GoOnPro. com. That's where my podcast is. If you want to see it without having to get to some... get to it on the internet and just watch it there, it's on and everything is on YouTube. So the video is actually embedded from YouTube. Com you can get my podcast either by looking, searching for 'go on pro' on YouTube itself and getting it from there, or searching 'brentwlartsmd' because I have The podcast, everything's set there. My Monday Meditation Minutes and my Friday Prime Day is there, which I haven't done that since I was in Paris yet again. And All Right, so then elsewhere that you can see my podcast. And so you guys that are listening to the audio podcast, I don't put a lot of my Friday Prime Day and my Monday Meditation Minute. On to a podcast, an audio podcast. Because it's really a visual thing because you're reading something there.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:01:37,510 ] Most of my Monday Meditation Minute is just a nice video. Of something I've filmed, and it's not really something to go on an audio podcast, though there is some music potentially and some sounds of nature on it. But that is on my website, and it is on YouTube, but it's not on some of the other podcast sites, okay? So Apple Podcast. It's on Spotify, okay? as a video podcast. It's on Apple Podcast as both a video and audio podcast. It is on Spotify as an audio podcast too. But then... And so if you search Go One Pro, you might find that there are two separate things. The blue logos and the blue artwork, that's going to be your video. And if you have like a maroon, red logo or a maroon red artwork for the podcast. It's usually going to be an audio podcast. It is on, let's see, where else are we available?

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:02:41,220 ] On YouTube Music.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:02:43,620 ] That brings in from the YouTube, brings in that podcast into YouTube Music.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:02:50,970 ] Apple Music, It's on Amazon Music. Just about everywhere. I don't think there's a lot of places that I don't have it available on. Really expanding our reach and I love how we've really grown, slowly, slowly through time. This is— I'm not advertising this anywhere. I'm not spending money to advertise this yet. I don't feel like I need to spend that money. I don't, I'm not that eager to get it out there. I'm really just eager to really just talk with, I'm really just talking to myself here. Right. Right. So, um, you, you, join me. I'm talking to you and I love you guys. But really, I'm just talking to myself. I'm just on this journey and really just bouncing things back and forth to say what I'm doing. I'm telling myself, I'm telling myself, I'm telling myself what I'm doing this week. I'm telling myself giving myself some accountability. That's the other part about this accountability—this tracking, this tracking accountability this tracking for the aura ring. Accountability for showing exactly how I've improved, and I have improved a lot over the last, really, it's been started almost two years ago, improved over a year, and really the last 11 weeks since February-ish, I have really improved a lot in all of the aspects, all five pillars.

Dr. Brent Laartz

[ 01:04:05,080 ] And I love it. And I love where I'm headed. I love how I feel. I love the fact that I feel good. Like, I'm 30. I love feeling like, I have a 28-year-old girlfriend who I feel like I match her every minute of the day, for every minute of how active and how good I feel and how I can be every bit as active and probably even more active than she is. And I'm really feeling like this is where I'd love to be. So thank you very much for joining me. We'll see you at week 12. Thank you, everyone. We'll see you on the other side.

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