Week 18: A Doctor’s 52 Week Journey to an Unprocessed Life

https://youtu.be/qPMosw2bjtM

Welcome to the Go Unpro podcast, a doctor's 52-week journey to an unprocessed life. Now, here is your host Dr. Brent W. Lartz, Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine, Neuroscientist, and best-selling author.

Alright everyone. here we are week 18 a doctor's 52 week journey to an unprocessed life here we are uh week 18 we've passed the one-third way mark and finding a few hiccups here along the way but mostly success and that's the point to it mostly success onward and upward there's going to be plateaus there's But as long as that general trajectory is upward, that's where we're headed, okay? Today, we talked a little bit last time about our attitude and about trying to provide some support along the way, right? And I did a post on social media this week. And I talked about this using Six Sigma, okay?

I've had Six Sigma training through different hospitals and trying to identify problems and then how to fix them. And then also, once fixed, that's not the end of the story. Because every time you figure out a fix, there's always a little bit of a hiccup as to why that fix wasn't exactly right. and why it worked, why it didn't work, okay? So Six Sigma is the process by which companies that want minimal error delve into a problem. Every single problem is treated this way, okay? They delve into a problem and they make a fix that has as little chance to error as possible.

This was brought about back in the 80s, I think, with Jack Welch, I think it was, with GE, General Electric. And the point was this with General Electric was he wanted the error to be no greater than six standards of deviation. Now that's 0.00001, right? So potentially. That would be in some place where you would want the error to be so low, like GE was involved with a lot of electrical things and making jet engines and making medical devices. And you want medical devices have almost zero error, right? So the way to define the problem and make it so that it had that little bit of an error. can be brought into our lives with any kind of situation.

Now, it doesn't have to be 0.00001 error, because I don't think humans are really to the point of getting to 0.00001 error, but can we get as close as possible? And the way to do that... is to use Six Sigma and a few other things. My companies have been brought into also the ISO 9001 world, so the ISO world, the International Standards Organization, so that they have some control processes by which you can make sure that you're quality control is as good as possible.

So we can kind of really just hack into a world here where we can use some of the things from Six Sigma, some of the things from ISO 9001 and maybe any of the other quality control standards of ISO, ISO 9003, et cetera, right? So, but kind of in the center is this manifestation because that's where we're at with what we want to do is we want to manifest our health, but we want to do it with all these steps of manifestation. Once that is occurring, we need to try to figure out the goal and the problem, and we can also make it a little more foolproof with Six Sigma. utilization, and with ISO 9001. And here's the way this might work, okay?

So the kind of combination, you know, with manifestation, you have to be clear in your vision, right? And that definition of all of your goals needs to be taken into account. Because we are talking about our health and there's multiple facets to health. We can't just say, okay, I want to be in good health. There must be multiple facets to that. So there's probably going to be multiple goals to this, right? And we have our five pillars. We have our five pillars of health. We have identifying fears and doubts for our manifestation journey. And those fears and doubts can be multiple different areas and all from each of those five pillars. Now, at the baseline, and you need to constantly measure.

So let's go back. Let's step back a little bit to Six Sigma. Six Sigma has five different components. You have to define the goal or the problem. You have to measure. You have to analyze. Then you have to improve. And then you control the outcome and you control, go back with feedback and control the outcome so that you can do a loop back. and see if what you're doing is working okay so and that's and then iso 9001 really has a lot of the same types of patterns of measurement and analyzing and we'll talk about that in a bit okay Let's be clear here in our vision of let's take one part and let's go with the diet.

We define our diet and we define our diet as a diet that we need to have to live to be 110 and as healthy for as long as possible during that journey. and living an unprocessed life, right? So, all right, so we define that problem or that goal needs to be set into some standards, right? What is this diet? And what is the standard diet? And it's not the standard American diet, sad, right? So it is. our diet, our diet to 101, 110. It's going to be the manifest 110 diet, okay? So we've been clear in our vision, and as part of the defined part of Six Sigma, we've defined it, right?

So there are all going to be all these different parts we're going to define, and along these 52 weeks, we are defining. All of these 52 components of our diet, exactly how it's going to go, right? And exactly what we do and don't want to have in our diet. So we are clear in our vision, clear in our goal, clear in exactly defining the process along those lines. Now, then, we have a baseline and constant measurement. Well, how can we measure that? We can measure it by how many days out of the week we are vegan, how many days out of the week we eat chicken, how many times out of the week we eat beef, and then sugar.

And we can measure the number of days we have a soda. If your problem is drinking sugar soda, and or any kind of soda for that matter do you want to geared more toward water and not measure and if your problem with your diet is uh eating too much other sweets anything it's a really a measurement process okay if you don't measure then you don't know i went all along with my life thinking that I was being healthy, right? And so I knew by the time I hit 163 pounds and hit a BMI of 25, 27, wherever I was at, 27, I think it was almost, 163 at 5.7, five foot seven.

And knew that I was creeping into the overweight category and knowing the problem, okay? So, but I thought I was healthy. I thought, ah, I eat chicken most of the time. I eat steak some, but lo and behold, if I actually measured, it wasn't true. I thought, because what your brain when you want to think about how healthy you are, you want to have. Your brain wants you to feel good and wants you to feel good about your diet overall. So I see patients day in and day out who tell me, oh yeah, I was pretty healthy until I came in with this pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Okay. Fair enough. That's how you thought.

Now, challenge for that person, and that's not my area to challenge them to do this, but if I was that person, I would challenge myself to say, well, there must be some problem because I have congestive heart failure in the hospital, and boom. I wasn't healthy right up until that point, unless I all of a sudden got a virus and attacked my heart and or I had some other acute heart attack that did that. And even then, that acute heart attack, there was a reason for that. That viral infection might have been a reason for that might have been an immune system issue, right? And it all stems back to the life and then measuring

how healthy you are and then also you can do other kinds of measurement too uh we're starting to have a thunderstorm here at the go on pro studios um hoping that we don't have the same problem as last week where we lost power and had to cut the cut the podcast in half um but we'll see we'll see what happens i still have not put in the uh on interruptible power supplies here. So we'll see. All right. So think about the measurement. Think about measuring everything else. If you don't know what your fears and doubts are, take some time, write them down, write all the possibilities down. And don't just take five minutes. Don't just take 10 minutes.

Take an hour, take two hours, take an afternoon, take a Saturday afternoon, go to a coffee shop, put some headphones on, and ignore everyone. And you can sit on your phone or on your computer, but don't scroll. Delve down, start up a document, fears and doubts. What are my doubts about how I can become healthy? Why do I doubt that? What limitations in my beliefs bring that about? Do I tell myself that I am, I've always been X? And that's a common one, right? But it's not just limited to that. But I hear people say that all the time. I've always been big bum. I've always been a little overweight. I've always been a little chunky around the middle.

I've always been a lover of sweets. I've always been. My mother told me I was this. My mother told me I will never amount to nothing. My mother told me I will always be just like this because she was just like this. Just because her mother was like that. Her mother told her that. That you will always be... Big boned because I was always big boned and or Lurtses or whatever the last name is.

Lurtses have always been whatever it happens to be.

Those limiting fears, limiting doubts, limiting thoughts that keep creeping in need to be changed. Okay. So, all right. So the baseline and constant measurement. If you don't have a scale, I never had a scale really until I moved into a previous house I lived in. Happened to have a scale already there. The previous owners left it there. And perfect. Never the, it was never the. The greatest gift in my life from those previous owners was leaving that scale there because I think maybe I had some fears from scales because, as you know, I was a wrestler in high school and partially in college and really was only a wrestler in college for about a month at Northwestern University and about one week.

At the University of Iowa, the University of Iowa, I last in one week and I realized that I'm an athlete, but I'm not a Big Ten champion wrestling team athlete. I am not a I am not a an athlete that is that is an elite world class athlete. I'm in my own for exactly what I am, and I am great with that. Okay, so I realized that. But as you know, with wrestling, cutting weight is an issue. And at that time, it wasn't an issue. But at college, in high school, I wrestled 105 pounds. My senior year, I probably weighed 118 pounds, cutting down to 105. And that scale can be an enemy for a person who's a wrestler.

So maybe that's why I didn't ever really like scales for then on. But I've really come to love scales now. I check my weight every day so that I can see what I've done. If I did something yesterday that caused it. And so let's get to. You know, the baseline constant measurement. Part of the improvement is the language and behavior and actions. Right. So that's part of the manifestation. All right. And control is. constant re-evaluation of the above and settling into place your environment, your friends, your home, your workplace, where you shop, where you go buy groceries, where you live even could manifest that. What activities you do on a daily basis, why you do those activities.

And so a combination of Six Sigma and manifestation is the key. So what I've developed is somewhat, it's kind of divided up into eight steps, but each one is divided also. So it is probably more than just eight steps, but I'm defining it possibly into eight to 10 steps here, defining your health goals into one vision statement. And then parse out each of those parts of this into a goal for each facet that you want to change, okay? Define the problem. problem. Subdivide this also into five pillars and define the goal for each of the five pillars. Identify the problems in each of the five pillars, the impediments, the obstacles, the limiting beliefs, environmental factors that would sidetrack the goals.

Okay, so that's defining the problem. But, you know, I think that defining that problem needs a little bit more in-depth analysis, okay? And so once we measure our baseline and we know how we're going to measure each of these five pillars, each of these goals, how we're going to measure. Diet can easily be measured. Exercise can easily be measured. How often you do this. Exercise could be measured. If you know that you can do 20 pound dumbbells 24 times each arm, boom, you know exactly what you're doing now at baseline. And you can measure that for the future. You go, you start at. 20 pounds at 24 reps. Now all of a sudden you can do 25 pounds at 24 reps. Boom.

Now you've got an improvement. And so you measure that and that's the key. Okay. So all right. So the other parts of measurement, it's not just about the scale. There's so many ways to measure each of these. You can measure your sleep. You can measure. how long you sleep each day. You can use an aura ring. You can use a watch. You can use habit tracker like I do, a scale. you could use other more scientific, more specific and detailed measurements, such as a DEXA scan, which I've never done yet, but will be doing soon along this 52 weeks. There are a lot of

Now let's then, now that we've got the problem, we've got our baseline measurement, we know how we're going to measure, we need to analyze deeper. We talked about analyzing the impediments and obstacles in our definition. But this is where this is not that step. Again, we said DMAIC. DMAIC is define, measure, analyze, improve, control. Okay, here's where we analyze. Now, with analysis for six sigma, it doesn't get quite into the detail that the... ISO 9001 does. Because ISO 9001 is really going to go into a quality control process so we can loop and do a constant documentation of. All right, so there are a few things with ISO 9001. There's SWOT and ROPR matrices. The SWOT is the most common.

SWOT is S-W-O-T. It's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So the first part, the first two is going to be your strengths and weaknesses set side by side. You're going to know your strengths, your willpower, et cetera. Your weaknesses could also be willpower. Okay. So strengths are, I have already good health. I already have a good diet and I just have to make some small improvements. Weaknesses could be I'm not healthy at all. I have congestive heart failure, etc. Right. So weaknesses could be I have to wake up every morning at 5 a.m. And it's difficult to sleep. OK, I have. difficulty with sleep. I have difficulty with my exercise. I never exercise.

I have this limiting belief that I am not an athlete and therefore I can't do this. I can't exercise because of my arthritis. I have this, any kind of impediments. And then so our opportunities and our threats are similar, but that our opportunities are kind of... what kind of processes could lead to a good outcome here, not just strengths, but it could be outside, okay? Outside things that are benefits to us that will help us in our path. Threats would be, could be external and internal threats as to what could keep us from having success as well, right? So locations with food, my work, I have free food in my doctor's lounge. I have alcohol.

I have a friend who drinks a lot and invites me out to drink every night or something like that, right? So those are threats. Those are external threats. Might be some internal threats too, but these are things that we need to think about. Sleep deprivation. I already have sleep deprivation Next week, I have a deadline to make a lecture for my medical residents, and therefore, I need to do that. I need to stay up after work, and I did that earlier this week. I stayed up until 2 a.m. making a lecture, still had to wake up at 5.30 a.m. to get to work, and therefore had sleep deprivation one day. Boom, there's a threat, right? Plastics.

Plastics are all around us. Those threats are everywhere, right, for plastics. Lack of time for exercise, etc., right? So there are external threats internal threats external opportunities internal threats or internal opportunities then there's the ROPR these are this is a similar thing but can also be utilized because there might be the ROPRs risks opportunities parties interested parties and regulation not sure how we're going to bring regulation into this that's oftentimes like legal things with a with a business right and my manufacturing business had regulation by the fda and etc that i needed to account for but maybe we could regulate our own life and so our risks could be something similar to all of the threats But risk could be different things.

So opportunity, similar to what we already did with the SWOT analysis. Interested parties might be interesting because this might be similar to any kind of opportunity and threat and a strength and weakness of interested parties. You might have a partner. You might have a pet. My mother who wants you to eat her homemade apple pie and it's got butter in it. You don't want that butter. So these interested parties gather your friends, all of your friends and your relatives and people who are there on a daily basis, including customers and and potentially.

If you have customers that you have to take out to dinner every Wednesday night or something like that and think about what they like and that how that's going to affect your ability to get exercise, get sleep, get a better diet, etc. Now, so that analysis, once that's done, needs to. set you on an improvement path, okay? So now you are in the I portion of this, okay? It is about improvement. It is setting monthly attainable goals, knowing what those, each risk, each threat, with each opportunity, each strength, each weakness, what's going to impact you and how best to then Mitigate that. Right.

So and then we start using if we are if we're improving now, we need to use the psychology and language. and behaviors and actions to follow those goals along with this manifestation goal, okay? So manifesting is not just speaking the language and having some behaviors, it is acting. okay so manifestation i think you know my daughter has this um and my son too have these ideas what manifestation is and it's just that a positive attitude is going to make you succeed that's not all it is because it's not about the positive attitude it's not about just the language and it's not just about being clear in your vision and measurement.

It is about acting along those lines and trusting the process, trusting everything along the way. If you can more often than not succeed in your goals and your measurements and your small successes, and those small successes are larger than the little setbacks, then you're going to you're going to have success. Okay, so that's what manifestation is. And then once you are defining that so you're defining all of this as well and analyzing what kind of language you should do what kind of language you should be speaking on every day what kind of processes you need to have in place, what kind of language you should be speaking to yourself,

setting up those positive feedbacks and positive affirmations that you need to be talking to yourself every day. Those need to be a daily part of your life. The behaviors need to align. Your behaviors and who you hang out with need to align. The actions that you do need to align. If you stop at some restaurant that has fatty bad food every night after work or even three nights or four nights a week or even a couple, that kind of action needs to be in your head that that action is not.

in line with this goal okay hanging out with friends drinking at the bars even if it's on a saturday night not going to affect your work or whatever it's going to affect your sleep for a couple of days it's going to affect your diet it's going to affect your weight it's going to affect your health and it is not in line with the goals okay so the control is taking that measurement, taking the measurements of your behaviors, measurement of your actions, and say, this month I ate vegan four days only. That was only one day a month, yeah, and one day a week, I mean. That is not an action toward this goal, okay? that is not an action.

I ate beans and corn and something, you know, an Oreo parfait because it was sitting there in the doctor's lounge. I went to the work cafeteria and did something, you know, ate something not so good. I came home and was so tired. I couldn't even. step out the side of the door and go for a walk down the in the neighborhood and is that behavior is that action aligning with my goal no that action the action that does align with your goal you're so exhausted that you can't do what you wanted to do which was go for a five six mile run Oh, wow, that would have been perfect, but you were so exhausted. It happens, right?

But going straight to bed and not doing anything, that doesn't align with the goal. Go for a walk. It is not that difficult to at least go for a walk, okay? Now, with that said. Some of this for some people is not easy and for some people their environment, their childhood environment, their toxicities of their parents or their loved ones or something. something has happened to them where their psychology is an issue. And knowing that is 99% of the success. Well, let's say, let's not say 99% of the success. Knowing that is 50% of the success. Let's call it 49.5% of the success. Knowing that and not doing anything about it is going to mean that you know about it and 49.

5% of the success, 49.5% of the success does not make a success. And so if someone has these psychology issues, limiting beliefs, and they know about it, but don't do anything about it, the likelihood of success is low. OK, this is where help comes in. Um, I, I've had, um, issues with some of my family knowing that they have an issue or maybe they don't know they have an issue. Um, and not believing that a psychologist. or a therapist, or even not a therapist, just a self-help book even, a manifestation book. My daughter almost, and my son, almost refused basically to read any manifestation book.

My daughter would suggest that she has been through whatever kind of training with her mother for any kind of... psychological training, some sort of psychological training she went through. She thinks she has read a book on intellectual maturity. and she thinks she is more mature than her brother, let's say, that's brother-sibling rivalry, and she thinks she's more mature. I'll tell you what, I think that her brother has become very mature lately and surpassed her a little bit, and she's younger. But I think that She has limiting beliefs and hasn't brought herself to try to think about health and help. And so until anyone accepts the fact that they may need help with that, I've accepted.

that I need help from others, need help from, let's say, it could be a therapist, could be someone who is going to help me, could be books that I'm reading and research that I'm reading so that I can learn how to have better sleep. I'm not a sleep expert. I have been somewhat of an expert in circadian rhythms, having a master's degree in neuroscience and my thesis, but It's not to say I know everything about sleep and there are some issues. I have problems with deep sleep. If I get six or seven hours, my sleep score has never been more than like 88 or something like that.

And in general, my sleep score often is in the 50s to 60s, usually about 60 something. And usually because I go to bed at 11 and I wake up at five. Okay. That six hours in general is not going to get me a 90 sleep score for sure. But even with seven hours of sleep, oftentimes my deep sleep is lower. So I know, and I know, and I can measure with my aura ring and aura ring is not a be all end all of. the measurement of sleep. Okay. So obviously there are better ways, but this is what I have. This is what I have to at my beck and call to be able to do that. So, all right.

So let's think about that, the rest of that and the control. Now we need to use some of these ISO 9001 process flows. to figure out diet. How do we eat our diet? Number one, we have to go to the grocery store and then we have to make our meals. We have to eat our meals. We have to go from there to bed and try not to eat snacks in between. And we need to maybe see what is the process flow of why I eat a snack before I go to bed. It's available. It's in the refrigerator. I bought it at the grocery store. Right. So what's that process flow for every one of these five pillars? And how do we change it?

OK, process flow of why? And then and then you can in that process flow. There's a little arrow from your little Venn diagram or whatever. It's a diagram of the process flow of how that food gets into me. And then there's got to be impediments. And you can also then make that control into the same kind of SWOT analysis of what I can change, what opportunities are there, what threats are there as to why and what strengths and weaknesses as to how I can get to some improvement. And then feedback, right? The feedback of measurement is always feedback of.

i've got some feedback here uh you just gained a pound overnight okay so or whatever you you uh I have a feedback of what I did this week, and now I had three vegan days, I didn't eat any sugar, I can see the red X's of the, or the green check marks, of the days that I ate no sugar, and the red X's of where I ate sugar, and they are less this week. Haven't had a single day. That feedback is... important in that control the process flow, why did I have success? Or the other way around, why did I fail? Okay, so but in the failures has to be some realization that there is not a complete failure.

Okay, so Unless you look at your whole month and see red X's the entire month, or I have emojis for my diet. If I see a cow on every single day, or a pig, or no green leaves, I use the little green lettuce leaf for my vegan days. If I don't see any of those, maybe I could be down about that but know that there's success. Know that you're getting up the next day. Know that tomorrow is a brand new day.

And that's where we're headed is to being tomorrow, being the brand new day, track it, measure it, and know that you can measure tomorrow and being the day and knowing that the following day, you're going to be looking back on that day. to see what you did right or wrong can help you out in the process. And you need to trust the process that overall, if you can be as healthy as you can and make the changes, that that will be enough for you to live a healthy life. Okay, so let's go to this and We've incorporated ISO 9001, and I encourage you to look up ISO 9001. I've had to make an incredible number of documents.

Let me just look, you know, I've, and one of the things with ISO 9001 is documentation control. And every time you change things, you have to make a revision, save the old one, make a revision. You have to do your scope of work, organization, internal, external issues, an organizational chart, SWOT analysis, risks and controls, suppliers and analysis of suppliers. that you know for sure that they are going to be quality enough in ranking of them. So, you know, you could rank your suppliers, your grocery stores and say, you know, X grocery store has bad prices, but they also have bad food there. This organic. grocery store has great food and lots of produce.

I go to Sprouts a lot and Sprouts has a lot of great produce at better prices. So it's a great thing. So I could do some kind of an analysis there and that could be done. And I think overall, we all kind of do that in our head, but you can actually write this into a document and think about it and figure out what you need to do for this. OK, so you can, let's see, make a list of your inventory of your refrigerator and look at it and say. look at this list of everything in my refrigerator, boom. And then you can kind of make a little red marks of, of my, of these things are unhealthy.

I should get rid of these, or I shouldn't buy it. The next time I'm at the grocery store, I won't buy these, this tub of ice cream, right. Or something like that. think we had some issues with my girlfriend's mother a while back where she was buying ex food and she doesn't like to cook anymore because I think she used to cook for her kids and now likes to eat easy things and and so she's become a little bit that way and but some things improved OK, so a change request form, you could actually assess what you need to do to change.

You've requested a change and you need to put a reason why you're making the change and what what what the goals of that change are. Why are you going to be vegan three days a week? What do you need to do? And then so what are the process flow of what you need to do to make that change? A design request form I've had because of needing design requests for different items in my manufacturing. Incoming material lists, same thing. And some of this can be done automatically by things here. Your refrigerator can take your own inventory for you, et cetera, right? You can do this ad nauseum. And. Hopefully, it's not ad nauseum. Hopefully, it is something that you can continue to monitor.

All right, so what are we going to do this week in our life, in our five pillars? Okay, so this week, I think similar to what I've started to try to do in the past, but even more, packing my own lunch. And this is a help of doing this. And then people have done meal preps on Sundays to try to prep the meals. And that way everything's already prepared so that when you come home on a Tuesday night and you're very busy and you're very tired, you need to get your exercise, but you don't have time to even cook your dinner. You might have that meal prep already for even a dinner or for lunch the next day.

You don't have time to get your lunch. But for me, oftentimes my lunch, my good lunch would be yogurt and granola and berries. And if I'm going to have that at 2 p.m. every day. And if I'm not home from the hospitals and or wherever I'm going to write my notes, if I am not home yet to get that yogurt, I need to bring it with me because I eat dairy-free yogurt and there is no way in heck that there's going to be much dairy-free yogurt at the hospital and the good quality that I can make myself. So, and then also I can. pick my granola rather than have my granola picked for me at some cafeteria, hospital, etc.

Okay, so I'm doing this even more, avoiding eating at the hospital and cafeteria, using and then monitoring that diet again, and then supplements that we're taking. As you're along this health pathway, realizing that if you are having a certain diet and you are limiting your diet and limiting, let's say meats, then you might have to change your supplement behavior because, and your supplement needs, because if you are going, let's say you go a hundred percent vegan, then you can't get very very good B12 or omega-3 from vegetables, unless there are a few sources of omega-3, but it's not anywhere near what we need.

And so you might need to get either supplements or add chia seeds to your yogurt, which is something I do, but also then also getting a supplement. And if you are wanting to be vegan, you might have to have a vegan omega-3 supplement okay and b12 supplement because there is not much b12 in vegan food vegan diet okay um this week for movement um again previously this week i haven't um, exercise and been pretty tired. Um, so I need to make some time and, uh, and then also I've had some issues this week because, you know, I have had set a goal to try to do some court sports and, and tennis.

and yet sometimes it's kind of difficult to find some people to do those kind of things. It's very easy to make time and go alone to do certain things, but court sports is not. So you need to find the people who are going to be with you for that, okay? Sleep. This week, the problem this week, I was working into the evening. evening. Also must wake up early. Catch up is the name of the game. So catching up on any particular day, at least one day during the week, trying to sleep in a little more. That's what I'm doing this week, okay? Trying to sleep in a little more, not just on the weekends.

Certainly, if you saw some studies where it suggested that it is not as good to Wait until the weekend to get your sleep and sleep in, number one, because then you could potentially have something called social jet lag, which is basically, oh, I slept in all weekend and I slept in till 11 o'clock each day. Now your clock is set poorly for the week on Monday and hence the Monday Mondays.

monday mondays and so though therefore you're going to have poor sleep that day because you can't get to sleep because you slept until 11 on sunday during the day and then you can't get to sleep sunday night so keep your sleep schedule um But get to bed at a reasonable hour and try not to do your social really late and try to sleep in just a small amount, maybe till seven or eight and try to sleep from midnight or maybe 11 till seven or, you know, sleep a little later if that needs to be and catch up on your sleep. But also try to catch up on your sleep as often as possible. possible. Um, because that's, uh, that is important. Okay.

So, all right. So working on getting that early night compared to weekdays, trying to catch up maybe on a Wednesday, try to set a day. That's what I'm trying to do. Set a day, for example, on Wednesdays that I'm going before the weekend so i don't have to catch up on the weekend okay um so it's better to make up that sleep as you go along periodically you're gonna have days where you don't sleep so that sleep debt better the dollar cost average pay off your debt now pay off that sleep debt okay all right so that's what i'm working on this week is is paying off the sleep debt gradually rather than, uh, on each weekend. Okay.

So, and I happen to work a lot of weekends as well. So it makes it more difficult. You could go seven days in a row without sleep, right? So trying to not, uh, trying not to sleep in. on any particular day and getting up and getting going okay now connection uh this is important um this week i think that having a get together with a group that is not your own have a party for someone else have a party where let's say you might host their birthday party And then that's going to bring some of their friends that maybe aren't your friends. The other part would be having a get together with a group that you normally don't get together would be traveling.

Traveling is immensely important for connection and connection with the world around you. And it's a very important for me because I travel a lot. I love it when I travel. I love learning language. I love learning cultures. That is hugely important to me to be connected. OK, setting up either a conference education could be a self-help conference, could be any type of thing, could be through your company, whatever company loves happiness. And, you know, obviously they say misery loves company. But happiness loves company also. And company loves happiness. Okay, so getting together with other people. Travel for other people. You know, somebody else needs to get somewhere for to do something. Help them.

OK, I think we've talked about connecting and this is something that I am working on right now is setting up a medical mission, that medical mission. is going to India, potentially late October, early November, and or there also could be a potential trip in January. But getting set up to do that, that connection of helping others could be important. Do some kind of volunteer trip, find something that is interesting to you. that you can have a passion for. That connection is important, okay? So it could be a creative thing too. It could be something through art.

It could be going to a city to, you know, something I love doing is going to New York to going to some place and finding some people that I know, that I know in New York so that I can hang out with them and hang out. somebody were planning a reunion trip of some sort with some medical school classmates. Those kind of connections, getting together with people that you either haven't seen before something or seen recently is important, okay? All right. So that's the four pillars. So we've talked about our diet, our movement, our sleep, our connection, and then the fifth pillar, plastics. This week, right here we can see you can see my metal my chrome pen it's it's not

undeployed you can see I have a lot of polyester clothes in general I have a Pima white Pima cotton t-shirt that hopefully protects me a little bit from that but I am looking to this next four weeks, this next month, the month of August and September, is going to be about my clothes. Okay, I have in the past helped myself a little bit by buying some cotton and hemp clothes, but we're going to try to do...

a plastic free month as far as what i'm purchasing okay i'm going to try to buy three all cotton dress shirts or maybe try to get uh maybe it could have a little hemp but as little polyester there's a little plastic in them as possible okay so this this week is dress shirts. I'm going shopping this weekend and I'm going to get some of these and that'll be potentially on Saturday. I will definitely wear on either my Sunday Science or on the next podcast. I'm going to wear these cotton dress shirts. I'm going to get rid of, not get rid of these. My daughter bought me one of these blue shirts. This was bought by my

Try to tell people that that is your goal to get rid of plastics and tell them if you're going to buy me something, buy me something that is plastic free, but also has comfort. Right. So. One of my problems in the past has been, let's say, my cotton socks that I bought. They're nice, but, and I wore them the other day on a pretty long run. I ran. I got together at a park with some people who ride bikes and my girlfriend was going to ride bikes with some of these people that ride bikes downtown. And it happened to be that they were going to a place that was approximately four miles away.

And I was going to be running behind them and following them along. And so if I'm going to be running eight miles, that's more than my usual four to six miles. And I had cotton socks on. And these cotton socks, I occasionally get blisters. So there are some things that cotton can't quite do that some plastics can. And again, that's a limiting belief, right? So the research and the continuing to find and knowing that trusting the process and that there will be something that you can use that does perform almost as good as plastic is important. Or recognize that, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect.

For example, I think I talked several weeks ago, about four or five weeks ago, because I moved into this new house, started to have a yard and a driveway. And so. the need to kill weeds, right? So the need to mow the lawn, the need to maybe fertilize, et cetera, and to use natural products. And obviously we don't like glyphosate. We don't like using some of these products that have very major pesticide slash herbicide compounds that are harmful to us and have forever chemicals have effects on us that we do not want. And so I started using 45% vinegar slash acetic acid. And I don't use, I dilute that obviously.

dilute that down about uh four times three to four times so get it down to about uh 10 to 15 i'd like to try to make sure it's around 10 to kill weeds and it doesn't actually kill the weeds kills the leaves so it has to be constantly continued to be um to be applied to the weeds, and that's okay, but that's part of work. It's part of yard work. It shouldn't be, and this is why these herbicides are such a problem, is because we want something to be a permanent fix, and it doesn't have to be, and it's part of what we talked about last week about the comfort crisis.

It doesn't have to be an easy, easy fix every single time, because that easy fix can be a problem. That easy fix of a comfortable couch could be a problem. That easy fix of an herbicide that you go out without a mask, without gloves, and you just start spraying it over everything. Now it's in your yard, it gets out into the river, et cetera, and it can be a problem with the fish, wildlife, your pets, you, everything. And so. Forty five percent vinegar can be toxic to your fingers if you pour it on yourself. But if so, obviously you have to be careful. And so there are some limitations of these. And I accept that. I accept that lack of.

of perfectness to what I'm doing. And the fact that I have to reapply these, um, this weed killer, this weed limiter so that I can have a nice green lawn. Don't have to have a nice green lawn. I've got a lot of weeds and I'll pull them as much as I can. I don't have time to do all of it, but so that's my plastic, uh, experience this week. I'm going to get rid of. not get rid of, I'm going to add. And again, sometimes we talked about this also, sometimes adding is better than subtracting because if you add, you kind of dilute out the bad. So you might know I might not be wearing this as much.

Maybe I'll wear it to the club. This is kind of what I consider kind of clubbing shirt. I wore it to rounds today and I kind of. look like I'm a boy going out to the clubs, but hopefully not. But all right. So catch us for week 19 next week. This has been week 18 of a doctor's 52 week journey to an unprocessed life. I love you guys. I love that you're joining me. I love that this is becoming more and more popular. I hope you're enjoying following along. with me, what I'm following along. I know this week was maybe a little bit boring, had corporate speak.

My son saw my social media and he was like, get that corporate BS out of my, because he works for a company. He didn't want to hear any more about corporate stuff, but I hope we weren't bored about it. This is something that if we have some success, we do have to control the process. Um, catch us next week, week 19, catch us on anywhere where you see video podcasts, uh, YouTube. If you want to see my, uh, uh, nice mug here on, on the video screen, rather than just on your audio podcast, we have video podcasts on YouTube, go on pro.com. Substack, Apple, Spotify, and then everywhere else where you get audio podcasts. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Substack, LinkedIn.

we're there on social media as well showing you what I'm doing on kind of a daily basis I'm not there every day but I'm trying to be there as much as I can to try to get out the word to show people what I'm doing thank you very much for joining me we'll see you soon

This site and any information communicated within it are not intended as medical advice. The information herein is not intended as medical care, diagnosis, or treatment of any medical condition. No component of this content, including discussion or comments, shall be construed or implied as establishing a doctor-patient relationship. Before you translate or copy any of the information, diet, exercise, or products utilized herein or on any social media post to your own practice, consult your own research, physician, therapist, or nutritionist for your own health. No warranties or claims are made as to the benefits or risks of any treatments, diet, exercise, or products herein. Research any treatments, diet, exercise, or products thoroughly before trying for yourself.

Referral, affiliate, or advertising fees may be garnered by this site.