Week 21: A Doctor’s 52 Week Journey to an Unprocessed Life
Welcome to the Go Unpro Podcast, a doctor's 52-week journey to an unprocessed life. Now, here is your host, Dr. Brent W. Laartz, Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine, neuroscientist, and best-selling author. All right, everyone, welcome again to another episode of Go Unpro Podcast. This is a doctor's 52-week journey to an unprocessed life. And thank you very much for joining me again. Love it. Love you guys. Love that you're here with me. This is a travel edition again. You can see behind me, standard hotel room, right? And standard couch with standard pillows. standard little table behind me.I am at the standard desk that you always have at your right beside the TV bed, closed in here, little tiny refrigerator. What does that mean?
That means difficulty with trying to make your own food and make your own dishes that are healthy. Getting out and everything like that. So travel edition, I'm not going to go through a lot of this, but really just about the fact that I had a really good meal last night at a Lebanese restaurant. I'll tell you, the Lebanese are famous for using, same with the Greek, very, very similar foods, right? Very famous for. making food with whole food ingredients, not a lot of processed ingredients, and great seasonings, right?So great herbs, that healthy type of food, and also fermented types of foods. And the beans and the hummus and the chickpeas that are involved. And then their chicken is to die for too. Had just a little bit of chicken last night with my meal.
And a whole cauliflower marinated in cumin and turmeric. What an amazing meal. And these dipping sauces that were to die for. One made with beets, one made with hummus, one made with serrano peppers, a labneh. And so, but any important meal, once I get home, I'm getting home tomorrow, preps need these ingredients. Beans, fermented. foods, variety of vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Therefore, our meal prep needs to have at least four or five different parts of these, okay?Hence, our meal prep for the week is going to be this. Something fermented, something with hummus, something with beans, all right? And something with yogurt, obviously, right? But yogurt will be fermented in a sauce there. That will include some probiotics, but what that goes into is even more important because yogurt and the probiotics that are in yogurt, you put them in your stomach, they get killed by acid, they travel through the intestines, and most of them, a great majority of them, do not stick in your intestines.
so it needs to be a constant feeding along with fiber so it has to have some fiber in with it so when you eat your yogurt it's got to have some oats some kind of grain some kind of fiber some kind of granola that's going to help it stick right so and help it get through that stomach as we're going to make another hummus. Again, as I usually do this time, we're going to make it a fermented chickpeas before we make the hummus. Okay. So obviously there, it has to be that you cook the hummus and, or the, not the hummus, the chickpeas and get them cooked down becausemake the hummus after you ferment it and you cook it at all after that then that just kills the bacteria okay beans at some point i'm going to play with fermented beans as well but we're going to make a great bean onion tomato pepper cucumber and olives salad with fermented pickles.
Okay. So fermented pickles that we did about three weeks ago, it has been fermenting for three weeks now. It will be sour, sour, sour, and pickly, pickly, pickly. So, all right. So remember to pack if you are going to work, if you're going to travel. pack those natural whole food snacks. I oftentimes steal the apple out of the Marriott gym, right? Or the orange or out of the Admirals Club.I steal the oranges and apples. Occasionally, I steal some candy as well or nuts, that kind of thing. So the candy, the jelly beans might not be so good for me. But occasionally, you got to snack a little bit and you have to cheat a little bit to have your pleasure in life, right? So it can't be all 100% draconian or monk life here, right?
So let's go over really quickly. I have come up with five pillars of each of our five pillars, right? So now we're going to have 25 pillars, right? But Five pillars of movement. We talked about this before that the five pillars of movement are cardiovascular, resistance training, and strength or the equivalents thereof.If you're doing a lot of already resistance training in your work or your gardening or etc, that is what centenarians are doing for their strength. They are having to do this kind of work on a daily basis. And that's what creates that. However, at the same time, if you do work and you do kind of one or two repetitive movements on a daily basis, 100 times a day, it may only get one particular muscle group. We need all.
130 of our muscle groups to be active resistance and get those moving on a daily basis. And so resistance training, we know that strength of grip strength is a marker for longevity.Same thing with lower body strength as far as our Thigh strength, that is basically what helps us to walk, get up out of a chair and be mobile. Okay, so the third pillar is flexibility. We need to be flexible. We need to have the ability to move quickly and be flexible in that. And balance, very important, obviously, for longevity. There's not necessarily a study that says that balance is important for longevity, but I can tell you that common sense wise, it is because that is what prevents falls. And it is the quick movement of your muscles to get to steady yourself after a small trip.
Let's say, for example, if you can steady yourself quickly by getting that foot there quickly.to the point where you need to balance yourself and then balance yourself without falling, the far more likelihood that you are not going to fall in old age and therefore you're going to live longer. Okay. So muscular endurance there as well. I don't do resistance training so much for strength, strength, or muscle mass per se, because really when you talk about muscle mass, and we're going to have this in a Sunday Science soon, is at some point muscle mass is self-defeating, right? So if you get to be the muscle mass of a bodybuilder,and you don't have flexibility because of that muscle mass, or you don't have the balance because of that, or because of too much muscle, then potentially there could be maybe a hormesis issue with that.
And I don't think that's been studied enough. So we're going to go over that in one of the next few Sunday sciences. So muscular endurance is that doing 12 to 20 reps with the resistance training and to that weight to failure, but to that weight and not to the max. resistance to get one or two reps. That one or two reps might be okay every once in a while. It would potentially lead to more injury. So that's why I avoid it for the most part. Okay.Not always, but, and strength is important. Telling you that. But for me, I like the muscular endurance. I like doing 12 to 24 reps, somewhere in there, okay? So the five pillars of diet and the Michael Pollan quote, eat food, mostly plants, not too much, is a very big part of this, okay?
And you know, the Mediterranean or mind diet, low sugar, low processed foods is important, okay? So the whole food. is number one. Number two, mostly plant-based. Number three, fish and beans as the protein source. Four, calorie restriction. And five, no processed or fast food or alcohol. Okay, so minimize the alcohol. Not no alcohol.If you have to, if you, you know, obviously we don't ever have to, but if you're with some friends. and you have a glass of wine. To me, the alcohol of my choice is geared toward wine greater than beer, greater than hard alcohol, okay? So wine and or maybe some ciders, maybe some fruit ciders that there might be out there. Those may have some, and I'm sure it's cooked out of the brew by the time it's brewed for wine and for ciders.
However, that antioxidant issue and potential protection there, if you're going to drink one drink, I like to make it a wine, okay? So, or a cider, then beer.And certainly when I drink no alcohol beers, the zero beers, it, you know, you're getting basically sugar there and carbohydrate. You're not adhering to a low carb diet then. So you're, you have some processed sugars there. So. um while it's something i might drink a no zero beer with somebody uh as i'm having a beer with them that um i wonder what the issue with that is with uh longevity i don't know be obviously difficult to study but common sense is it might not be that great to have these processed sugars all right the five pillars of sleep dark at night after 8 p.
m., bright sunlight early in the morning, purpose-driven, activity-driven day, okay?The more activity you get during the day, the exercise that you get, and the purpose that you have that day, and the successes that you have that day, the lack of stress that day for the purpose-driven, activity-driven, stress-free day. cool temp and diet above same diet low not much food after 8 p.m and no alcohol is good for sleep okay five pillars of connection family friends creativity which is art reading writing painting music any kind of creativity you can think of it could be just creativity of just daydreaming and thought but that kind of creativity. Community is important. Charity, church, clubs. I do the run clubs.I like to do charity events and I do like to volunteer for charity.
That's important. And then travel, not tour resort. We're talking about travel to meet people, travel to do things connection sort of way. Okay. Connection with culture, getting to museums, getting to visit the history of places. I know my parents love to travel to the Southeast United States and see all the different civil war places. It's amazing, right? So that travel is important. Doesn't have to be worldwide. You can get, you can even get travel to a community, even in your state, 60 miles away to a different community and reach out to people there. Okay. So could be different culture there.Obviously not that great of different culture if it's just 60 miles, but obviously money and availability and. and resources matter. All right. So then we have the five pillars of plastic free living.
That's our fifth pillar of our longevity and our journey to an unprocessed life is number one, cookware, pans, utensils, no microwave, cooking with either a convection oven. And I like to make a lot of glassware, dishes and storage containers, glass, you know, we're talking all of these things, glass, steel, wood, and maybe copper, those kind of things. All right. So and make sure that steel is very high quality steel.obviously for rust purposes, but also for maybe contaminants in the steel as well, work and maybe travel to your work and or everything you might use for your computer and electronics. Okay. I saw you, or I saw, sorry, I showed you. My mouse, my wooden mouse and my wooden keyboard and my wooden phone case, which looks great and so far has protected my phone.
My girlfriend said, what's the under over to see how much? time before you break your phone with this wooden phone case, but it, I have tossed that thing a couple of times onto the ground and it has so far held up with that wooden phone case. All right, personal care items.So from brushes to toothbrushes, to toothpaste, to different things, shampoos and soaps, different things that you can make more natural. less plastic, less, oh, and, um, laundry detergent and dishwasher detergent. Okay. So, all right. So now, and personal care items, otherwise our laundry detergent and laundry. fabric softener. I don't use any fabric softener. I don't believe in needing a scent for any of my clothes, right? What do I need that for? And deodorants and other things. We're slowly changing that.
Personal care items would be dishwasher detergent, okay? And then the last pillar, fifth pillar. is clothes. We are also slowly changing our clothes, etc. Those are the five pillars of our five pillars, so making 25 pillars. Basically,everything there, and we talked a couple of weeks ago about doing root cause analysis of why we can't change something, what's happening. root cause analysis of the successes and root cause analysis of the failures, okay? Really had a great week this week. All right, so let's go to what we're doing this week, okay? So in our diet, first pillar, we are still working on getting the 50 vegetables per week, getting around 30 to 40, something along those lines. And it's more difficult when you travel this week.
It was more difficult when I was working too much last week before that. And so what we're doing this week is adding a probiotic push. So we've gotten multiple different probiotics, probiotic strains.in powder form so that I can add it to my yogurt, bifidobacterium longum, lactobacillus plantarum, lactobacillus salivarius, velanella, acromantia, lactobacillus acidophilus, lactiplanta bacillus plantarum, lacticacea bacillus rhamnosus. What these are all going to do and issues here are going to be this. Some of these bacteria produce lactic acid. Some of these bacteria, specifically two or three of them, take that lactic acid and produce propionic acid. Some of those bacteria take lactose and produce that lactate, but also some propionic acid and some of the short-chain fatty acids.Some of those...
Take that lactic acid that the other one produced and potentially that muscle and or body fatigue produces and produces the propionic acid, butyric acid, and therefore then feed our colonocytes and feed our body with some good short-chain fatty acids that our muscles can use. And we're also going to have a fermentation push that gets us some also some different bacteria as well. Fermented chickpeas in the hummus, fermented pickles in with the beans. We're going to potentially in a few weeks start with beans to do also fermentations. We are using oat milk, which is organic, home produced, homemade oat milk for our yogurt.and endurance based and other benign lactobacilli in here because so that's what we're doing this week for a diet really big push for probiotics okay in movement we are running and traveling run clubs we're doing some training because in approximately two weeks now we have a 5k i haven't done for quite some time i do not usually do that much competitive work
But I am going to start doing maybe about once a month or once every other month. I'm either going to do a 5 or 10K. Okay, so we're going to start doing two a days once per week, trying to get even better shape.I think that helps me to then make up for that one or two days a week where I'm on my rest days and or a forced rest day where... I don't really get injured that much, but occasionally, but what I do have happen to me is what happens to every one of you and every one of the entire world is we get too busy and we're working until six, seven, eight. Then we have a, then we have a, some kind of a social thing that we have to get to.
And so we don't work out that day. and I think that's why a lot of people do their workouts in the morning.I don't like getting my workouts in the morning for this reason. I want to, if I am awake and I am getting going, I'm getting to work, okay? So if it's 5 a.m. and I'm awake, I'm getting to work by 6 and I'm doing that. If I sleep in till 7 or 8 o'clock, I'm going to work then. So if I am up by 5 a.m., for one reason or another, and it may be planned so I can get that number of work done, then I'm doing that. So I'm going to start doing two a day. So maybe strength training and some balance work and some cardiovascular work in the same day.
Okay, so sleep again, potentiallythese probiotics that we're going to be using on a daily basis potentially could help our sleep and that is one thing so kind of a combined diet and sleep is those probiotics already mentioned and everything else that we're already doing for sleep and really trying to get to that seven to eight hour mark instead of the six hours, 15 minutes and that kind of thing. OK, so again, they're potentially quality of sleep. And we're going to have this in a Sunday science. This coming Sunday is about the effect of probiotics on your sleep and the fact that those probiotics can help with the quality and that sleep. OK, so connection again.
talking about travel this week and um all right so that's the deal this week travel and getting getting the run clubs the travel run clubs so in other words going places to do a either a run club or whatever club you might want to do for yourself. I'm doing the run clubs and there are potentially some travel events with my local run clubs. So like a 5k or 10k that somebody is going to go to that I might participate at some point. And obviously I could travel a lot because of my work. And so therefore that's going to be the case. Okay. So, and The other part to this this week is that we had the trivia game night last week.We're getting to some culture also and art.
I'm going to a jazz club tonight. Going to make that part of the big push for this. And that's where we're headed, okay? Again, this is week 21, connection, creativity, going out to some music. I would prefer if this were kind of some more classical music of some sort, jazz or something more creative, you know, speed metal. I think, I don't know about you, but you could have some connection with that, and there is certainly some art to it, but I think that the stress induction of going to a speed metal show and mosh pitting certainly is every once in a while. I'll do it.I have mosh pitted myself and gone to Pepper I've seen. five finger death punch or whatever.
But I guess that was, that was probably 10 years ago, the last time I've done anything like that. But again, I'm going to try to go to a jazz club tonight and connect with my family and go on with my daughter. Again, here, all right. So the fifth pillar, plastics, clothes, pants, shorts.um we have already started to do these kind of things and our um last week we did some athletic athletic shorts um the week before we got some new underwear that was more cotton can't it's difficult with cotton underwear i've bought some cotton underwear that was a hundred percent cotton and those things fall down they they were not um effective to any degree. So I'm trying to experiment with some others, trying to get as much cotton.
And if that elastane is only around the band and therefore then there's covered up with some cotton, then so be it. So this week it is athletic shirts. So we're getting certainly some Linen, hemp, bamboo.I saw a product that had, I think it was birch wood. Again, not plasticized, not ultra processed. So research what is being done with these fibers before they're put into your shirts, pants, shorts, underwear. I already have undershirts. My white undershirts are 100% Pima cotton, a little bit expensive. And I know that's difficult with some people with the ability to get to this kind of expense of recreating a wardrobe. And this is why it's 52 weeks, okay? So we're gradually doing this. again, not plasticized, not processed.
You know, there is some types of fibers out there that are natural, that are really just processed into basically plastic.So I'm not going to name names, but do your research as to how each of these fibers are done for each of these. I had I think we talked last week about the list of 50 vegetables. I'm going to skip over that 50 vegetables that I'm trying to get into my diet. All right, so I'm going to skip over that. Let's go over basically a recap of what we're doing for everything. We talked about the five pillars, so this is a little bit of a recap of that, right? So, but... Our diet, we're doing liquids, mostly water in the morning, 25 ounces on the way to work.
I'm doing my fiber, which is a psyllium husk at 11 a.m.with another 25 ounces of water. Time-restricted feeding, 10 o'clock p.m. at the latest, preferred to be 8 p.m. till noon to 4 p.m. if at all possible. Again, that basically puts, if it's 10 p.m. to 4 p.m., that makes it approximately 16 hours of time restriction of feeding. If I can get it from 8 p.m. to 4 p.m., all the better. If I can only get it from 10 p.m. to noon, that's 14 hours, and so it's 1410. The more we can get in that time-restricted feeding, the better our calorie restriction is going to be. So that's the importance of all this.
None of this has to be anything of what you do versus what I do. This is what I want to do. This is how I time-restrict myself because I can do it. And then once weekly, I'm doing a 36 to 48-hour fast with water only. And I'm doing daily berries, daily fermented foods, daily beans, daily leafy greens, three plus days of vegan diet per week. In other words, everything I eat on three or more days per week is vegan. Preferred meat is fish, followed by chicken, followed by cheese, no dairy otherwise, calorie restricted, again, no fast foods, limited processed snacks, mostly whole foods, trying to avoid cooking to a degree, to a small degree, a lot of whole uncooked foods.But not 100% avoidance.
Don't come at me and say, what's the matter with cooking? Well, I just like it that way. Okay, so minimize protein, not maximizing. Microbiome centric, variety of vegetables, low sugar. And the supplements I take are A-carbose, calcium plus vitamin D, B12, testosterone, omega-3. and um and it's a vegan omega-3 by the way um my movement i'm doing the five pillars uh really running resistance training court sports things that have to do with balance flexibility trying to stretch every day yoga and uh i had an invitation this day to do qigong uh and i'm I think that's important motion to increase strength and increase balance and breath work.OK, so and reducing stress and also might help sleep as well for sleep, dark room, dark after 8 p.
m., early light, purposeful activity filled stress release day, colder room. and a lot of other things that we're doing for our sleep. Committing to seven to eight hours, brewing a peppermint tea at night, and let's see, what else? Essential oils for sleep. We have, I have a lavender essential oil that is in my room beside my bed, and uh, again, friends and connection to make that sleep better and potentially sex makes sleep better also. Okay. So, um, eliminate the negative self-talk doing affirmation and meditation at night and that negative soft, uh, self-talk and getting rid of stress at night.before bed is very important. Okay. Um, let's see. And the darkness we talked about, uh, we've gotten, uh, some dark, uh, blackout curtains and we just need to install them still.
All right. So a weighted blanket I've heard of my, my blankets pretty well weighted. Um, What else? The meditation, the 478 breath work, breath work before nighttime, limit screen time at night. If you do have screen time at night, there is a setting on phones that will decrease your, it will decrease your Blue light that you get and it's a little bit more amber of a light on your screen if you have to look at your phone.I also have it set to be black and white and lower level on the display. Different things. I keep my phone also, for that matter. Keep the phone in another room, preferably, you know, something nearby. If you get an emergency phone call or if I get paged, I have to hear it, right?
But I have. uh, the phone in another room. I think that's very important not to have your electronics right next to your room. Okay. So, all right. So that's, uh, as far as sleep, I think that's pretty much it that I did. Um, I think for all of this, the accountability app is important, okay? So a connection, family, friends, purpose, charity, reconnection.We talked about this already pretty much before the break and what we're doing with that, run clubs, et cetera. Let's glaze over that for a bit. Plastics, almost the same of what we just went over before on our five pillars. Really, it's about changing to steel, copper, wood, and glass, those things. So that is where we're at with our... unprocessed life for week 21.
We are getting toward halfway through the year. We're going to have a lot more ideas in the second half because we're going to go through a lot of different examples of what we're doing. We're going to do a bit more field trips in the second half, so look forward to that.We're going to be field tripping to the kitchen, field tripping to the gym. As I get my home gym, we're going to be talking about and setting up a podcast room there in the home gym and to show you exactly what I'm doing. I'll take you even into my bedroom, show you what we're doing there, okay? Those kind of field trips on a weekly basis are going to be a little bit more of a staple.
I know we've taken a couple so far, and I think we've found it a little bit difficult to arrange that on a daily basis. Certainly, we've done a field trip here. Hey, we are in Washington, D.C.Part of what we were just talking about and some of our social media was in... Scottsdale, Arizona and the run club I was at there and love that, loved that kind of field trip. And we're going to be doing a lot of those kinds of field trips because we have a lot of different travel slated for the year, potentially New Zealand and in the winter time. And we are looking at a lot of different things like that. Maybe Charleston, South Carolina, I think is in the books here. Can't wait.
Can't wait for you to join me. Can't wait for exactly how we're doing all of this on the road and at home in the new podcast studio. And as we. Remodel that podcast studio. It is slow going because I've been traveling, because I've been working so much, but we are going to be working on that soon. So I can't wait for you to join me on the rest of this 52-week journey. Again, week 21, Sunday Science coming up soon, and we have a lot of different things in store for you and I can't wait for it, okay? So let's get toward where we can be proud of what we're doing. Little failures are not the end of the world. Little failures, getting back up off the horse, take a day off.
Yesterday I traveled, was on the airplane basically all day long.I think I only got 8,000 steps or 9,000 steps, but that's pretty good for being that. So, and can't wait for you to join us anywhere you get your podcasts, because these podcasts are on Substack, YouTube, they are on Spotify, they're on video and audio on Spotify. They are on... apple podcasts they're on anywhere you get your podcasts and then on go on pro.com okay g-o-u-n-p-r-o dot com that's where you can find us follow us on social media we are on tiktok we're on instagram we're on facebook we're on threads we're on substack as a note carrying basis and so Thank you very much for joining me.I look forward to seeing you guys again very soon.
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