One of the things that's really important when you start setting goals and changing protocols is you wanna set a measurable goal. So if you can measure it and you can track it, then you can analyze it and you can change it. That's kind of scientific method. That's what we do in science.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I am your host, Dr. Crockett. It's great to see you back. How has your week been? I think it's actually been two weeks since I posted. I've been going through a bit of a spring overhaul both personally and with my business and the show. So I hope you like the new format. Thank you for all of your suggestions and your help and your encouragement.

I got to a point with this where I'm like, our viewers are so few and does this even matter that I'm doing this? You know, our accounts on YouTube have been pretty low. And honestly, we just haven't been hitting algorithms, and I haven't paid that much attention to it because, you know, my philosophy when starting this show is never to be like, you know, the YouTube blow up person.

This show was started as a service to my patients because we were having all these conversations in the office about things that weren't surgery. Oh, by the way, I'm a surgeon. For those of you who don't know me, you can go back and read the one about Dr. Crockett. I will link that below for you. It's all about Dr. Crockett or who I am or whatever.

But yeah, so anyway, in the office, I have all these conversations with patients in the room that are personal and private. And I kept having the same conversations over and over again about how to be happier and have a healthier body in general and a healthier lifestyle. And that encourages me too, because I'm also trying to work on those things. So we started this show as an effort to do that and now we have this amazing catalog.

So the other day I had a day in clinic where I had so many people coming in who, you know, most of my patients coming in don't know me. It's not a typical OBGYN practice like I used to have. It's more referral based. And so most of the time these patients are walking in and they're referred by their doctor and, you know, their doctor may have said some nice things about me, but they really don't know me. And they're walking in to meet me for the first time. And then, oh, by the way, I'm Dr. Crockett and I'm about to do surgery on your most private parts.

It's kind of, oh, cause by the way, I'm a gynecologist too, in case you didn't know. So I kind of was looking for a way to soften the introduction and maybe give my patients a little bit more comfort in meeting me, get to know me a little bit better. So we have the show playing in the waiting room now. And so patients get to kind of see my personality and get to know me a little bit.

And for some reason this week, I just had a run of people and their spouses or their partners also, the guys were coming in and saying, thank you so much for doing this. You know, something you said really touched us, you know, keep going and we want to hear some more. And it just really touched me. So I thank you for that. You guys know who you are. You people know who you are. Thank you for your support.

And also if you're following us on YouTube online at The Dr. Crockett Show, please like and subscribe and drop a little comment below. That means so much to me. It means as much to me as somebody saying to me, meeting me in person, hey, good job, because I am a real person. Good job. And it's meaningful to us and keep going. So I appreciate y'all.

Today, we're going to talk about how to get started. So I did a show two weeks ago on five ways to have more energy. And I've been really slow getting into the spirit of things this year. I had a very hard winter as far as depression and just being tired and energy and really just pretty much hibernated during the winter. And I apologize for that, you guys. I know a lot of you are in the same boat.

So I started a series on protocols, wanting to do that as part of the New Year thing, and now it's March 22nd. And I'm just getting to the point where I have the energy and the wherewithal, and the thoughts put together to have a meaningful segment for you guys about how to get started.

So the reason that we were talking about protocols at all is because it's a way of us to look at our habits. So as a life coach, one of the things that I teach patients is to examine their thoughts. We are not our thoughts running through our mind.

That thought train is an automated thing, but we are the watchers of our thoughts. So we teach mindfulness or the ability to step aside from your thought stream and your brain and to actually look and examine your thoughts. And now we're taking that one step further for our habits.

So we all have habits. They're things that we do or don't do every day. So just because the word protocol sounds maybe a little bit intimidating, I don't want you to think that this isn't something unattainable for you or that you aren't already doing with your life. This is just a time for us to think about, well, what do I like about the habits that I have? How are they fulfilling me or helping me further my life, or how are they hindering me?

And so I've kind of given a whole lot of thought to my habits, and I've got some mentors that I look up to. I've been getting a lot of education. But the thing that's really got me going right now is a new goal. And for me, there's nothing like a new goal to help me with, especially my fitness goals.

So I've been pretty dialed in on my eating habits and I'm a champion sleeper. That's really, I'm really good at that. But the one thing that I really haven't been doing that well is paying attention to my workout habits. So I thought this was probably a good thing to kind of bring to y'all and talk to you about.

I wanted to share with you a fitness challenge that I've kind of already started. I'm a lifetime member of Life Time Fitness. True story, back when I was married to my first husband and had little kids in the early 2000s, we were actually founding members of this gym in San Antonio at 281 and there was about a 10-year gap where I moved away from San Antonio and wasn't involved with the gym. Actually, it was a little bit longer than that, 12 or 13 years, but kind of kept my gym membership because my kids were in town and you can use the membership anywhere you go. So our family's been using it for a long time.

But anyway, I'm back at the gym and it's been really intimidating to me for somebody who has been quite fit in the past. I've been, I was a gymnast when I was little and water skier, and then I was a triathlete. And so I was never really big into group sports. In fact, I really sucked at basketball. It was, I was like the worst one on the team. I didn't understand it, but, but dance and all of those kinds of sports that I did, I'd been fairly successful at just in keeping my body strong and healthy.

And now I'm a menopausal female and in the mid-portion of my life, And I'm like, oh my gosh, if I don't make some changes now and change my protocols about exercise and my thoughts about exercise and figure out how I'm going to be in the next half of my life, then my body is not going to withstand the strain and the pressure and the workload that I want to put on it.

So Life Time Fitness is having this fitness challenge called the 60 XT and you don't have to belong to Life Time to do it. You don't have to have a gym. You can follow along if you want and just do it for your, for fun. It's a, it's an eight week challenge. And for those of you who are Life Time gym members, the challenge starts on Monday and there are some really cool prizes at the end.

The one I'm most excited about, honestly, is the cold plunge. So, well, I don't want to say forget the money. I could do some really fun things with the money for the women's pain pelvic clinic that we're working on. But anyway, the cold plunge, which I really love for recovery. It really helps me feel better when I do that. That's one of the prizes.

So I had to do before pictures today. I am not showing them to you. We're not doing that at all, but we'll see how this goes. So I've got eight weeks of doing this fitness challenge. And this fitness challenge has kind of a really, a pretty loose protocol that they suggest six habits. And I was looking at these because they're really close to the five ways to feel, to have more energy, talk that I just did two weeks ago, the video, so y'all can go back and look at that one if you want.

But the six habits that they're encouraging us to do are to get seven hours or more of sleep a night, to take 8,000 steps a day, to drink half your body weight in water, which for me is about 2.5 liters. Hopefully, there'll be less as the thing goes on. The third one is to eat 30 grams of protein each meal. And they didn't say how many meals a day, they just said each meal.

So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how I'm modifying for that because traditionally I've taught whole food plant-based, which I still very strongly believe in for heart health and a whole lot of other things, but for the purpose of gaining skeletal muscle mass and this challenge, I'm going to be adding in animal products, meat products to my diet because I need the density of the protein, and I would rather do that than drink a whole bunch of shakes and processed type foods.

So where was I? Sleep, water, steps, oh, no alcohol. And then, oh, one rest or recovery activity per day. So that could be a meditation or taking a nap or doing foam rolling or cold plunge or sitting in a sauna or stretching or whatever you consider self-care and rest. So those are the six basic goals that we're gonna try to do for the next eight weeks. We're gonna try to do them daily.

And so I wanted to talk with you a little bit about when we talk about how to get started on changing our protocols, sometimes it's fun to have a contest like this where you're doing it with other people. It starts to build a little bit of community around you and it has a finite end and measurable outcome.

So one of the things that's really important when you start setting goals and changing protocols is you wanna set a measurable goal. So if you can measure it and you can track it, then you can analyze it and you can change it. That's kind of scientific method. That's what we do in science. So we do the same with our body and I love tracking.

So for instance, I use my Garmin Venue. Lots of you use the little rings or the Apple Watch. There's all kinds of ways that you can track your fitness activity, your sleep activity. But that's one way that I'm measuring is by my Garmin.

The other one I'm using is my scale. So I have a scale that tracks my body fat and my weight and muscle mass and bone mass and all that stuff. And so my goal during these eight weeks is to increase my strength training, which is like my job and that's it right now. So I have pretty good upper body strength just from the surgery work that I do, but overall my skeletal muscle mass, I can feel it fading as I'm getting fully into this menopause thing, even though I'm on hormone replacement therapy, which is another part of the protocols.

So one thing that I want to do during this eight weeks is I don't just want to lose weight. I want to be stronger and have gained muscle mass on the other side. That's really challenging to do as a menopausal woman. So when we were in our 20s or 30s, if I wanted to lose five pounds, I would just go run five miles and it would fall off. It literally, it was just much, much easier to burn fat weight. But as we get into menopause, our metabolism shifts so that we start to lose lean muscle mass. And when we lose our muscle mass, then we gain more fat.

So a good example of this is my weight has been kind of stable over the last decade. Like I've had ups and downs, but honestly, my body has chosen this weight as like it's preset. This is where we want you to be. But my body fat composition is much different now than it was 10 years ago. And so I'm very cognizant about the importance of my lean skeletal mass, my muscle mass, and my health-gevity.

So if I have a goal to be 120 years old, my muscle strength, especially in my legs, that prevents me from falling and helps keep me balanced, that's super important and I have not been focused on that enough. So my overarching goal for this next eight weeks is to lose fat weight and increase my skeletal muscle weight and have measurable gains in my weightlifting and flexibility.

So for an example, for this little program, it's super cool. You can go online and take a look at it. We'll link the link below. I started with meeting my trainer. I had my free 50 free. The whole thing is 60 bucks. I think I got my bang out of it just with the hour of personal training with Justin. He was amazing.

So I had a trainer that I met this week and I had a session with him Thursday morning where he did all my intake about my habits and my health and my, you know, my fitness level. And do I have any joint problems or things that I can't do? And so we got to know each other a little bit more and set some measurable goals and some protocols in place about how to change my eating.

And then I did my first fitness training with him yesterday, which I was so scared. It's a funny story. So I'm sure y'all know what Pilates is. It's kind of like yoga, but not. And I did Pilates like, I'm not kidding you, it's been at least 25 years since I tried to do Pilates. And I always joke about how much I dislike yoga. No hate, no haters from the yoga people. I just, I just struggle with it.

So, but I have a background of performance-based sports, dance. I was a twirler in high school, yeah, that. And then triathlon and all that. So gymnastics, very performance based. Pilates really speaks to me more along those lines. And so I had never done a reformer, a Pilates class with a reformer.

And if y'all don't know that, what that is, I'm going to tell you, you know, look at that because maybe we can put one on the screen. It's kind of scary looking like it's this big contraption and it's got springs and a slider and all kinds of stuff on it. And I've always thought it kind of looked a little scary, but it wasn't.

I did my first training session yesterday with Justin and went through the Pilates moves and did a little bit of elliptical and TRX training with the bands and yeah, I feel amazing this morning. I felt great afterwards. My energy was better. I could feel all the little muscles in my body that I hadn't been able to feel before. And it took away my fear of the Pilates trainer.

And actually what I discovered is my personality is much more suited to the reformer and Pilates than yoga because, and I don't know, whatever ego, I do well with performance-based movements and because that's my history, this is kind of like doing ballet laying down. The movements are kind of similar, the flexibility and the joints are kind of similar, but you don't have to hold your whole body weight and be a fricking ballerina on our toes to do it. So I'm embracing the reformer.

So what I want you to think about is to think about how you want to track what you're doing. I want you to also define your accountability. So the other thing this is doing for me is defining my accountability. So I'm meeting with my trainer once a week now and I have accountability and I know I should be able to do that myself, but it just is more helpful to me when I have, I know that the teacher's watching, like, you know, there's somebody that you have to turn your homework into. I'm sorry, it's long habits of upbringing like that. So the external accountability really helps me.

And I'm hoping that over this eight weeks, if I get more comfortable, when I get more comfortable being in the gym and moving my body again, and I have these healthy habits started, that the eight weeks is a long enough time for me to have changed my protocols and my healthy habits to continue on the pathway of healthy muscle gain and strength and health-gevity into my later years.

So I want you to also gather the information for your protocols. So your goals may be very different. Maybe you're not a menopausal female woman. Maybe you're a 30-something year old who's recovering from having a baby. Your protocols are going to be different and maybe you're a male who's bodybuilding or another kind of athlete. So gather your information, but I want to show you a couple that I chose from YouTube for me just scanning through them.

So one of my heroes is JJ Virgin. She's super cool. I looked at what She is teaching women to eat and how to move. She's very much an advocate for strength training and this woman has some muscles on her, she looks good. So she's one of them. And then the other one is Mary C. Haver. She's written this book that I recommend so often in my office that I think I ought to carry it. Why am I not carrying it in my office to sell? Like, I should be doing that.

Speaking of selling, today's program is sponsored by Virtuosa Vitamins. We're going to talk a little bit about what I'm taking, but this is our specialty product line of vitamins. I have them here. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. So thank you for our sponsor.

Back to Mary C. Haver. So she is an OBGYN in Galveston, Texas, just south of me. And she is a menopause expert. And she is somebody that I get a lot of my information for about menopause. So when I go to think about what I want to eat or move or what supplements I want to take, I'm also following along what she's teaching because she's teaching from the North American Menopause Society recommendations, and she's super encouraging also, another woman in menopause with muscles and very lean muscle mass and a lot of energy and those are the things that I want.

So that's how I've kind of gone about figuring out gathering information for my protocols. I've got my supplement set and we're going to have a whole other segment here.

I'm going to encourage you to tune in for the second segment for all the protocols that I'm doing. I've talked a little bit about them here because the next step for you is doing. So choosing a start date, doing the doing of the tracking and all of that. And then the end point at which you're going to reevaluate and re-appropriate your protocols.

So the other little bonus thing I'm going to give you all today is I told you all last time we're going to start doing a recipe every show. And today's recipe was my homemade chili crisp. I'm not even somebody who really loves spicy, but this stuff is like amazing yum, and it's vegan. Delicious, you can put it on anything.

We had it with gluten-free pita chips today made out of a Melman-based flour tortilla, so gluten-free and really yummy. Yeah, I haven't started my protocol here with the 30 grams of protein per meal. That one didn't have 30 grams. Well, you're allowed a little bit of exception, I think. But anyway, I'm gonna start posting my recipes from the episodes on drcrocket.com in the recipe section so that y'all can start also eating healthy and choosing plant-based foods. Most of what I'll put there is whole food plant-based. I might put a little bit of other stuff in there because, you know, it's not an all-or-none thing. It's all balance and being human.

And I want to remind you that if you haven't been told this week that it's okay to be human and to be balanced and that life is some great and some not so great and that we're all in this together to support each other, well, I'm going to tell you that I'm very glad that you're here and want to encourage you along your own health journey with your own protocols and tune in for the second episode on how to get started and see what my protocols are, what I'm going to be doing.

You can track along with me and support me or hoot and holler at me or, you know, be nice. I love you guys. I'll see you next week. Have a great week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.