Welcome to 2024!

We believe that healthy eating means getting away from the refined sugars and carbs and processed foods. So whether you're paleo, Mediterranean diet, Blue Zone diet, whole food plant based, these diets are all eliminating the things that your body has to process harder that is making us more unwell as a society in America.

Happy New Year. Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast with Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 66, Welcome to 2024. Thank you for joining us in the new year. This episode is an overview of the great things we are planning for you and the show in the upcoming year.

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'm your host, Dr. Crockett. I'm Dr. Susan Crockett, a Board Certified OBGYN in San Antonio, Texas. My specialty is minimally invasive GYN surgery. We launched this show just about six months ago.

So I want to welcome you all to 2024. I thought I'd do a little bit of a different format today, and just take a minute to speak directly to you for all of your support over the last year. I'm so excited to show you what is coming in 2024. Do we have a whole lot of things coming.

Now I know those of you that have watched for some time, all those thousands of you who've been doing our views and watching and liking and subscribing. I am so, so grateful for you. But also excited because there's no point in doing this if we aren't helping people. If we're helping people and you're sharing it with others then you're helping us fulfill our mission. I want to thank you very, very much. We're going to help you do a whole lot of that in the upcoming year.

So for this year, I wanted to show you a little broader base of who I am, what the Dr. Crockett show is, and what we're building with collaborative efforts in the coming years. Now, if you've been listening to the show for any time, you know a couple of things. One is you know that I really, really like llamas. That's our little theme animal foods of the show. But you also know our tagline is going where the scalpel doesn't reach.

So we started this show in 2023, mainly as an effort for my patients, for us to bring the conversations that we have around wellness and health, out of the privacy of the exam room and into a broader audience. So as a surgeon, I go in and fix things all day long. But this show started with an effort to figure out how we help people with the parts of their health and their wellness that I can't cut out with a scalpel.

So with that in mind, I want to show you how we're expanding what we're doing this year. The first thing is if you haven't checked it out, I want you to go visit the new drcrockett.com. I've got something really fancy. I'm so excited with my new set. Check it out. Check us out. We've got slideshow video stuff.

So yes, I'm going to be doing a whole lot more teaching this year because I have a setup now where I can teach. In fact, this is a whiteboard that I can write on. For those of you that are my patients, you know that I love a good whiteboard. I’m always drawing out what we see on your imaging, explaining to you what we're doing in surgery, and I just think visuals help so much.

If you go to YouTube and search the Dr. Crockett Show, you can find all of our episodes. We're going to be adding additional types of content this year. I'm so excited about that. I hope you'll continue the journey with me.

The other thing that you'll find as one of the first things when you go to our website is this freebie offer. It's a totally free download. I get questioned all day long from my patients about what to eat and how to eat. We, at the Dr. Crockett Show and in my office, we teach a whole lot about whole food plant based.

Now we're not 100% like that. We say we're mostly whole food plant based. But the main gist of it is we believe that healthy eating means getting away from the refined sugars and carbs and processed foods. So whether you're paleo, Mediterranean diet, Blue Zone Diet, whole food plant based. These diets are all eliminating the things that your body has to process harder that is making us more unwell as a society in America. So we're encouraging you to get back to your whole food.

But what does that mean? My patients look at me first and panic because they hear veganism, and they're like oh, I'm not going there. Then they get a little bit curious. So if you're in that curious phase, this is a great handout for you. It goes through a little bit of my journey to becoming mostly whole food plant based.

It's got links in it to all of the encouraging media that I used and that I recommend to my patients, like Netflix shows and Forks Over Knives, and all of those videos that help get you thinking about why this is a better, healthier way to eat, and how you might make changes for yourself that benefit you.

So this is not a one size fits all at all, I want you to find what's comfortable for you. This handout, it’s a six page PDF handout. Super nice. This handout will help you do that and give you lots of encouragement. At the end of it, I do a remake on a spaghetti dish.

So I go from the most unhealthy, most processed sugar-filled spaghetti sauce type food down the different levels of eliminating the unhealthy ingredients and getting to the healthier whole food, whole plant based type of eating. All the way down to a level which is beyond what I can do. I would say it's an overachiever of whole food plant based, which is making your own food in your own garden, which I'm not quite there yet.

So I hope you'll go to the website, drcrockett.com, download the freebie, and then leave me some comments at the end of this video here and tell me what you liked, what you didn't like. Maybe you've got a favorite recipe that you'd like me to remake in a healthier way for you, and we'll look at doing that in the year to come.

Now one of the things that we talked about on the show is we had quite a bit of food this last year. I didn't intend for the show to become a cooking show. But towards the end of the year, it kind of did. I think that's just kind of a natural way that we integrate with our audience and with our guests.

We started an idea about our interview show where our guests come into our studio, which is where I'm filming from now, our studio apartment, and they originally come into the kitchen. I cook a healthy food for them, and we have a conversation for about an hour or two before the show where we just talk. We talk about all kinds of stuff.

That intimate conversation is what gives us the relaxed comfort zone when you see us interviewing together on the show. We cultivate the conversation that we want to share with you guys from those conversations that we have around the kitchen table. They're so important.

So instead of just being a show where people come on, and they walk in the door, and they sit down in the seat, and they're all nervous. They don't know me, and we don't have that relationship. Our show is more about encouraging those collaborative relationships and getting to know one another. We feel that is actually primary. That's what comes through the show to you guys with the authenticity of the content that we share. The food is important part of that.

But I don't really want to be a cooking show. So in the next year, we've decided we're going to do more educational content. In fact, I'm going to lean more into a little bit more of the science or the surgery and the medical aspects of it just because I've been getting so much requests for it from my staff and also my patients. They're like could you please put more information on so that we can share with other patients what you're teaching and what's available regarding robotic surgery and women's health in general. So that's kind of where we're going to go in the next year.

So the next thing I wanted to show you was the Becoming Virtuosa podcast. Now, a lot of you most of you are probably finding us on the YouTube channel, the Dr. Crockett Show, but what you might know is that if you just like to listen to audio podcasts, this show is available under the name Becoming Virtuosa on all four of your major platforms. So your Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, and then the Dr. Crockett Show.

So if you just want to listen to a podcast while you're exercising, which is something we're going to be doing more of in the next year with Malcolm and Michelle Cook. Or if you want to just listen to it on the way to work, then you can go to drcrockett.com to the podcast page, and you can find where you can listen to our episodes that drop every Tuesday on your favorite podcast station. So isn't that cool? So cool.

The next thing I wanted to tell you about was we have a vitamin shop. This launched just a couple of months ago. I'm very, very proud of it. We're going to be talking a lot more about it. This is not your normal vitamin shop. This is virtually what the doctor takes. This is what I take. I'm not going to become the sell 100 brands, market 100 vitamins, nutritional supplements to people. I am literally offering you only the handful, maybe two handfuls of supplements that I find myself prescribing and personally taking over and over and over again to my patients.

So I'm not somebody that believes that vitamins are the whole answer to your nutrition. All these shakes and supplements that are selling you to the idea that you can just replace your healthy food with a supplement. I just don't agree with that at all. In fact, we want to encourage you to eating the rainbow diet. If you didn't check that show Dr. Reed Miloy - it's one of my favorites that aired just before Christmas where we went as two doctors and shopped the rainbow. That's really what we believe in.

But you know what? Everybody needs some help. At least most of us do. We don't have the exact balanced diet. So my favorite two products are shown on this screen. The collagen builder, which is not a collagen supplement. We talked a little bit more about this in the collagen episode, the Bone Building episode, which was one of my favorite ones was Sam Blumenthal. That one aired on Halloween. You should check it out if you haven't yet.

ut the idea is not that we distill down the collagen that you get normally in animal products to a powder because I think that we lose most of the nutrition in that. The idea is that we feed our bodies the vitamins and minerals and the nutrients that help us build our own collagen. Collagen is the basis of our structure and our soft tissues. It’s why our skin doesn't just fall off our faces, and why, as we age, we get wrinkles because we start losing collagen strength.

So the collagen builder is one of my favorite for recommending to my aging and post-menopausal patients. I also recommend it for my surgery patients just to help with recovery because collagen plays a big part in rebuilding our tissues for healing after we have surgery.

Then my second favorite product that I recommend all the time is this probiotic. It's a great probiotic. It's really nice because it doesn't make your gut just go crazy, and it has a shelf life that's very long and does not have to be refrigerated. So a lot of times you'll find lactobacillus type probiotics that have to be refrigerated. It's kind of pain. You forget to take them and all that. This one's really nice because it's room temperature stable and can sit on your counter.

So for those of you that have destroyed your gut microbiome during the holidays with all the fun holiday food and alcohol and such, or if you've had antibiotics, destroyed some of your gut microbiome, this is a way to replace it with healthy lactobacillus.

So I hope you'll check out the vitamin store. We're going to be developing a lot in the coming year. Not with so many added products. We have about 12 or 15 on there now, but we're going to be offering deals and bundling. I want you to be able to take advantage of that. We're going to have an immune bundle coming up because this is flu and COVID season. So stay tuned for that.

These are some of the other products that we have. So we have an Active Sustain for women, which is a daily multivitamin. We also have the Healthy Bone Support, which is my favorite osteoporosis prevention medicine. It actually has studies that have shown that it reduces or can reverse osteopenia without having to take Fosamax or a bone builder type of medicine.

This is a highly absorbable calcium that will not increase your atherosclerosis risk. It's also your vitamin D that you need and a little extra bone builder in there. I've been using this product under a different name in my practice for over 10 years. It's personally what I take myself. I've personally seen it reverse osteopenia in my patients. A very, very good product.

Then everybody needs a good omega. We get omega-3s, our healthy ones, from fish mostly. This one is a nice one that won't make your burps tastes like fish. It'll get to your brain health and those omegas that your brain needs.

Then Healthy Brain Support, that's for those of us that are starting to have trouble with memory. This just gives you a comprehensive memory support system for all the vitamins that you need to stay sharp and to increase your brain health, which is one of the topics we're going to be talking about on the show in the upcoming months.

The next thing that I'm really excited to tell you about is the upcoming book. So this is the title of the book. This is the market for the book cover called the Seven Seeds of the Soul. The reason this is so cool is that if you followed me for any length of time, you'll see that we have our logo, the drcrockett.com logo, we have the seven seeds which are the seven colors, and those correspond to the seven primary topics that I'm going to be teaching and talking about.

Why am I talking about all of this? Well, one of the things that we've noticed in the last couple of years is the increasing rate of growth with AI in our world, the amount of technology that's coming forward, the amounts of change, and the amount of transformation that is necessary for us to struggle with it or to thrive with has just gone up exponentially.

So what I've done is I've looked at my own life, and I've looked at my life as a physician and my life as a certified life coach. I've put together a toolkit, and the toolkit consists of the seven seeds. They are, let me see if I can do it looking at the screen. There you go. Be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. That's the cover of the book. So you'll see this six circles around the seed of life fertility symbol and then the center one represents attunement, which is where we get in touch and in vibe with everybody else around us.

All right, so the next thing I want to show you is the website for the practice. So yeah, by the way, I'm a physician. I own my own practice called Virtuosa GYN in San Antonio, Texas. We are coming up on our 10th year of practice. The site for the practice is virtuosagyn.com. That's virtuosa with and A and then gyn.com. Here, you can find everything you need for your gynecologic care and needs.

I'm building something super exciting for y'all in the next year or so. I'm filming a video later today which gives you my background and kind of talks to you a little bit about who I am and what I've been doing. If you just know me as a patient that's come into the office or you just know me from the show, you may not know, well you probably don't know, all the cool stuff that I have to share with you and what we're building.

So we're actually physically building a new office space. We broke ground last year, and the office space is being built above a new outpatient robotics center in San Antonio, Texas. Our goal is to become the premier women's place in San Antonio for women's surgery. Our goal of starting our practice was to make surgery easier for women.

Everything that I've developed and cultivated for surgical care over the last nine years has been to make surgery easier for women. Nothing makes me happier than to have a patient come in postoperatively and say, “Oh my gosh, that was so much easier than I thought it would be.” Or, “My goodness, I had no pain. If I'd known that this was going to be this easy, I would have done it years ago.” That's what we hear over and over and over again.

So I'm one of the leading minimally invasive GYN surgeons in the country. I've just done over 2,500 robotic cases. I'm not going to tell you all about my history now. But we're going to bring my knowledge and skill to this new surgery center with the goal of teaching other surgeons how to increase their skill in doing more minimally invasive GYN surgery for women, making surgery easier for women, and to train other surgeons to be able to do that as well.

I also proctor and teach other surgeons. The show that you're watching right now is on the YouTube channel the Dr. Crockett Show. We are going to be building out a similar YouTube channel for my surgeons. My residents and fellows surgeons have been asking for this for quite some time. The new surgical center is going to have state of the art AV equipment and broadcasting and capability. We will not be doing live broadcasting. I have an ethical problem with that with surgery. I just don't want that distraction with taking care of patients.

But we will be able to record and have teaching broadcasts to bring you ideas about increasing your skill set. We'll be sharing knowledge from other surgeons. Might even have an interview or two if I can get, well I'm not going to spill any names yet because I don't have them booked. But if I can get my friends on the show, I have two in mind that we might bring some surgery interviews to you as well.

So I wanted to give you a little preview of what this looks like. So this is a little video of us touring the new building. It’s getting built right now, and we are scheduled to move into our new 6,000 square foot office space in May of 2024. Then what we're walking through right here, you see Lacey in the hardhat next to me. She's my right hand woman, my first surgical assist. We are scheduled to open these new state of the art ORs, which is an epicenter for women's surgery for Intuitive Surgical October of 2024.

So I'm super proud of the work we're doing. Super excited to bring you all of the things in the upcoming year. I just want to thank you all for tuning in, for joining me on this journey this year so far. I'm going to invite you to come along in the next year and help us celebrate 2024 in a really big way.

Please remember to like, subscribe, and share because that's how we grow. It really matters to me that you're helping us spread the good news of our show and helping others gain the skills that they need for flourishing and growing into their best versions of themselves into 2024. So thank you for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you in the new year. Happy 2024.

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.