Dr. Robert Whitfield recommends filtering air and water, eating organic produce, cutting gluten and seed oils, and following a 3-2-1 pre-bed routine (finish eating 3 hours before sleep, stop fluids 2 hours before) to lower chronic inflammation. Vegans should aim for 30g protein powder plus 15g amino acids daily. Six to seven and a half hours of deep sleep supports lymphatic recovery.
All right, guys. Hey, it's Dr. Whitfield. I get asked all the time, basically, how can I start preparing, even though I can't necessarily logistically come to Austin and stay with you for a week until, you know, several things are organized, including, you know, maybe childcare, leave of absence from work, support from a family member or loved one during the process, because we highly encourage having that support. So the basic things I talk to everyone about right off the bat that you can do starting today are change your air quality, and we'll just speak about fluid quality and food quality so many times. It's very confusing in terms of the supermarket. Supermarket itself is kind of laid out in a particular way where food is on the periphery and in the aisles are all the processed items and things like, you know, condiments and soups, et cetera. So basically, I don't care what type of diet you follow. I feel like my patients who are vegan or are having the most difficulty getting protein in their diet, but we have a pure protein supplement in terms of a powder that helps them. So even that can be worked around. So if you're vegan or vegetarian, then you're eating your vegetables, and you have to make sure that those are organic. We really want you to avoid glyphosate exposure. Glyphosates themselves, those are part of the spraying that goes on with the crops. And if that is on the crop and it gets into your system, especially as a woman, it can affect your hormones. Many of my patients will have problems with their thyroid and their sex hormone. So that is a way simply to avoid that. Be careful with your. Your fruits and vegetables and wash them carefully. Look at the environmental. Environmental working groups, 30 dozen. That will give you some clues about what to avoid. But always try to get things that are obviously organic to the best of your ability and cleanse them properly. We've talked a lot about fluid on our show, and we interviewed the founder of Echo. So filtered water has been talked about for a long period of. I don't and am not a proponent of alkalizing. Alkalizing, nice. Or adding specific things, you know, to the water. And I'll. I'll just. I'll tell you why. So we want filtered water. For us, we use Echo both in the office and at the surgery center. It has a hydrogen option that allows for the oxidative stress to be reduced in the gut, which can, know, promote. We'll just say better gut health. We want better absorption always. So having filtered water makes the most sense. Now a Lot of folks will use RO and add minerals back, that's fine. What I don't encourage our patients to do, our patients that are going to work with us is to add a lot to the water in terms of packets with a lot of B vitamins because if you end up taking supplementation from us prior to surgery, that's going to create too many B vitamins. So just purified water, that would be what I would recommend. And then if you're using our pure protein, you can put that in the water, use a frother to mix it up and just drink it. Two scoops is about 30 grams of protein. If you use amino acids from us, that's another 15 grams. So you can get 45 grams that way. And I'll teach you some some tricks to get your protein intake leveled up relatively easily. The air quality I think it's particularly important to me because I grew up in an environment where I had a lot of allergies both to grass and the different, you know, shrubs and plants that were growing around. It just seemed like I was sensitive to all sorts of things. And as I got older that was less of an issue. And now we've went through a series of of filters and we've settled on Jasper Co filters. The Jasper filters in terms of filtration, excellent. In terms of filtration, the settings recognize and sense how the quality of there is and adjust to that which is in the marketplace not really precedent. Most filters just simply do the. You adjust the rate yourself and it sits there and just runs. Jasper adjusts. So that's a great option for your home. I would put one in your bedroom and one in your room where you spend the majority of your time. They are smaller cylinder type filters. They look nice and for the esthetics of a living area they'll fit in without any issue. So those are things you can start right now. Level up your air quality, fluid quality and food quality. Start doing that today. A couple more comments about food is I recommend cutting out gluten completely and dig dairy, minimize if not eliminate and seed oils. So these are all and have been shown to be pro inflammatory in my patients who are suffering with chronic inflammation associated with breast implant illness. We want to limit any contributing factors for inflammation. So once again improve air quality, fluid quality, food quality. Then I I'm going to give you my two cents about getting a little bit better recovery before you ever start the process with us because obviously we're going to stimulate inflammation by surgery. So if you're suffering from chronic Inflammation. Many times you'll have issues with cortisol already. And if you have problems with your sex hormones, you may have higher levels of estrone from your estrogen metabolism. These all lead to more stress. These are stress related hormones. They're buffered out by testosterone. But many of my patients suffer from decreased or suppressed levels of testosterone. So for us I really concentrate on having people do the three two, one, three two one before bed. So three hours before your designated bedtime, we'll just choose nine. So at 6pm you're going to have your last meal. You're going to be tidying up your last meal, not starting but finishing your last meal. At 7, you're going to have finished your last fluid intake. That means for people who want to take and drink sleepy time tea or chamomile tea or something to help get them off to sleep, that stops two hours before bed. And there's a reason for this. We want you to be able to go to the bathroom and urinate before you go to bed because it's important to sleep through the night in an undisturbed six and a half hour to seven and a half hour stretch so that your lymphatic system can work and you can get into restorative deep sleep. If you don't do this, you can't recover. Our hormones are not secreted properly, including growth hormone. If we don't reach these deeper levels of sleep and stay asleep long enough then we come can be like chronically if you will behind because of a lack of sleep. So there are lots of devices and wearables. So the ones I am most comfortable recommending are the ones I've used personally and found consistency with the data. So a whoop strap and ultra human is a ring that you can wear. Both of these companies I feel have and provide very good data around sleep and recovery. There are more nuanced things that we can discuss in person, but these are the ones I trust the most. The other thing I would mention is if you snore you need to get tested for sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a big problem in terms of neural inflammation, hypoxia to the brain, ultimate problems with things like Alzheimer's. So we want to always make sure that we're getting proper oxygen at night when we sleep. I have sleep apnea and I sleep with a CPAP. The company I use for travel is called ResMed and my, my home base is ResMed. I, I think they are a good quality product but you need to get tested. All right, that's how you get started with preparation prior to surgery.
