Health Coach, Shana Robinson, on Food, Eastern Medicine, Corporate Burnout, and Everything in Between
Combining nearly 20 years of business and HR experience with a powerful wellness practice, entrepreneur and health coach Shana Robinson is an expert on the rising world of corporate wellness. We sat down with her to get the insider perspective on how businesses are evolving to keep up with employee needs, the potentials of incorporating Eastern Medicine philosophies into your diet, and more.
Amy Cohen: I am so excited to talk to you today, Shana. We had an amazing webinar last week for a law firm. And we talked about some interesting topics that I have heard you speak about before. I want you to introduce yourself because I don't think anyone could do as good of a job as you do.
You have the most incredible background that merges these two worlds.
Shana: I can. And thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure. I fell backwards into the corporate space. I never intended to work in the corporate world. From the time I was five until I was 32, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. My father was an attorney and self-employed so I saw there was some freedom in that.
I started my career at Yahoo in 1997. I was there for five years. I went to eBay and then Google. All when they were teeny tiny little companies. It was amazing. I couldn't have paid for that experience. I always say I had a front row seat to a Harvard Business School case study.
I left Google and went to culinary school instead, the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City. It was the leading health supportive culinary school at the time. That was there that my passion for health and wellness was ignited. My inner hippie was awakened.
My first or second week they taught me that food and mood are connected — what you eat actually impacts how you feel. That had literally never dawned on me. I was 33 years old, and it was like, "Oh, my God, what are you talking about?"
After culinary school, I went back into the corporate space and fell into HR. I worked at companies like Twitter and Blue Apron and Compass. And again, the amount of stress was so insane. And all of these things, all of these symptoms, were showing up, but I didn't necessarily know that they were symptoms of chronic stress. My body was giving me all of these signals, trying to get my attention. So I decided to leave the nine-to-five-grind altogether and start my own business.
Amy Cohen: I love it. I love it. And I love the food affects your mood. I also think the opposite is so true. I think your mood affects your food, right?
You've done so much research and are clearly incredibly passionate about Traditional Chinese medicine. And one of the things that you’ve spoken about is what time you wake up in the middle of the night and how it is indicative of the imbalances in your body. Will you dive deeper into that?
Shana: I will gladly talk about this. This is one of my absolute favorite topics. So, in traditional Chinese medicine, there are 12 major meridians and they are paired with Yin and Yang, and that's a whole podcast in and of itself. So those 12 meridians are paired with two hours on the clock. There are 24 hours in each day. They each get two hours that they're at their peak function. That's when they get to show off. That's when they get to do their thing.
So the clock is a huge diagnostic tool that we all can take advantage of. You don't necessarily need to memorize it, you can literally Google it. But for me, when I work with people or just talking to friends, if they say I'm not sleeping well, I usually ask if it's trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. Most people have trouble staying asleep. If it's once or twice and then you're able to fall back to sleep, then you can go about your life after one or two nights; I'm not going to say that's a pattern.
But if you've got three or more nights where you keep waking up at 1:37 or something, I’ll say "All right, your liver is trying to get your attention. Your liver peak function is between 1:00 and 3:00. Your liver is paired with anger, the emotion." Some people say they wake up at some point between 3:00 and 5:00. Well, then I’ll tell them, "Okay, this has to do with your lungs. The emotion associated with your lungs is grief. So, what are you holding on to?"
Amy Cohen: Are there things that we can do to help the organs in our bodies function better?
Shana: Yeah, for sure. There are different types of foods and different flavors that are associated with the different organs as well. Your kidneys and your bladder are paired together so salty-flavored things. (And I'm not talking like Morton Salt or added crappy salt in processed food. I'm talking more like Himalayan high quality Celtic sea salt.) Seaweed is really good. Root vegetables are incredible for your kidneys and your bladder.
Your kidneys are a root organ. They help you feel grounded. So, things that go into the ground — carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, anything that is a root vegetable — are super helpful. Black beans and kidney beans are incredible for the kidneys.
There is a whole thing called the doctrine of signature, which is the belief that foods that look like body parts are actually there to benefit to that body part.
Amy Cohen: I never knew that. That's so intuitive.
Shana: I know! It's cool. A tomato is really good for your heart. If you cut a tomato in half and you look at all of the insides of a tomato, it actually looks like the chambers of a heart. Citrus is really good for your lungs. It's also really good for the breast tissue because once you peel back that skin on the little smiles of citrus, little pieces of citrus, they have all those little things inside that actually resembles breast tissue.
Amy Cohen: That's amazing. What are the five things you just stay away from?
Shana: Cold food and raw food. It's summer so I do eat a little bit more. But it's extremely hard on the body. It's really hard for your body to digest. It's also why we don't crave it in the middle of the winter. It's hard for your body to digest and it actually cools you down. Which is why a salad sounds great in the summer but, in the dead of winter, that's the last thing I want to eat. I want soups and stews and things like that. So, so raw food, cold food, is pretty much a no, no.
“Our bodies are databases. Our bodies are constantly giving us all this data and information so that we can say, ‘Something isn't right.’”
Amy Cohen: What do you think of rigid dieting? I have a friend who won't eat any nightshades, whatever that means. What are your feelings on that kind of thing?
Shana: So, nightshades: That's an interesting one because night shades contain something called oxalic acid. So, that leeches minerals from your bones; it inhibits the absorption of minerals in your bones, specifically calcium. Usually, those are tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and things like Swiss chard and spinach. When you eat spinach, you get that filmy stuff on your teeth. That's the oxalate. So usually, things with oxalate, you pair with a dairy source or a calcium source so they repel each other.
If that person isn't eating nightshades, it could be for a number of reasons. It could be that person is on an elimination diet. He or she has arthritis or some inflammation so that will help tamp down that inflammation.
But things that are too rigid, I'm not a huge fan of. I mean, if you can't make it a lifestyle, that's where I bristle a little bit and start to ask questions like, "What are you trying to get out of this?"
To me, it's, "Let's change your eating habits so that you have healthy insides, which will manifest in beautiful skin and great hair and all that other stuff — all the physical that we can see." I don't think there's a one size fits all diet approach. Keto, for example, is very hard on your liver. If you feel great, kudos. But if you're asking for guidance, I'm just going to say, "Be careful because your liver has to process all of that fat." I don't care if it's coconut and avocado or crappy fat, it's the same. Your liver processes it the same.
Amy Cohen: To me, it goes back to the reason why I do this and the reason why I created the Lynne Cohen Foundation and the reason why I started this educational platform, the Series for Education and Awareness in Medicine. Women need to know their normal, to know when their bodies are imbalanced.
If you're waking up at 3:00 in the morning, it's because something's out of balance, which I find to be just so incredible. You have to listen to yourself.
Shana: Our bodies are databases. Our bodies are constantly giving us all this data and information so that we can say, "Something isn't right."
There are a lot of doctors that are now calling it FLC, feel like crap syndrome. There's brain fog. There’s obviously cortisol production, which increases your belly fat. There's dark circles under your eyes that literally no concealer in the world will cover. That's all going to show up if there’s a kidney imbalance.
If you look at the underside of your hands, on the palm side of your hands in between the ridges for your knuckles, if you see those vertical lines in between there, even at the tops of your fingers, if you have some rigidness, or if it looks pruney like you've been underwater, most people have it, that's a sign of adrenal fatigue. There are all these funky little things that your body is doing to get your attention.
Amy Cohen: I'd love to know more about your take on merging Western and Eastern medicine
Shana: Western doctors, I think there's a time and place. I think there's time and place for naturopathic. Functional is a blend of the two. Most functional doctors go through Western medical school, but then they go through two additional years of training. So, they are trained Western, but then they also get this holistic piece of it. And naturopaths, it is also science-based. It's just a very different way of looking at the body. They go through four years of medical school as well. But they look at the body as a whole. Whereas in western, it's a little bit more symptomatic and reactive.
When I went to my naturopathic doctor and I just said, "There's something wrong, I feel like crap," and he said, "Cool. Let's go have you do blood work before we even start to figure out what's going on because there are so many things that it could be." He had me go do a comprehensive blood lab and that was 15 or 16 vials of blood. They were hugeBut I would not have found out what I found out had I gone to not just a Western doctor.
Much respect to them because I did not go to medical school, but what I found from my naturopathic doctor was that my hormones were completely out of whack. One was super high, one was super low, which also meant that my thyroid was hypo. I also found out that I had low ferritin. I didn't even know what that was; I'd never even heard that word before. It’s essentially iron in your blood. There's a little bit more to it, but it's amazing I'm not bald. Normal range for a woman of ferritin is 20 to 200 nanograms. I had four nanograms in my body which is insane. So obviously, I had anemia as well. I hadn't eaten meat in 10 years at the time.
So, I left his office and he said, "You need to have some heavy iron. You have to. It's imperative. Otherwise, you're going to have Hashimoto's within a year." So, I left his office and bought short ribs and braised short ribs for the first time in 10 years. I took digestive enzymes and I felt great.
Getting comprehensive blood labs done is very important to me. I get them done every six months now, because my levels were so funky and just through diet and supplementation, no pharmaceuticals, I was able to correct it. My ferritin is almost back to a normal range in a year just because I started eating red meat.
Amy Cohen: Yeah. It's amazing. It's truly amazing. It's amazing what stress does to the body.
Shana: Yeah. I'm not a huge fan of pharmaceuticals for pharmaceutical sake. We need those naturally occurring substances to fuel our body. It's not about synthetics.
Amy Cohen: I agree. I agree. And I do believe there's a happy marriage between the two.
I also think it’s so important not rush to conclusions and to treat the problem, not the symptom. Treat the root. When my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she had had many symptoms for over a year. And for a year, she had been attributing them to stress. And looking back, it's hard to say what was the cause of what, and we'll never know because it wasn't talked about or dealt with.
But she had so much stress in her life and so many symptoms were because of stress, because of cancer. Or maybe one caused the other. I don't know. I wish that we had listened or that she had listened or talked to her doctor about it, any doctor at that time and said, "This isn't normal. This isn't this right. This isn't what I should be having." And she just didn't. She just passed it off as, "Oh, this is normal for someone who's under a lot of stress."
But stress wrecks so much havoc on our bodies. It's just this nasty slippery slope.
Shana: Y last point that you made is so important. If things are funky, go to a doctor. There's no shame. They're not going to laugh about your poop. They're not going to laugh about your weird periods. That's what they're there to help you. They're trained to do that.
Amy Cohen: I guess, they go to the wrong doctor. Yeah.
Shana: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, find another one. There's plenty of them. But yeah, get to know yourself.
Amy Cohen: Definitely. And take advantage of people like you who are amazing and so passionate and so learned. I just think it's so phenomenal.