Who: Cate Shanahan

Claim To Fame:  Dr. Cate Shanahan is the bestselling author of Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. A board-certified MD trained in biochemistry, genetics, and ethnobotany, was the creator and longtime director of the Los Angeles Lakers PRO Nutrition program, and her next book, The FATBURN Fix, about the new science of how to assess and repair the broken relationship with your own body fat, is available for preorder and releases on March 24!

Where To Find Cate: Her Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Cate: “Dr. Cate Shanahan beautifully presents the scientific evidence why traditional foods enjoyed by our ancestors thousands of years ago can keep us lean and disease-free today. Deep Nutrition is an eye-opening, engaging book that is sure to change your life and the life of your family.” — Vani Hari, bestselling author

When and where do you like to write? Are you the same-thing-every-day kind of writer or can you write anytime, anywhere?

For me, it’s all about the topic–much more than the setting. I can write anywhere if I have something under my skin that needs expression. If I don’t, I can’t write anywhere. No matter how hard I try it all feels false.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

20 years of the same breakfast ritual:  1 cup cold brewed coffee in ¼ cup raw cream and 1 cup raw milk I am good to go. Same breakfast for almost 20 years. But before that, another longstanding ritual of 10 minutes of yoga and 450 core crunches. I also take activity breaks every hour or so to do a not very demanding workout video that gets the sludge out. I would love to run or bike again but have a virus in my knee that keeps me down.

Writers have to be master prioritizers — juggling all sorts of projects and deadlines at the same time. That’s certainly the case for you. Do you have any methods for managing tasks and time so to not let overwhelm sneak in?

My method is to not be very focused on (or successful in) promoting my work. It takes a ton of time to do that! Twitter, facebook, etc. I tend to help folks asking for favors rather than work on projects relating to the almighty social media platform. The process of helping people often raises fascinating questions that ultimately do inspire me to write, but even so I’m more of a model of what not to do than what to do. I can give you all kinds of tips to make sure only the most devoted people in your subject area ever hear of you.

The Fatburn Fix is your third book. What did you learn the first two times around, in the publishing and marketing side of things, that you applied with the new book?

I was told platform matters more than content. Being drop dead gorgeous really helps. That having a marketing team lets you sell anything. But what I learned was that even so, people still appreciate good writing and new ideas that make sense.

In addition to your books, you write regularly for your own site and have contributed to countless other outlets. Do you find that your routine or process between your short-form work versus your longer form books?

It’s a lot easier for me to write short articles that answer straight forward questions than create a new body of knowledge, which is what my husband and I did with Deep Nutrition and I tried to do again with The FATBURN FIX. Deep Nutrition took 6 years and The FATBURN FIX took 8.

Your work is intensely and meticulously researched. What is your process for collecting and organizing material you might want to use in your writing?

It starts with my patients. With the first book, Deep Nutrition, I was fascinated by the tragic decline in health I was seeing happen between generations. The older generations who grew up on Hawaii before electricity was common had to be very self sufficient and even though they were 60 and 70 years old, most were far healthier than their own children and grandchildren. That book was supposed to be a simple pamphlet for my patients about avoiding vegetable oils and refined sugar and flour, but ended up as a 500 page exploration of the scale of human health. My husband (co-author) and I were fascinated by the underappreciated close relationship between humans, DNA, and the edible environment. Writing Deep Nutrition was a very organic very disorganized chaotic process that involved reading every cookbook written prior to 1900 I could find, thousands of journal articles, and dozens of books about everything from organic chemistry to climatology to what crops were grown in the US in the 1600s, to the history of food, and the history of civilization, plus watching a lot of Anthony Bourdain and cooking shows. We almost killed each other on a regular basis deciding what should go in and what should stay out of the book.

In the process of marketing Deep Nutrition I realized that nobody was talking about the defining feature of junk food—seed oils—that obesity medicine is basically a failed science because doctors know nothing about how these oils affect our metabolism. I’d started writing The FATBURN Fix in 2012, but once I focused on these seed oils and how they worm their way into our diet and then our body fat, I found a lot of answers to basic questions about most of the diseases doctors learn to treat only with drugs.

What books or writers have most influenced the way you think and the way you write?

Weston Price’s book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration opened my eyes to the fundamental truths that food can change what it means to be human. My husband taught me to write.

What is your advice to aspiring writers?

Writing is hard. Make sure to write about something you believe in because you’re going to struggle and fight and bleed for your cause. The best reward is not the money—at least not unless you sell a million books. It’s that when it’s all over and done with, you’ve made the world a little more beautiful.

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