Create Your Balance - Nutrition

We all can appreciate carbo-loading the night before a big race, but fueling our bodies for performance is about more than just a meal or pre-race routine.   Creating the proper nutrition and hydration balance through your training, during races and in race recovery can have incredible impact on overall performance and health.

We’re excited to be joined this week by an incredible resource in sports nutrition, who has been the lead dietitian on the meal planning team for US athletes during the Olympic Summer Games.  Jillian Wanik, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, will be joining us on #askHMF tomorrow, June 30, at 3:00 pm live on Twitter.  Send your questions to us at @runHMF or post them on our Facebook page today/tomorrow and Jillian will answer them live from 3-4:00 pm.  Topic areas include:

·       Hydration guidelines

·       Power foods to put on the grocery list

·       Running for weight loss

·       Sports nutrition products

·       Adding calories – when and how

·       Pre-race and race recovery

Learn more about Jillian below and please join us tomorrow, we’ll be giving away Fuelbelts to a couple randomly selected participants who submit a question.  Thanks to Eversource Hartford Marathon sponsor United Bank for supporting the Create Your Balance campaign.

Jillian Wanik

Jillian provides nutrition counseling, presentations and classes on sports nutrition, weight management and wellness for athletes looking to improve performance and positively impact health outcomes.  She is passionate about helping individuals reach their fitness and performance goals through better nutrition.

Jillian worked as a part of a global interdisciplinary team at the Olympic Summer Games in Athens, Beijing and London and the Asian Games in Guangzhou. She defined and set standards and policies for elite athlete fueling. She helped create the Olympic menu databases and provided individual and team strategies to optimize food and fluid choices for performance.

Jillian loves running and her road bike.  She has been an athlete all of her life, recently completing her first marathon and Olympic distance triathlon.  

She earned her Doctorate of Clinical Nutrition from Rutgers University, where her research examined the relationships between physical activity level and changes in weight, waist circumference and percent body fat among participants in a worksite wellness program.

Jillian is an Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics member, a Registered Dietician Nutritionist, Board Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics, Certified Nutrition Support Specialist and a member of the Sports, Cardiovascular and Wellness dietitians practice group.