Welcome to the Running Explain podcast. I'm your host, Elizabeth. I'm a marathoner, coach, and answer seeker.

When I first started running at the age of 29, I had so many questions and what felt like nowhere to turn to for answers.

And now I'm here to answer all your running questions about anything that you might want to know.

If you're a new runner or you've been doing this for a long time

there's always something more to learn about running so let's get started my guest this week is

sports dietitian brooke zernacki of intentful nutrition and she is here today to talk to us about

nutrition for the perimenopausal endurance athlete perimenopause is the phase of your hormonal

changes that happens before you hit menopause.

And yeah, your needs do change. There's a lot that happens during this time of your life.

And there's also ways that you can support your needs as an athlete, as a perimenopausal athlete,

with nutrition. So here is Brooke to talk to us about nutrition for the perimenopausal athlete. Brooke, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you here. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. I'm very, very excited to be here today chatting with you all things of nutrition. So before we get started, go ahead and tell us about yourself. How did you become a sports dietitian and about your athletic background? Yes. So I became, well, a sports citation because I love running. So I wanted to

help the people that I love running with and just am around all of the time. I was a collegiate athlete in

college as well. So that is a big part of my background and why I'm so passionate about helping athletes and

runners fuel properly for their sport, not only their sport, but also their day-to-day life, because we're humans outside of our sport as well. So that's a little bit about, you know, my background and how I came to be a sports dietitian, but truly it's because I'm just so passionate about helping this population.

It's funny.

I've talked to

obviously a number of

dietitians on the show

and a number of coaches. And for most people, there's an element of, well, I mean, I just wanted to get better. And then like, and then I wanted to help other people. But it's that curiosity of like, how can I use my knowledge to improve my own performance and then you realize

oh my god this is a career I can have and I can use this to talk about what I love to talk about

with other people and like make it my job that's pretty cool yeah and it's like so ironic

because when I first got into dietetics like my whole schick was that I was going to help

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