Member Profile: Catalina Fernandez
Global Representative America
M.A., RD, IOC Diploma in Sports Nutrition
Catalina Fernandez, our America’s Global coordinator, started her career in sports nutrition as an athlete; being a former volleyball player for the Costa Rica national team. This had her questioning the impact diet had between other players from big teams that looked and performed different from hers.
She decided to pursue a degree in Human Nutrition in Costa Rica, where no sport nutrition class existed, so her real career started when a professor from the Human Movement School “adopted” her for the thesis project. He helped her obtain a scholarship for a master’s degree in the US and introduced her to international conferences, like the ACSM Annual Meeting, where she met personalities in the field like Louise Burke, who guided her into taking the IOC Diploma.
Employed by the Costa Rica Olympic Committee in 2015, she started developing the Nutrition Department and a sports nutrition culture in general around the different sports, with the philosophy of working side by side with athletes and coaches on the field, bringing science into practice in their daily routines. Her work lead her to be the first sports dietitian to assist Team Costa Rica at the Olympic Games, in Rio 2016.
Being able to show how nutrition and the guidance of a sports dietitian impacts the performance and preparation of elite athletes, nowadays, the Nutrition Department grew to the point of employing two more dietitians, having the chance to expand the attention to more sports and starting some level of specialization. Besides working on the preparation of athletes from sports like boxing, surfing and cycling on their road to Tokyo, other projects being developed right now are:
- Creating specific nutritional protocols (sport characterization, testing, strategies, etc.) for the Tokyo sports together with the rest of the multidisciplinary team.
- The publication of a recipe book that includes typical Costa Rican recipes with sport nutrition tips for athletes, with the objective of encouraging them to be more involved in cooking their own food, while they also learn.
- The use of a brand new educational kitchen recently built in the Olympic Committee, and the development of a cooking workshop program for athletes (using the recipe book)
Role as a PINES Global Representative
As a global representative I help to promote PINES to other nutrition professionals in my region. I have also just completed an international food factsheet for PINES to assist athletes and their sports nutritionists prepare for travel to Costa Rica.
