Meet Sports Nutrition Specialist Alene Baronian

We love sharing the stories of the providers who use Healthie to help their businesses grow. Meet Alene Baronian! Alene is a registered dietitian and founder of Eat 2 Perform Inc. Her private practice specializes in sports nutrition, weight management, and wellness. This California-based dietitian has embraced technology in her practice by integrating telehealth.

We were so fortunate to connect with Alene to hear about her career so far and the expert advice she has to share!

Tell me about your path to becoming a dietitian.

Alene: I have always had an interest in nutrition and weight. As an overweight teenager with undiagnosed thyroid disease, I tried many ways to lose weight. That journey, all the misinformation and a nutrition 101 class led me to a career in dietetics.

As a young dietitian, I worked in public health and clinical nutrition. It was clear early on that a graduate degree was must for the advancement of my career. I applied and completed an evening program in Health Education and Administration while working full time. After completing graduate school, I taught classes at San Francisco State University and became a full time mother to three boys. With a full family, a private practice seemed to be the most flexible  field I could pursue. With the encouragement of colleagues, family and friends, I started seeing clients at home. As my workload increased, I looked for office space and opened up Eat 2 Perform Inc.

Tell us all about your private practice: What is your approach to nutritional care?

Alene: Eat 2 Perform specializes in sports nutrition, weight management and wellness. Telehealth is an integral part of my practice. All of my clients are using Healthie to work on their goals by posting meals, their hunger/satiety scale, hydration, sleep, physical activity or any health related goals. Daily accountability and support increases mindfulness and habit building. What I also love about it is that it feeds into various learning styles. It’s tactile and visual. When clients come in for their weekly, bi-weekly or monthly appointments, we cover those with auditory learning styles.

What advice do you have for dietetic students just graduating / completing their internships?

Alene: I have many interns and new graduates at Eat 2 Perform. My advice is to be open to it all. You may think you want to do one thing but as you get exposed to various aspects of dietetics, you may find other aspects that you fall in love with. Give yourself some time to explore and be ok with making mistakes and failure. Some of my best learning and opportunities have come from those experiences. All the bumps and bruises have to lead me to having a thriving private practice, working with individuals that I love and publishing my first book! As a new dietitian, I could not fathom any of it. Dream big and be open to what comes your way.

Why are you excited about using Healthie?

Alene: Being a dietitian in the heart of Silicon Valley, I knew that most of my clients were technologically savvy. The traditional food journaling on paper would have been seen as archaic to them. I started using Instagram with my clients to log their food intake. We created private accounts and they started taking pictures of their meals, beverages, exercise and even sleep. It was actually great to review because it was logged in chronological order. A couple years after using Instagram, I had a couple of tech/health guys contact me to ask if I would beta test an app they were developing for dietitians to do almost exactly what I was doing on Instagram. The beauty with Instagram and the other apps I used, I knew what worked and didn’t work for me.

One of my interns came across Healthie as we were looking at options for telehealth. What I love about most about Healthie is its customer service. Erica and Cavan have been great to work with. Healthie has all the pieces needed to start a private practice. I’m excited and look forward to Healthie’s growth and how it evolves with the changes in telehealth and dietetics. I think we are still on our infancy of knowing how to work with clients via telehealth.