How to MEAL PREP in Nursing School
A nursing student shares her meal-prep system: build a shared recipe list in OneNote, plan two weeks of meals around your clinical schedule, shop weekly for fresh items, and stick to the plan to avoid burnout. She eats three meals plus two snacks daily while managing pregnancy and a toddler.
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In this video, I'm going to walk you through my step by step process for meal planning while in nursing school. If you remember from some of the Instagram Live videos that I've done, planning your meals is going to save you a ton of time and stress. That way you're not rushing every day trying to figure out what to make. So I'm going to show you my process for this and how to keep it all organized. Now hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell and let's dive in. So my version of meal planning is super simple. This is not some complicated, Pinterest worthy life that I have going on. So thankfully you don't need any fancy Tupperware for this. So don't worry, it is super easy. There are two major reasons I believe all nursing students should plan their meals out. The first reason is getting your time and sanity back. We all know that nursing school is a little crazy sometimes, and that's the understatement of the century. So if you're able to take just a half hour every two weeks to plan what you're going to eat and save yourself many, many hours throughout those two weeks, that's pretty nice trade off. I want to save you as much time as possible. Now, the second major reason is to stay healthy during nursing school so you can be at the top of your game. Nursing school is no joke. You know this and you know that when you're not feeling your best, you, you're not going to study as efficiently, you're not going to be able to critically think as well on your exams or stay on point at clinical. So it's really important that you stay healthy, fed and hydrated so you can rock nursing school. So let me show you the simple steps that I follow to make this meal plan thing happen. The first thing we did when we started this whole process is to make a master recipe list. Now this is the step that's probably going to take you the most time, but once it's done, you can just add to it periodically when you find a new recipe that you like. But here's what this looked like for us. We use OneNote, which is just a notes app we have on my phone and my husband's phone. So we both have access to this and we just created a folder for recipes and we've saved all of our favorite recipes here. I also have a master list of our favorite meals that I can pull from. Having this master list is super handy because when I go plan meals, I can just pull from that List all our favorites are already there. I don't have to think this is the step that's going to take the most time, but I promise it will be worth it and save you a ton of time when you go and plan your meals. Now step number two is to actually plan out your meals for the next two weeks. When I was in nursing school, I would actually plan this out a little farther, like three or four. But I think two weeks is a good starting point. I really don't recommend doing one week at a time because the weeks go by too fast in nursing school. And I don't want you to have to do this process every week. I think every, every two weeks is a nice sweet spot. So take a calendar. Either write it on your family calendar at home or in your phone calendar, but list out the meals that you're going to have each day. Now here's the most important thing though. You'll need to compare it with your nursing school calendar. So if you have clinical on Wednesdays and Thursdays and won't be home to cook your family dinner, you may need to plan ahead for something that's easy for the kids to cook. Or maybe you have a super early clinical day. One day for some of mine, I would get up at 3am, so for those days, I didn't want to plan a full breakfast or make pancakes. It was just a quick egg muffin and I was good to go. So just make sure that when you're planning out your meals, you're comparing it to what's going on at school so that you can work around that. Personally, I like to plan for three full meals and two snacks. So pretty much every day that's what we do. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, and two snacks. Especially since we're pregnant and I'm basically starving all the time. Plus we have a toddler who's grown a ton in the past month, so we eat a lot about every two hours, so that's a good schedule for us. But maybe you don't snack too much or maybe you don't normally eat breakfast. So just plan the meals that work best for you. I will say though, I think it's really important to take a lot of food with you to clinical. Between the food physical work that it takes to take care of patients on the floor and the mental energy that you're using up to try to keep up with everything, it can take a lot out of you. So personally, I like to bring like four snacks and lunch with me, so I had more than enough food to get me through. Now, step number three is where you'll make your recipe list and do all of your grocery shopping. Now this is one thing I do recommend that you do weekly, so you'll be planning your meals out two weeks in advance. But grocery, grocery shopping might be a weekly thing, especially if you have a lot of kiddos and not a whole lot of refrigerator space. I also want you to buy healthy foods at the grocery store like salads and veggies and fruits, and those tend to go bad more quickly. So it tends to work best for me to shop every week for those sorts of things. I always like to have fresh fruit and a bucket of salad around. Those are staples at our house. We always have them. So it will probably work out best for you to shop every week, especially. Especially if you're buying things like salad and fresh fruit. Now, the next step is the most important one to follow. But before we dive into it, I want to give a shout out to ebony for our YouTube comment of the week, which says, you are a godsend. I start LPN school January 2020 and will be graduating December 2020. Thank you for all of your videos. Wow. Congrats on starting your LPN program. Ebony. I am so, so glad that you're here. You are so sweet. I'm so glad you love the video so far. You guys are so nice. Keep your comments coming, friends. I really enjoy reading them and getting to know you better. They always make me smile. Now let's get into step number four, which is the most important but possibly the hardest step. This is to actually follow your plan. If you said you were going to make chicken for dinner, but you're super exhausted after class and just want takeout, I really, really recommend that you stick with making the chicken. The more you compromise and break promises to yourself, the less you'll be able to rely on you. So keep the trust with yourself and follow through with what you said you were going to do. Now, of course, if you want takeout, that's totally fine, but just put it in the plan beforehand. So if you know you have a super long clinical day or class coming up, you know you'll be exhausted, then heck yes. Plan to have pizza deliver. Totally cool. The catch here is that I just want you to stick with the plan and promises that you make to yourself. Deal. That way you won't be breaking trust with yourself every day because that's not a cool thing to do. Now in the next video, we are going to dive into some more great nursing school tips and I'm going to walk you through how to critically think about the cardiac system. This is a must watch video especially especially if you're in med surg, so make sure you don't miss that. If you're struggling with critical thinking in nursing school, I'm basically going to give you all of the answers now. Make sure to like comment, subscribe and share this video with a friend. And click on one of these videos right over here so you can keep rocking nursing school and go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I will see you in the next video, my friend. Take care. Bye bye.
