Nurse working Nights!

MrsTomy

Hi everyone! I'm a RN and I work in the ICU at night. I 'm trying to figure out how to calculate my food intake/exercise. Here are my issues:

FOOD – I work at night, but I don’t always keep an up at night sleep during the day schedule when I’m not working. Some days I wake up at 11am then go to work that night and don’t get home until 9am the next day. So, on days like this I eat 1-2 extra meals: breakfast when I wake up, lunch around 5pm, dinner around 11pm, and another meal around 7am so I won’t wake up in the middle of my “night” hungry. Since I’m up for so many hours I really do need additional calories to stay awake/functioning for so long. Then on other days when I am done with my 3 shifts I come home and go to sleep at 9am, I wake up around 5pm and eat a meal with my husband, then around 11pm I go back to bed with him and sleep until the next morning. So that day I only eat one meal because I’m not awake for long. So, my question is: is it okay to add calories on the long days and not get as many on the short ones? Do the extra meal(s) on one day get cancelled out by the lack of meals a few days later? My schedule is crazy! Help!

EXERCISE - As a nurse in the ICU i can be VERY busy or pretty slow so I am unsure how to calculate the "exercise" i get at work. The days that I just do normal walking/standing stuff at work I figure my activity level i put in my settings "slightly active" covers that. But on the really busy nights where I am power walking the whole night (not to mention the racing heart from the adrenaline!) I was wondering how to account for the extra calories burned without going overboard and giving myself a higher calorie allotment than I should

Thanks for any input! I know my schedule is weird, and hopefully sometime in the next year I will be able to move to a dayshift position so I can have NORMAL hours!!!

lulabellewoowoo

I work a 3 am to 9 am shift as a medical transcriptionist, sometimes get a nap during the day, sometimes not, and usually sleep 5 hours at night. Since I feel like I'm awake so many hours of the day and eating constantly, I went into "settings" and set things up in 3 hour increments so that no matter what time of the day I was up, I was only eating a certain amount of calories within a 3 hour period, was eating consistently so my body wasn't hungry or tired. Don't know if that helps any.

patwil73

I am an RN who works nights also. Sometimes i think that's what led to my weight gain - infrequent meals (so lots of snacking) and night day switches on my internal clock.

What I do now is divide my days into 4 hour blocks (0800-1200, 1200-1600, etc). On days I work, I eat with the family around 6:30 pm. Then I have some kind of snack at 11 on the way in (usually fruit, sometimes with some beef jerky), eat again at 0230, snack at 0600, meal at 0930-1030 and then into bed at 11.

On the last day of my stretch, I will usually stay up the morning after, eat a meal at 1300 and snack at 1700 then off to bed. Up at 0730 with the kids, breakfast at 0800, snack at 1000, lunch at 1200-1300, snack with the kids when home from school, dinner at 6:30, snack before bed.

I work my stretch straight so its 7 days on and 7 off, so it is only the last day that might be a little less.

I also put my daily activity as light even though I have to respond to all codes and RRT's. I am constantly walking so I figured that was safe. The body should get used to utilizing its calories efficiently as long as you are not drastically underfeeding it so it tries to hold onto every calorie or overfeeding it so it has no choice but to store them. If you eat sensibly and burn calories every day it should be ok with burning more some days and less others (as long as it is already used to burning them each day).

Hope all this made sense - it is getting late in the day.

MrsTomy

Thanks guys! Hopefully I'll get this all worked out soon!