Good Nutrition: Why Nutrition Is Essential for Travel Nurses

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By Kevin Devoto

December 2, 2022

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Why Nutrition Is Essential for Travel Nurses

When you ask people if they have a healthy lifestyle, most will assume you’re asking if they have any vices that impact their health and well-being. If they don’t drink excessively, they think they’re automatically being healthy. Others assume that health is about their body shape. If they’re skinny, they will say they have a healthy lifestyle, even if they eat pizza for dinner every night.

Achieving a healthy lifestyle is about giving your body what it needs, not just avoiding negative influences or focusing on its shape. A big part of that is nutrition.

It Gives You Lasting Energy

While the box of doughnuts at the nurse’s station might seem like an easy, high-energy breakfast, the saturated fats actually take extra energy to digest, and the energy you gain from the simple carbohydrates gets all used up immediately. When you’re on your feet for twelve hours or more, you need dense nutrition, or else you’re going to get caught in a cycle of burnout.

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Companies like Le-Vel offer multi-faceted nutritional systems that make getting all your nutrients in the morning amazingly easy. According to Thrive reviews, it’s simply three steps: two multivitamins when you wake up, a breakfast shake, and a dermal patch that lets you slowly absorb supplements through the day.

If you are looking for a food overhaul, healthier eating choices you can make include cutting out fruit juices, sodas, and other sweetened drinks and sticking to lightly sweetened tea, coffee, or water. Switch out snacks made with refined white flour with whole grain or greasy fried food with baked options. You can skip processed snacks entirely and go nuts (literally) by replacing crackers and chips with things like almonds or cashews.

It Improves Your Mood

Sometimes nurses get so focused on their patients’ health that they forget to look after their own! If you’re feeling foggy or grumpy, you might want to order up your own blood panel to see if you’re low on B vitamins, magnesium, or other nutrients, as they can directly affect mood.

You can increase these nutrients by finding out what foods they come from. For instance, if you’re low on B12, you might want to increase your meat intake or add nutritional yeast to your diet, and if you’re low on magnesium, eating some types of beans can help with that. You can also get these nutrients from supplements, such as the Thrive capsules and breakfast mix.

By increasing your energy levels with good nutrition, you can rely less on caffeine to give you a boost, reducing agitation and jitteriness. Having less caffeine in your system may also help you get to sleep quicker, increasing restfulness and improving overall stability.

It Makes You More Resilient

Adequate nutrition gives your immune system gets a boost. This doesn’t always prevent you from getting sick in the first place. However, it does mean your body is better able to fight off disease and that you’re likely to recover sooner.

Your body is constantly renewing itself from wear, and what you put into it matters. When you eat a nutritionally dense diet or take supplements such as Thrive, you are ensuring that your body has the best building blocks available to it. You can actually see the immediate benefits of good nutrition in things like the density of new fingernail growth and the lustrousness of your complexion.

A person’s genetics play a large part in the development of conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and bone loss. However, while there are people that will experience those things no matter what, there are also people that get them because they aren’t making healthy choices. By focusing on nutrition now, you may be preventing issues later in life.

Proper nutrition isn’t a cure-all, and for maximum effect, it should accompany other lifestyle changes, such as cardio and flexibility-focused exercises. Systems such as yoga and pilates can also increase strength and require little to no equipment beyond your own body! Both are great choices for the nurse on the go.

Our job board is a great place to search for your next travel nurse assignment. We have you covered with our housing page if housing is an issue. You can search for what you are looking for.

If you are a new travel nurse or looking into becoming a travel nurse:

Travel Nurse Guide: Step-by-Step (now offered in a PDF Downloadable version!)

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