the first week

Well, friends, the first week of Dietetic Internship is over. And man, was it a long and exhausting week.

I’ll have a more formal recap of the week for y’all on Tuesday – including what we did and some general information. However, right now I want to kind of share with you just some of the personal changes/realizations/etc that went on during the week.

The one thing that I will say right now as a disclaimer, which I will say again every single time I talk about my internship, is that I’m not allowed to show ANY pictures or give ANY details about what I’m doing. I think I will be okay to give away the generalities, so if you find these posts boring – sorry, that’s the best I can do.

Overall – I have to say the week was awesome. Being an adult again was a trip.

Personal Successes of the week:

1. I woke up every single day with enough time to shower, put on makeup, do my hair, dress nicely, grab breakfast to eat in the car, and remembered to bring all my stuff I needed. This is HUGE for me, honestly HUGE. In my former corporate life, I used to roll out of bed at the last second possible, never do my hair and put my makeup on in the car/at work/skip it all together. Some days I had food with me, some days I didn’t. If nothing else, this was the single best win of the week and a routine I hope to continue every.single.day of my internship.

2. I ate a healthy meal at home every night for dinner. This is 100% due to my neurotic planning/batch cooking I did last weekend (post will be on Monday). This is also a routine I will have to maintain if I want to continue my weight loss/overall health throughout the internship.

3. I exercised 3 of the 5 days I worked. It wasn’t easy and it definitely took a LOT of convincing and talking to myself, but I was super proud of myself for sticking to my goal of keeping fitness a priority through the internship. Monday I went to a step class at my gym (which was AWESOME!), Wednesday I did an hour of mixed cardio/strength training at home and Thursday I did a running/walking workout at home.

4. I didn’t kill anyone while commuting. Major win here folks. I started an audiobook on Tuesday and that’s been keeping me sane/entertained while I drive the 2 –2 1/2 hours a day to and from work.

5. I tracked every single thing I ate all week! Again, major win here.

6. I blogged the three blogs I had planned on getting up for the week. Again, major win!

Looking at these positives really shows me how much I’ve grown, not only as a person, but really in my healthy living lifestyle as well. This was such a challenging week for me, but I made some MAJOR strides at achieving my goals and making myself/self care a priority.

For everything that is positive, there is usually something that is negative. I don’t want to dwell on the negatives, but I do want to acknowledge they were there and use them as inspiration of what to do differently in the future.

Personal struggles of the week:

1. Exhaustion: Monday I was running adrenaline and stayed up until 11:30 that night. Tuesday, I was dead. By Tuesday night, I was in bed and asleep my 9:15. This continued on for the rest of the week – going to bed super early and waking up in the 5 o’clock hour. I haven’t been so absolutely tired/achy/physically spent in a long, long time.

2. Wanting to be a sloth: Coming home and wanting to be a sloth really only impacted my workouts, because I did all of my cooking over the weekend. Had I not had healthy food ready, I ‘m fairly certain we would have ordered out all 5 nights because I was so tired. Psyching myself up to workout sucked. I really really beat myself up on Tuesday after skipping my trampoline class from pure exhaustion, so I had some extra motivation to get my Wednesday and Thursday night workouts done.

3. Eating breakfast at 6:30am and eating dinner at 8pm. This is quite the adjustment. Like I said, I’ve had to completely re-configure my snacking schedule/strategy. Eating dinner after working out SUCKS. Eating dinner at 8pm, then being asleep my 9:30 pm SUCKS. I’m going to have to re-work my meal plans around this fact this week.

4. Needing a hybrid purse/backpack. This one is more funny than anything (and yes I realize the answer to this is: briefcase). I don’t have a lot of bigger purses anymore, since I always used a backpack/messenger bag for school the last 2.5 years. However this week I realized that I now need a purse large enough to carry 1,000 things to and from work, yet small enough that I can carry it around with me all day.

This realization struck me on like Tuesday, when I was juggling 40 things in my hands and purse at once. It’s funny how that’s not something you think about when making the transition back to “working adult” from “student”.

This is probably going to change though to just needing a big purse. I’ll be carrying around a big binder in my rotations (which I’ll be putting together this weekend), with everything else in my locker throughout the day. I’m holding off on buying a briefcase (since I have a bag that will probably work for now) until I figure out if I will really need it.

5. Hydration. I struggled SO MUCH with drinking enough water this week. I carried a water bottle with me all day, but water is just blah to me right now. We get free coffee/tea from all the cafes/cafeterias in the hospitals – so I drank a lot of tea this week.

Must work on this next week!

Overall – I’m super happy with the way this first week went. I am SO overwhelmed still by everything, but I’m going to take it a week at a time and just improve every week on the things I learned I did wrong the week before.

Areas to improve on next week:

1. Making healthy choices at lunch every day – This week all my lunches were pre-selected for me. Next week, I think I’ll be in complete control of what I want for lunch – so I need to focus on making every day healthy choices, vs. ooooh it’s orientation let me eat this cookie choices.

2. Hydration – Less tea y’all, more water.

3. Making an exercise schedule for the week ahead of time – last week this wasn’t possible because I didn’t have my schedule, but I do for this next week – so I’ve gotta slot it all in!

So, long post – but there we go. Like I said – I’ll have a formal overview of the first week for y’all on Tuesday!

How was your week?