Meal Prep for Nurses: Healthy and Convenient Food for Busy Schedules

It’s no secret that being a nurse means juggling a demanding and fast-paced career. Between long shifts, catching up on sleep and self-care for nurses, cooking a nutritious meal can feel like a challenge.

That’s why many nurses rely on a planning-based approach to stay on top of their nutritious needs: meal prep.

Meal prep for nurses is becoming more and more popular. After all, it helps you maximize your downtime, save money on groceries and keep you on track with your nutritional goals—even during the busiest weeks. The best part? It’s easier than you think: make a few meals in bulk, store them for easy reheating and you’re set!

Keep reading for the ultimate guide to meal prep for nurses, packed with practical tips to help you create healthy, delicious meals that fuel your long days.

The Basics of Meal Prep for Nurses

Let’s start with the fundamentals—the information you’ll need to prep weekly meals effectively and tackle your nutritional needs with ease.

Must-Have Nutrients

As a nurse, you likely already know about the three main macronutrients (“macros”) you need to sustain your energy level and everyday functions: ¹

• Carbohydrates are one of the body’s main energy sources. In addition to playing a large role in cellular energy production, carbohydrates are also critical for immune system functions and gut health.
• Proteins are amino acid chains that support the body’s structural needs. Nurses spend a lot of time on their feet, using their functional muscle strength to care for patients. Protein intake is key to maintaining muscle mass.
• Healthy Fats are very energy-dense and play a role in numerous bodily processes: hormone production, cell structure maintenance, body temperature regulation and so much more.

Registered dieticians recommend that adults get 20-30% of their daily calories from fats, 30% from proteins and 40-50% from carbohydrates.² Of course, if you have unique dietary needs (if you’re diabetic, for instance), these recommendations can vary.

That said, nurses should also focus on micronutrients (like vitamins and minerals) that support energy, focus and overall health. Some examples include:³

• B vitamins
• Vitamin C
• Zinc
• Magnesium
• Iron

As you plan your meals, consider targeting foods that contain these key nutrients. They’ll keep you feeling good before, during and after long shifts, especially if you’re trying to stay awake on the night shift.

Meal Prep Step-by-Step

Meal prepping is super simple. Let’s cover the basic steps you need to know to prepare healthy, wholesome meals as a busy nurse:

1. Choosing recipes – Your meal prep recipes should be simple to make, fit within your budget and contain all of the necessary macros and micronutrients you need to maintain your energy levels.
2. Making shopping lists – Your time at the grocery store should be just as efficient as your time in the kitchen. Consider grouping your ingredient lists by department (e.g., produce, deli, dairy) to get in and out as quickly as possible.
3. Scheduling prep time – While it takes less time than making individual meals every day, meal prep still requires time commitment. Set aside a few hours of downtime to prepare your meals; budget more time than you think you’ll need at the beginning of your meal prep journey until you get the hang of it.

Meal Prep Tools

Of course, you don’t have to come up with your own recipes or track your meals on your own. As you learn to meal prep, try out helpful smartphone apps like:

• Paprika Recipe Manager – Paprika can help you find recipes, generate grocery lists and determine the number of meals you’ll need depending on your schedule.
• Meallime – Meallime is an app purpose-built for meal prep. You can build a meal plan based on hundreds of pre-loaded recipes (or add your own), create shopping lists and more.
• Grocy – For tech-savvy nurses and spreadsheet aficionados, Grocy is the perfect tool for meal prep, food inventory management and shopping list creation.

In addition, you can turn to social media communities dedicated to meal prepping to find new recipes and get tips from experienced meal preppers. Consider joining a Facebook group or Reddit community to find other healthcare professionals who share healthy meal prep ideas.

4 Essential Meal Prep Strategies

With all of the above in mind, let’s dive into four essential strategies you can use to get your meal prep operation up and running.

Batch Cooking Basics

Meal prep requires batch cooking: making large quantities of food in batches to save time and energy.

Let’s say that you’re making five lunches for the week ahead. Your recipe includes grilled chicken, roasted green beans and quinoa.

You can cook each of the dishes in bulk to streamline the meal prep process:

• Grill five chicken breasts at the same time.
• Use two baking sheets to make enough green beans for the entire week.
• Use a large pot to make five servings of quinoa.

While this might seem somewhat obvious, it can be difficult to visualize cooking five servings of quinoa in one session—especially if you’re used to cooking meals one at a time for a one- or two-person household.

In addition, you’ll need to consider how you store this quantity of cooked ingredients. You can either:

• Store in bulk – After you’ve cooked the chicken, green beans and quinoa, use large containers to store each dish in a large quantity. Then, you can dish out ingredients as you need them.
• Store individual portions – After cooking, use smaller containers to store individual portions of each item together—so, in this hypothetical, you’ll need five containers that can store one portion each of chicken, green beans and quinoa. This method facilitates a “grab-and-go” approach. If you’re eating these prepped meals on your lunch break, all you need to do before leaving the house is to put on your scrubs, grab a container and walk out the door.

There are merits to both methods, and your choice will depend on your individual needs. You can also use a combination of both for different types of meals (i.e., packing work lunches individually while bulk-storing items you’ll dish out at home).

Quick and Healthy Recipes

To prioritize efficiency, choose meals that are simple to make and offer all of the nutrients you need. While our chicken, green beans and quinoa recipe above is just one example, here are a few other ideas:

For breakfasts, consider:

• Yogurt, granola and fruit parfaits
• Premade scrambled egg cups
• Preassembled breakfast sandwiches

For lunches, try:

• Preassembled lunch meat sandwiches
• Salads (with dressing stored separately to keep your greens crisp)
• A grilled meat paired with a roasted veggie and a carb

For dinners, make:

• Soups or chili
• Casseroles
• Pasta dishes

And don’t forget about healthy snacks like:

• Homemade granola bars
• Chopped veggies dipped in hummus
• Fruit salads

Keeping Meals Interesting

The lists above aren’t exhaustive; you’ll need to get creative with your recipes to prevent boredom and maintain nutritional balance.

We recommend mixing up your meal plan to make a diverse array of dishes. After five days of chicken, quinoa and green beans, make a five-day supply of chili. Once soups start getting boring, switch to salads. If you tire of salads, switch to sandwiches.

Keeping your meal prep lineup stacked with fresh recipes will help you:

1. Stay on track – If you try to eat the same meal for lunch for a month, you’ll likely throw in the towel and order delivery (forsaking your hard work and your nutritional goals).
2. Save money – Consider structuring your meal prep recipes around sale items at the grocery store; you’ll always have a new ingredient to try and your wallet will thank you.

Prep and Storage Techniques

While nursing is an exciting career, it’s also full of routines. Before every shift, you put on your scrubs, go to work, take reports and start seeing patients.

Meal prep is routine-oriented, too. Create stepwise approaches for:

• Cooking – Start with the ingredient that takes the longest and begin prepping your other ingredients while the first one cooks. In the chicken, green beans and quinoa recipe, you would start grilling the chicken, get the quinoa on the stove and then start the green beans, using your time as effectively as possible.
• Storage – Whether you take the bulk storage or individual meal approach, make your storage process work for you. Do you plan to wash your storage containers every day or do one big dishwasher run at the end of the week? How does that factor into your prep time? Your storage approach needs to be part of your meal prep plan, too.
• Freshness – Depending on your approach, you might prep multiple meals to give yourself a few options throughout the week. If this is the case, you’ll need to plan to eat meals when they’re as fresh as possible. For instance, salads will need to be eaten more quickly than cooked dishes (because lettuce will wilt faster than cooked meat and veggies will spoil). Incorporate “First In, First Out” (FIFO) whenever possible.

Time-Saving Tips and Tricks

To save even more time during the meal prep process, consider:

• Using pre-cut fruits and vegetables
• Purchasing pre-marinated meats
• Buying parboiled rice and pasta
• Completing “prep” steps (like grating blocks of cheese or chopping veggies) a day ahead
• Buying premade salad dressings, dips and other “meal enhancers” instead of making them

While you may not need to lean on these strategies as much until you get used to the meal prep approach, they can be immensely helpful in the early days of your meal prep journey.

Nourish Your Body, Fuel Your Care

As a nurse, you know how critical it is to nourish your body with wholesome foods; after all, our bodies function best when they get all of the nutrients they need consistently.

At Healing Hands, we know that what you put on your body is just as important as what you put in your body—that’s why we make high-quality women’s scrubs and men’s scrubs for everyone in the medical field: nurses, PAs, physicians and everyone in between.

Check out our best-selling scrubs and discover undeniably comfortable, functional and practical workwear with Healing Hands.

Sources:

¹ National Library of Medicine. Nutrition: Macronutrient Intake, Imbalances, and Interventions. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594226/. Accessed on December 27, 2024.

² Cedars-Sinai. Know Your Macros – Why Macronutrients Are Key to Healthy Eating. https://www.cedars-sinai.org/blog/what-are-macronutrients.html. Accessed on December 27, 2024.

³ Nutrients. Vitamins and Minerals for Energy, Fatigue and Cognition: A Narrative Review of the Biochemical and Clinical Evidence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7019700/. Accessed on December 27, 2024.