 How much battery I have left? Are we rolling? Let's go. Welcome back everybody to my channel. For those of you who are new around here, my name is Michael, aka Dr. Chlini, and I am a radiologist, subspecializing in interventional radiology in New York City. I've said it a million times and I'll say it once again, med school and residency are extremely difficult and occupy a majority of your time when you're doing them. The hardest part of residency and med school is trying to find some semblance of a healthy lifestyle while working those long hours and spending every single waking day in the library studying. So today I'm going to give you tips on how to be healthy and maintain a healthy lifestyle in residency and med school. So let's go hit the intro. I'm just going to dive straight in here and not beat around the bush. We're gonna go straight into my tips on how to stay healthy in med school and residency. So let's start with tip number one. Tip number one I have for you all is that routine is everything. You've heard me probably say this a million times if you're a long time subscriber to my channel. Routine, routine, routine, routine is everything. A routine will not only allow you to start a healthy lifestyle, but it also helps you maintain it. We all know by now that my routine start around 5 a.m. in the morning every day. So I do recommend that for you as well but I know that may not work out for some people. Some of you all may not be morning people and have trouble getting up in the morning. A lot of my friends and colleagues in med school had trouble waking up in the morning so they would stay up way late into the wee hours of the morning at night. I could not do that. I'm very much a morning person. Everything had to happen in the morning. That's where I think the clearest and where I get things done. The key here is not to make a routine in the morning if you're not a morning person. The key is to build your daily routine around you because that's what matters the most. And it also may take you a while to kind of nail down and fine tune your morning routine and that's okay as well. The main thing is that you find your routine, you stick with it and make it a habit. If you stick with it day in and day out every single day or as many days a month as you can, it becomes a habit. And if you have a healthy routine, that becomes a healthy habit. You see how that works? And since we're on the subject of routine, we might as well go ahead and talk about the first thing on my daily routine, which is hitting the gym. Like I said, I am a morning person. I wake up around 5 a.m. every day even when I'm on call and I usually have a cup of coffee either before or after I go to the gym first thing in the morning. It kind of depends on how tired I am that morning, how much sleep I had the night before. I usually try to have some coffee first because I feel like it kind of wakes me up and gets me into the mood. Now I don't go to the gym every single day because fellowship is just unpredictable and so is residency and so is medical school for that matter. The goal is not to go every day because it's almost impossible. The goal is to go as many days as you can or as you can fit in your schedule. I like to say around three days a week is ideal, especially when you're on busy rotations or have a busy schedule. And let's not forget on those seven days stretches of call, I don't go to the gym at all that week because I just don't have time to or I just have like two hours of sleep for multiple days on end and working out is just not feasible. And this is all the more reason why having a routine is so important because after you have those unpredictable weeks in medicine, you can fall back directly into that long-term routine you've built pretty easily. So if I do a seven-day stretch of call like I did last week and then this week I have a lighter week, I can go straight back in to wake up at 5 a.m. and go into the gym just like I did this morning. And that's way easier to do after you already have a long-term routine built. Also, I found out that what rotation I'm on at that time dictates what I actually do at the gym. If I'm on a procedural rotation or half procedures to do that day, I generally will stick to cardio that day because I do a lot of fine-tuned, precise procedures that require precise movements of my hands. And if I crush biceps for that day, I'll be in there like this because my biceps are so shaky for the better part of the day. And that's no good for me to do procedures with. I need nice, steady hands to do procedures. So on those procedure days, I'll usually do just cardio 30 to 45 minutes or so. Speaking of 30 to 45 minutes, you don't have to do two to three hours at the gym every day. You really just have to go in for 30 or so minutes. The goal is to get your heart rate up, get a nice pump and burn some calories. And start your day. And while we're on the topic of healthy living, I'll go ahead and spend a little time talking about Noom, which happens to be a sponsor of today's video. As part of a paid partnership with Noom, I wanted to let you know that they are way more than a weight loss program. Noom actually combines technology with real human coaches to use science to help you change your behaviors. This allows for a healthy relationship with food, which ultimately leads to weight loss. Noom is a disruptor in the healthcare industry because it uses psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy to help you build habits that stick, which helps you get to a healthier weight. There are no complex exercise routines or food restrictions. Noom focuses on behaviors and personal habits, which makes you more likely to keep the weight off and maintain that healthy weight. Noom gives you insight on why you should do certain things, like what are the motivations behind this specific behavior? This knowledge is necessary for living a healthy lifestyle. My absolute favorite part about Noom is the seemingly endless nutritious and delicious recipes they offer. In just two weeks of using Noom, I found myself less stressed and more in tune with becoming the healthier me. Take your free 30 second quiz by using the link in my description. Now, let's get back to video. The next tip I have for you is arguably the most important and that is meal prep. Meal prep really is the single most important thing in maintaining a healthy lifestyle in residency or medical school. If you're anything like me and you don't have lunch or dinner prepared and you have these long 12 plus hour days, you come home, you walk in the door and you are starving. So what's the first thing you do? Well, you grab anything in front of you. What I usually do is I rummage through my pantry. I find like chips, pretzels, whatever I can just to kind of get rid of the hunger. And then I end up just like eating a ton of nuts and chips and I'm not hungry for dinner. But if you meal prep, you don't have to worry about any of that because when you come home and you're starving, you have a nice healthy meal prepared for you in your refrigerator or whatnot and you just eat that instead of vaging out on all these snacks. What Andrea and I usually do is prep on Sundays. The Sundays I'm not working, we'll usually wake up in the morning, have our coffee, go to the gym and then come back in about noon or so after going to the grocery store and start just prepping for the next couple of hours. We usually try to make a meal prepared for us for at least like Monday through Thursday because sometimes we go out on Fridays and we don't necessarily need a meal. And honestly, it's hard to prepare that much food at one time unless you're like a restaurant or something. We usually make enough food for about four days for the both of us. I tend to eat quite a lot. So sometimes that food only lasts us like three days. Either way, the main takeaway here is the meal prep. We usually make some sort of rendition of vegetables in a clean protein. So our go-to is usually grilled chicken or baked chicken with a whole bunch of cauliflower or broccoli or both and sometimes a side kale salad or whatnot. We usually switch it up every week but that tends to be our go-to meal. If you don't meal prep, I encourage you just to try it one week and it'll change your life. It's very difficult and it takes a lot of time on those weekends to meal prep for the week but it's totally worth it because you don't wanna come home and veg out on terrible food that just adds empty calories in your body. You might as well eat some nutritious lean proteins and vegetables. Meal prep. The last tip I have for you is pretty obvious and that is to avoid sugary drinks and coffee creamer if you can. Sometimes we don't really think about coffee creamer but those calories tend to add up because coffee creamers are usually pretty high in sugar and so are energy drinks. Now, I'm guilty of this myself because especially when I'm on my long work weeks or even my seven day stretches of call, I'm tired. I'm exhausted and I can't even stay up half the time because I've had so many sleepless nights and my go-to is always to reach for like a monster, like low calorie monster or a coffee from Starbucks or whatnot to kind of give me a little extra pep on myself to get me through the rest of the day. The problem with that is, A, these energy drinks have a ton of sugar and caffeine but mostly it's not a sugar and coffee creamer is loaded with a ton of sugar usually like high fructose corn syrup which doesn't really do much for your body and is basically just empty calories. So if you can avoid it, do it. The worst part about these sugary beverages too is that usually they accompany your rough work weeks and those rough work weeks are usually the weeks where you don't have time to work out. I keep going back to my seven day stretches of call because I usually don't have time to work out during those days and that's when I need these sugary beverages the most and that's when you should go after those sugary beverages the least because you're not working out, you're not burning those calories, they're just going into your body and staying there. I always encourage everybody to try to drink black coffee and I know it's not that satisfying for a lot of people but if you can wean yourself off the creamer and just drink black coffee straight you can have as much as you want within reasons. So that officially concludes this video. Hope you all enjoyed all of these tips to become a healthier med student or resident. If you liked them, let me know in the comments below. If you do any of those, let me know in the comments below as well or if you have any meal prep ideas I love to hear new recipes let me know in the comments below as well and maybe we'll try it out one time. Otherwise make sure you follow me on Instagram and TikTok and crush it on TikTok lately and subscribe to my channel we're at 200,000 subscribers now and we are going to be doing a giveaway very shortly. Otherwise, I'll see you all on the next video.