Here’s how to use Nutrition Cheat Sheets to help you get the most out of your time in clinical nutrition.
New to clinical nutrition? This is for you.
Nutrition Cheat Sheets was started with one goal: To make sure that dietitians new to clinical nutrition have all the resources and support they need to make it in the real world and keep growing as an RD.
The number one issue I’ve heard from dietetic interns and brand new RDs is that no one ever walked them through the differences between everything they learned in school and everything they’re supposed to know in real life.
For those of you struggling to make that connection, keep reading because this post is for you. These are the 5 ways Nutrition Cheat Sheets will help you fill that gap between textbook answers you learned in school and the way clinical is done in real life.
How to use nutrition cheat sheets in clinical nutrition
These are 5 ways you can use the tools Nutrition Cheat Sheets has to offer to help you maximize your time and have the best possible first experiences in clinical nutrition.
Pick one to start or dive into them all. Each will help become more confident in clinical, probably pretty quickly.
- Memorization-free clinical nutrition references and cheat sheets
- Medical nutrition therapy patient education handouts and quick reference
- Acute care starter guide for RDs new to clinical nutrition
- Nutrition Quick Chats for clinical nutrition counseling tips and tricks
- Live discussions on executing clinical nutrition needs for patients during Office Hours
#1: Never memorize anything (use Nutrition Cheat Sheets)
The Essentials is a bundle of clinical resources originally created for my grad nutrition students. They were constantly struggling to memorize everything we talked about. Lab values, medications, calculations…everything.
What they didn’t realize is that in the real world, you don’t need to memorize anything.
You’ve got 7 of the latest cholesterol meds committed to memory? Great. But no one cares. The only thing that matters is how well you can use the information you have access to.
The faster you realize that anything you need to remember can be put into a handy reference sheet and kept close by, the faster your stress level will go down.
Want all the clinical references you’ll need to get through your first year in clinical nutrition? START HERE
#2: Patient education handouts (make everyone's life easier)
These were the first things I made for me and my patients. I’d get so tired spending huge amounts of time searching around online for handouts I could use during nutrition education sessions. The problem is I’d only find sub-par ones.
I was having major 3 little bears issues: they were never just right.
The handouts I found were either SUPER wordy with teeny tiny font and a whole lot of extra information my patients didn’t need. Or they were one big ugly graphic that was equally unhelpful because I’d have to explain the ridiculous thing. I needed something that put exactly the information I was explaining on a very clear and easy to understand handout. Well, fast forward to now and there are some way better handouts you’ll never have to dig for.
The Nutrition Cheat Sheets MNT handouts meet all the most important criteria for patient education resources:
- Easy for patients to read and understand
- Simple for me/you (the dietitian) to explain clearly and quickly
- Attractive enough that they might end up on a fridge, instead of in the trash
It can be a little hard to foresee the exact moment when you’re going to need a specific handout for a specific patient. But just knowing you can drop into Nutrition Cheat Sheets Shop whenever you do hit that wall is going to make your life much easier. and realize how much you need them.
Check out all of Nutrition Cheat Sheet’s patient education handouts here.
#3: Acute Care Starter Guide (what goes into real-life clinical)
It’s a rare thing to talk to someone who felt like the nutrition they learned in school was JUST WHAT THEY NEEDED when they started their dietetic internship’s clinical rotation. It’s way more common to hear about all the wild differences between your textbook and a real patient.
But it shouldn’t be this way. And it definitely doesn’t have to be this way. Sometimes you just need a roadmap. A big picture idea of what to do first, later and last. Which is why there’s the Acute Care Starter Guide.
A lot of preceptors are really good at explaining different parts of this process, but few have ever really thought about the system as a whole. It’s rare that we have preceptors who are also teachers. And despite many wonderful and best efforts can sometimes come up short when it comes to giving you clarity on how all their advice plays into your overall clinical nutrition work.
This is what the Acute Care Starter Guide will give you. And happily, it’s free! Download it here.
#4: Nutrition Quick Chats (clinical nutrition + motivational interviewing + real patient issues)
How much time was spent learning about nutrition counseling, patient education and generally speaking to people in your nutrition classes? 50 minutes? 1 class session? Nothing?
Anything less than a semester of dedicated course work and practice time is too little. I think I had about 2, 50-minute classes over my 2 year grad program dedicated to nutrition counseling. Which is why I had no idea what I was doing when I first started working in nutrition.
They don’t tell you what a major part of clinical nutrition, counseling is. Most of us land our DI, are handed someone’s medical chart, and are told to “go do a nutrition on for him”. That’s it. No guidance, no instruction, no game plan.
Instead of walking in blind every time you have another nutrition ed to do, why not start with a solid foundation. Something that reviews the basics of motivational interviewing and lets you practice a bit using examples pulled from real patients?
Start here with the Nutrition Quick Chats Quick Course. It’s short, it’s free and it’ll get you familiar with some of the key aspects of motivational interviewing and how to use that in clinical nutrition.
#5: Office Hours (live review of clinical case studies)
Once you’ve gotten familiar with some of the basics of motivational interviewing and start to develop a sense of what talking to patients feels like in real life, it’s time to get your questions answered.
Those questions are probably coming from your actual experiences. It doesn’t take long to hit a wall when you’re beginning to learn nutrition counseling. Patients ask questions you don’t know the answers to. You realize you don’t REALLY know how to explain a medical condition. You find yourself talking way too much during nutrition eds.
This is why conversations are so key. Getting the chance to talk through the decisions you’re making, is crucial to growing as a dietitian. None of us get better in a vacuum. We get better when we’re able to bounce ideas off other RDs who’ve been around a little longer then us, or who have a different set of experiences then we do.
This is how the Clinical Nutrition Counseling Office Hours came about.
These live sessions let you listen to how a clinical nutrition case study can be worked out in real time. And because it’s a live session, you’ll also have a chance to ask the questions that come up around implementing clinical nutrition into nutrition counseling.
Binge watch the last episodes of Clinical Nutrition Counseling Office Hours here.
And That’s It!
This is how to use Nutrition Cheat Sheets to support your as you learn and grow in your clinical nutrition career.
If you feel like you’ve got to start one place, make it the Acute Care Starter Guide. You’ll get your feet wet with a solid roadmap to clinical nutrition — and you can move forward with everything on this list as you need it.
Want even more to help in clinical?
Check out The Nutrition Cheat Sheets Shop for all the nutrition education and clinical resources that will make your life easier.
