Just so tired all the time

[mdjess86]

So, I completed my first whole 30 this past January. I loved how my skin looked and how my body shape changed (I'm already thinnish to begin with) but I never got that amazing energy everyone always talks about. I attribute that mostly to my job. I'm a surgery resident, which means I work 80 hours a week. I take 8 days of call a month, which means I'm in the hospital for a 28hr period of time, usually on these nights I'll get 0-4 hrs of sleep, but never consecutively. I have 4 days off a month, but that's it. So, I figured this was a good reason for tiredness and that maybe I would never have the tiger blood while this was my life (at least another 2 years, then I want to do fellowship for another year, then I will be an attending, who knows what my call schedule will be, it may be worse and after residency you don't go home after being post call). There's really nothing I can do about that schedule for at least 3 years. I have no choice in my working hours. I stuck closely to whole 30 for a few months after that, and tried to do another with my sister in March. However, I was on a very busy rotation, working 100 hours a week and I was so tired I stopped being able to meal prep well and since there was literally nothing compliant in the hospital except apples (no salad bar even) I would literally starve myself rather than eat something noncompliant. I realized this was just turning into ED eating for me, so I quit it halfway through. Since then I've pretty much gone off the wagon. This past weekend I meal prepped on a post call day and have enough food for maybe 7 days, more dinners than that but not breakfast. I'm officially on day 3 of a new whole 30. I am on a busy rotation but just 80 hrs a week so not too awful. The thing is, I'm so tired all the time. My meal prepping takes probably 4 hours once a week. This isn't awful, but on weeks where I'm working weekends it's often literally all of my free time for that entire week. When I get home on weekdays now I exercise, eat dinner, try to study (we still have yearly exams and I have to freaking rock it this year if I want to get into fellowship) but I usually fall asleep while studying. Wake up rinse repeat. On post call days I try to clean my house and do some laundry, but that's also the only days I have to do things like go to the bank, take my car in, take my cats to the vet, etc. 

I'm not even sure what the point of all of that was lol. I guess I'm just venting. I know I just have to suck it up and do it, I just want to hear from other people that it sucks too. This is going to sound horrible but there is very little "fun" in my life, and taking fun food away too (I'm sorry, no whole 30 food is going to be as delicious as chocolate cake) when I don't see a lot of the NSV, especially the energy, is just so depressing. I try to increase the amount of baths I take because I find those relaxing and they don't consume much time and they are cheap, but there's not much else I have time/energy to do. 

I guess my actual question is has anyone ever managed to reap the full benefits of whole 30 while having such a horrible schedule? My motivation is to be healthy, but it's hard to hold onto that when there's not a lot of tangible benefit, through no fault of whole 30's, but rather my schedule which is completely uncontrollable by myself.  I'm just feeling kind of bummed and defeated I guess.