Why You Should Cook Your Own Food
According to the stats, ninety percent of people avoid cooking by outsourcing all their meals or they like cooking sometimes and do a mix of it and ordering out or dining in at restaurants. Only 10 percent love cooking enough to do it often.
If you fall into the former camp because you’re pressed for time or lack confidence in your cooking skills, that should probably change.
You should tie on an apron and get behind the stove more for two reasons mainly.1Well, two reasons other than it being your god-given duty to slave away in the kitchen in performance of your domestic duties if you’re a woman…
One reason to cook at home is that restaurant food, even the healthiest option on a menu, is often loaded with calories and shocking amounts of sodium, fat, and sugar. These items can affect the metabolism and promote weight gain with overconsumption, which is easy to do because restaurant portions are usually gargantuan. The advantage here with cooking your own food is that it allows you to have control of the ingredients used, their exact amounts, the cooking method, and serving size. Such a benefit can lower the toll on your waistline, as demonstrated by several studies that have found that people eat almost 200 less calories per home-cooked meal than they do when dining out, in addition to consuming less sodium, fat, and sugar.2In a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, 9569 adults were observed from the 2007-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Those who lived in households where someone cooked 0-1 times a week averaged 2303 calories, 86g fat, and 135g sugar per day. Conversely, those who cooked 6-7 times per week consumed 2133 calories, 81g fat, and 119g sugar. For more on this study, refer to Wolfson JA, Bleich SN. “Is Cooking at Home Associated with Better Diet Quality or Weight-Loss Intention?” Public Health Nutrition. 2015;18(8):1397-1406.
In another study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers used a dataset of 19000 adults from the 2003-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Compared to those who ate food prepared at home, participants who visited fast food restaurants were found to consume an average of 190 more calories per day, 11g more fat, and 300 mg more sodium. Participants who dined at full-service restaurants consumed about 187 more calories per day compared to those who ate food prepared at home, 10 more grams of fat, and over 400 mg more sodium.
Somewhat related to the first point regarding control, the second benefit of cooking is that it’s associated with better diet quality because the processed and packaged stuff that’s served at restaurants or consumed while away from home is usually replaced with vegetables, whole grains, and other nutritious fare. The impact on your health and weight are reasons why you should prepare the majority of your food at home and limit buying it from eateries.
On top of knowing what you’re eating and having better control of the amount, cooking your own food has the added perk of helping to save money, especially when you use coupons and buy in bulk.
But you’re a baller, so penny-pinching isn’t what you really care about, huh?
In that case, then you should cook your own food for the weight management benefits alone.
But hey, if you seriously can’t stand the taste of your own cooking, then you could always just learn how to become better at eating out.3*wink, wink*
Glossary calories, diet, dietary fat, metabolism
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