Why bother with buying groceries, cooking, and cleaning? Step out of the house and you find an abundance of fast food chains, diners, deli food, pre-packaged food, take-out places, and the likes of Delarosa.

Cooking for yourself gives you freedom and control. Freedom to choose exactly what you want to eat, they way you want it. When cooking for yourself, you have ultimate control over each ingredient* and can maintain portion control. Choosing high quality ingredients will make any dish taste good without the use of excess butter/oil, sweeteners, sodium, condiments, and artificial flavorings. Thus, it is much healthier for you to cook your own meals. With the right ingredients, cooking at home will put you on the track of gaining your health back. In most restaurants, you can never be too sure of health sanitation or the source of the produce, meats, spices, sauces, etc. Even when you think you are eating a healthy burrito or salad at a restaurant, you may just end up consuming more calories, fats, sugars with processed, manufactured ingredients and preservatives. Also, it’s just faster to dine in. Investing some time in the beginning to well stock your kitchen, you can whip a quick, nourishing meal in no time. It would take you longer to get to the restaurant, wait in line, order, wait for your food, pay, and then go back home. Another bonus, you save a lot of money by dining in. You can eat leftovers the next day or use the same ingredients to make something different.

After cooking at home for some time, dining out becomes more pleasurable and special. With all of the money saved by dining in, you can really splurge at a nice restaurant. Eating in restaurants can be a inspiration for you to cook something new at home or a chance enjoy food that you wouldn’t ever consider making yourself.

Chicken and cheese cooked with fresh spices, garden salad with homemade dressing, and rice are examples of whole foods.

1. Eat whole foods– foods that are unrefined and unprocessed or that is processed and refined minimally before it is in edible form. Whole foods are fruits, vegetables, unprocessed meat, poultry, and fish, non-homogenized milk, and unpolished grains. Whole food typically does not have any added sugar, fat, or salt. Food that needs high-powered, industrial equipment, or could only be made in a laboratory, then it is not whole food.

2. Avoid eating processed foods– foods that have ingredients that you wouldn’t keep in your kitchen to make food or ingredients that were created in a laboratory or made in a way that a person would not be able to make at home with reasonable skill. Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients. “It doesn’t mean that you have to be able to make the food — but that the food could be made in a home kitchen by someone who knows what they’re doing.”- Andrew Wilder