What you prefer to eat at home

Do you prefer to eat out or eat at home? Вы предпочитаете кушать дома или в кафе?

Nowadays, some people like to eat at home and prepare food by themselves, but others prefer to eat out side in restaurants or at food stands. As far as I am concerned, I prefer to eat at home.

Of course there are some advantages to eat out. Firstly, restaurants offer a more comfortable environment to eat and the food there tastes more delicious than home-cooked meals. In addition, eating at restaurants is a good way of getting together with friends. People also do not need to worry about washing dishes and cleaning. For people who are too busy to cook, eating out is certainly an ideal choice. Furthermore, for people do not know how to cook and do not have some one to cook for them, eat out seems to be the only choice.

However, I prefer to cook and eat and home. The main reason is that at home, family members can prepare their meals and enjoying their food together, which can enhance their relationships. Family members can talk, make jokes and exchange feelings on current affairs with each other while preparing a meal. Parents have a chance to communicate with their kids and keep track of what they are thinking and doing; while children can learn to help with some household tasks and develop intimacy with their parents. Image that you and your brothers and sisters help your mother to cook on a weekend, and enjoy the food later on, and you feel everything is so nice.

Another reason is that eating at home can save money. The same amount of money that you spend on a meal in a restaurant can buy a lot more foods from a supermarket. You can use the money saved to buy a new cloth, or attend a concert.

General speaking, eating out side is comfortable and convenient, but eating at home has more benefits. I prefer to eat at home.

English Writing Practice: Topic 13 – Do you prefer to eat out or eat at home?

Some people prefer to eat at food stands or restaurants. Other people prefer to prepare and eat food at home. Which do you prefer? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

English Writing Practice: Topic 13 – Sample 1

Some people like to eat out at food stands and restaurants, while others like to prepare food at home. Often it depends on the kind of lifestyle people have. Those with very busy jobs outside the house don’t always have time to cook. They like the convenience of eating out. Overall, though, it is cheaper and healthier to eat at home.

While eating in restaurants is fast, the money you spend can add up. When I have dinner at a restaurant with a friend, the bill is usually over twenty dollars. I can buy a lot of groceries with that much money. Even lunch at a fast-food stand usually costs five or six dollars for one person. That’s enough to feed the whole family at home.

Eating at home is better for you, too. Meals at restaurants are often high in fat and calories, and they serve big plates of food-much more food than you need to eat at one meal. If you cook food at home, you have more control over the ingredients. You can use margarine instead of butter on your potatoes, or not put so much cheese on top of your pizza. At home, you can control your portion size. You can serve yourself as little as you want. In a restaurant, you may eat a full plate of food “because you paid for it.”

It’s true that eating out is convenient. You don’t have to shop, cook, or clean up. But real home cooking doesn’t have to take up a lot of time. There are lots of simple meals that don’t take long to make. In fact, they’re faster than eating out, especially if you think of the time you spend driving to a restaurant, parking, waiting for a table,, waiting for service, and driving home.

Both eating at restaurants and cooking at home can be satisfying. Both can taste good and be enjoyed with family and friends. I prefer cooking at home because of the money and health issues, but people will make the choice that fits their lifestyle best.

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English Writing Practice: Topic 13 – Sample 2

In modern life now, more and more people prefer to eat at food stands or restaurants. They think that will save time so that they can have enough time to do their jobs. But I still prefer to prepare and eat food at home.

There are several reasons. First of all, you can save money if you eat at home. In general, to get profit, the restaurants ask for more money for the same food you cook at home. That is a waste of money. To save money, you may prefer to prepare your food at home with less money.

Second, usually, the food in restaurants is not what you are expecting. you may dislike the way the restaurant cooks the same dishes as you do at home. For example, the other day, I asked for potatoes in a restaurant. After the first bite, I thought it was so awful. My mom never cooked such potato for me! The bad lunch even destroyed my mood that day.

Third, if you prepare food by yourself, you will have a happy mood when you eat it, regardless of the real savor of the food. It goes a saying well “labor brings happiness”.In addition, you can change your method of cooking considering your taste on that day.

The reasons above may answer why I prefer to eat food at home. Cooking even has become my hobby now. Come back and have your delicious food, I’m sure you will like it!:)

English Writing Practice: Topic 13 – Sample 3

Nowadays, some people like to eat at home and prepare food for themselves, but others have a negative attitude that they prefer to eat outside in restaurants or at food stands. As far as I am concerned, it is better to eat at home. There are numerous reasons why I hold on, and I would explore only a few primary ones here.

It cannot be denied that there is some advantage to the first points. Firstly, the condition of the restaurant is more comfortable and the food there is more delicious usually. Then eating in a restaurant becomes a good choice for getting together with friends. In addition, eating outside take people’s convenience and shortcut. For the people who are busy working, preparing food for themselves will make trouble and waste time. For a young person who is not able to cook for themselves, eating at food stands resolve the problem.

The main reason for my propensity for eating at home is that eating at home and preparing food for myself can enhance the emotion among the member of the family and bring pleasure to everyone.

In modern society, every day, parents are busy working and sociality, and children are busy on the study and playing. For convenience and saving time, they often choose to eat outside. Then there left so little time for them to share. Sharing dinner at home is not only eating but also provides a chance to talk, make a joke, and exchange feeling with each other. Maybe someone thinks that making dinner is a heavy burden. But I believe preparing food with family is also a happy, likely have dinner with family is a pleasure. With your sisters and brothers help your mother do a meal on the weekend and enjoy the food, and you will feel everything is so nice.

Another reason is that I think that eating at home is more economical than going to a restaurant and saving money. Using the same number of money you can buy more and better food from shops than from restaurants. You can do nourishing meals for your children rather than junk food from food stands. And you can spend the saved money on many other ways, such as buying new clothes and seeing a movie.

Generally speaking, eating outside is comfortable and convenient for our life, while eating at home can share happiness with family. Taking into account all these, I prefer to prepare food for ourselves and eat at home.

Is Eating At Home Healthier Than Dining Out?

01/14/2015

Do you prefer heading out to your favorite (or perhaps nearest) restaurant for meals rather than cooking at home? If so, you’re not alone. We get it! Dining out, whether heading through a drive-thru or sitting down at your favorite restaurant, is often more convenient and sometimes even more delicious than cooking your own food at home. Even those who love to cook need a break from the kitchen every now and then – but is dining out versus eating at home a healthy and nutritious option? Doesn’t it seem that eating at home is the healthier option? This is a question we recently received from a reader and set out to find the answer!

For more information, we reached out to Ethan Bergman, PhD, RD, CD, FADA, Associate Dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies and Professor of Food Science and Nutrition at Central Washington University, and food and nutrition consultant Judy Barbe, MS, RDN. What did they have to say? Is it healthier to eat at home than it is to dine out? The answer is…

It all depends on you, the consumer!

Both Dr. Bergman and Judy Barbe agree that this question can’t be answered with a simple yes or no.

Dr. Bergman says: “When a person eats at home and prepares the food themselves, they have control over the ingredients that are added to foods. Home eating also provides the opportunity to select foods that lead to good health. But eating at home is no guarantee that the foods prepared and selected will be healthier or more nutritious. A person preparing the home meals may add ingredients that lead to chronic disease such as heart disease and diabetes.”

Because you have more control over what you’re eating when you choose to prepare it yourself, it’s more likely that it will contain fewer calories than restaurant meals. Judy Barbe refers to a recent study on meals where researchers found that those who choose to eat home-cooked meals actually do end up eating healthier and consuming fewer calories. The study, which will be published online in the journal Public Health Nutrition, also found that those who cooked dinner at home at least six to seven times a week consumed an average of 2,164 calories daily, while those who dined out more, cooking at home no more than once a week, consumed an average of 2,301 calories daily.

Both experts point out that there are certain circumstances that may lead to dining out being considered unhealthy. Judy Barbe asks, when you eat out are you celebrating with cocktails and foods you wouldn’t normally eat at home? Do you start off with a bread or tortilla chip basket? Do you order an appetizer plus the fried shrimp and fries? Are you choosing steamed, broiled, or grilled versions? Restaurant serving sizes tend to be generous. Are you taking half home? Dr. Bergman agrees that when eating in a restaurant, a person may overeat as a consequence of finishing the entire portion that is served.

What have we learned? Dining out can be just as healthy as eating at home – it’s all about the choices you make! While cooking at home gives you total control over what you are consuming and may often lead to a healthier, more balanced meal, we understand that sometimes you need a break and would rather someone serve you! If you do choose to head out for your next meal, stick to registered dietitian Carolyn O’Neil’s Restaurant Road Rules to help you determine a better route to nutritious eating at your favorite restaurant.

IELTS Mentor «IELTS Preparation & Sample Answer»

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IELTS Writing Task 2/ IELTS Essay:

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task.

Present a written argument or a case to an educated reader with no specialised knowledge of the following topic:

Some people prefer to eat at restaurants while others prefer to prepare and eat at home. Which one do you prefer?

Give reasons for your answer.

You should write at least 250 words.

Model Answer 1:
Food is a vital need for our living and people from different geographic locations are habituated to eat foods differently and the menu differs so greatly. Many people are happy to eat food outside the home and they think that preparing foods is a waste of time but to others outside food is like a toxin and they always avoid outside foods and prepare foods at home. In my opinion, both ways of taking foods have some advantages and disadvantages.

If someone takes foods from a restaurant or fast food shop, he can save a great deal of time as food preparing is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. For those people there is no monotony of flaming the burner, washing the dishes, preparing the ingredients. They simply order the dishes and everything is ready for them. Moreover, restaurants offer a sound environment with a variety of menus. They don’t have to maintain a time schedule to eat and mostly they spend time at a restaurant while they are not busy. Thus they can do lots of work without thinking the cooking issue. Cooking involved going to the grocery and buying vegetable, spices, rice, meat or fishes and it is really a difficult thing to do if someone is very busy with work. Restaurants offer an overwhelming environment to attract the people. They offer music, calm environment and better services.

But eating in a restaurant is not always pleasant. It costs a great deal of money. Almost all of the dishes cost at least 3-4 times higher than those of home-made foods. Foods cooked in restaurants are not hygienic always and as the restaurant owners want more profit, they don’t hesitate to cook low-cost vapid foods. Almost all the items prepared at home are cooked with great care and as it’s a matter of our health issue, we choose the fresh and best ingredients while shopping. On the other hand restaurant owners always buy low-quality ingredients. This causes some serious health issues. Those who eat at restaurants are more likely to suffer from different diseases.

Again, home-made foods are easy to digest and can be taken any time staying at home without thinking ‘ what the overall bill are going to be’. Foods prepared at home can save a lot of money and considering the nutrition facts I prefer to prepare and eat foods at home.

(Approximately 396 words)
(This model answer has been prepared by the site developer. However, please note that this is just one example out of many possible answers.)

Model Essay 2:
Many people go to the restaurants for a meal whereas the others cook and eat meals at home. In my opinion, I opt to cook and eat meals at home because I would argue that it is healthier than to eat at restaurants.

Firstly, many restaurants do not purchase fresh foods since they would like to decrease the cost of meals. They do not attend to the cleanliness and hygiene of foods. Hence, some people get poisoned by eating in restaurants. It is particularly dangerous for children because they are more vulnerable and can be easily ill from the poor quality of foods. As it is known, many people eat using the same dishes and drink from the same cups and bottles which are not even properly cleaned. If these things are not cleaned properly, they can be extremely dangerous for human health.

Secondly, to prepare and eat foods at home can be more economic especially for a family. Because to eat at a restaurant frequently would cost a large amount and that would be pretty tough for low wage earners. The good restaurants that maintain the quality and hygiene of foods cost a lot that average people won’t be able to accommodate.
On the other hand, restaurants can offer some advantages. For instance, if you eat at a restaurant, you can save your time. Because to prepare and eat at home one needs to spend a considerable amount of time and effort which could have been used in other constructive works. In addition, some restaurants offer delicious and variety of meals including foreign menus that we could not make at home on our own. You can eat awesome meals there and drink wines in a fascinating atmosphere. Moreover, to prepare and eat at home is a tough task for single and busy people who have very less spare time. So restaurants can be a better alternative for those people.

In conclusion, it is considered by many that health is more important than money and delicious meals. I believe that if we prepare meals at home, we can prepare foods and dishes properly and we can use healthy ingredients. However, if you eat at a restaurant, you can not be sure that the meals and dishes are clean and healthy.

(Approximately 377 words)
[ by Tekin]

Model Answer 3:
There is no gainsaying in the fact that restaurant business is flourishing like never before. In earlier days, there were only a few restaurants where people visited on special occasions. But now, we have eateries in every nook and corner of the city; which are swamped with people of all ages. Admittedly, I too like to go and eat at restaurants but occasionally and prefer to cook and eat at home daily.

There is no comparison of the freshly home-cooked meal to restaurant food. Every raw material is handpicked, fresh vegetables, good quality oil, and condiments are used, which not only increases the nutrition values of food but is delicious too. We are sure that the food cooked is hygienic whereas we are not sure of the quality of ingredients used in the restaurant and its hygienic condition. Recently in Kerala, India there were live worms were found in chicken in KFC store which is a renowned food chain across the world. On further investigation, it was found the products used were expired.

Many people find cooking as a stress busting activity too. Family members can help each other in daily cooking and hence can spend quality time with each other. This way, they can also extol the importance of home cooked food to children. These days obesity is a very common problem which arises due to wrong eating habits and eating outside frequently is the major cause. Restaurant food is often fried and hence lots of calories, cholesterol, unsaturated fat which not makes us fat but slowly results in diseases like heart attack and diabetes. Apart from this, we also squander a lot of money when we at the restaurant frequently; which could otherwise be saved or used for other purposes.

In a nutshell, home cooked meal is not only healthy and hygienic but can be interesting too. One can try making one dish in several by experimenting with ingredients. Parents should encourage their children to eat at home and inculcate the habit of cooking right from the childhood.

(Approximately 335 words)
[ by Preeti]

Eating at Home vs. Eating Out

Your guide to this review is Rebecca Moses

CONTENTS

While many restaurants and fast food outlets offer us convincing marketing statements that they offer healthy and nutritional food, studies frequently find that this isn’t the case.

The sugar and sodium content of most processed foods cause them to be serious threats to our health. These are also the same qualities which allow these foods to become addictive.

It’s not just fast food, either.

The restaurant industry encourages overconsumption and indulgence in foods that we know to be unhealthy for our bodies.

Nor is restaurant meals as healthy for us as what we would make at home.

At the same time, the cost of eating out puts a large strain on many of our food budgets.

Cooking at home is the best choice for having a consistently healthy, budget-friendly diet.

Many find it to be a rewarding exercise, whether you’re cooking alone or with your loved ones.

Healthier Ingredients and Methods

Restaurants and prepared food often incorporate more fats, sugars, and sodium than we would normally use when cooking for ourselves. Cooking at home allows you to add only as much as you think you should, while also allowing you to use healthier sugar and fat alternatives.

It’s Easier to Avoid Food Allergies

Food allergies can cause unpleasant and even dangerous experiences, including hives and rashes, swelling, and possible asphyxiation. Common food allergies include shellfish, tree nuts, lactose intolerance, and gluten intolerance.

For those with allergies, you may not be able to tell if your food is likely to come into contact with something that you’re allergic to in a restaurant. Even when you do ask, many restaurant kitchens aren’t equipped to properly substitute for or isolate your food from every allergen.

Portion Control

Restaurant portions are often more than our bodies need to be satisfied. Sometimes when we’re enjoying our meals, it can be tempting to finish a large portion, even when that means over-eating. Eat at home means serving yourself only the portions that you know you need.

Enjoying a More Balanced Diet

Planning your own meals gives you the opportunity to have a more nutritionally balanced diet.

Many prepared meals, such as fast foods chains, restaurants, and freezer meals, rely on filling you up and appeasing your taste buds with carbs, sugars, and sodium. Additionally, restaurants price side salads and vegetables at a premium.

Fortunately, when you’re cooking at home, salads and vegetable sides can be very inexpensive and quick additions to balance out your meal.

Reduced Germ Exposure

Keeping your kitchen clean means protecting yourself from germs and contagions. You never know how clean a restaurant’s kitchen really is. This also means that you have complete control to cook your food thoroughly to prevent potential issues.

It Helps Cultivate Healthy Eating Habits

Healthy eating habits come from controlling when and how often you eat as well as what you eat and how much you eat. Practicing home cooking means you can follow healthy recipes. You can even make your own healthy snacks such as trail mixes and salads.

You Can Take Your Time

Sometimes eating in a restaurant can make us feel rushed or watched while we eat.

We might be conscious of servers wanting to turn a table or we might find the atmosphere to be uncomfortable.

Eat at home allows you to take your time with your food, which can, in turn, discourage overeating since it gives your stomach time to signal fullness to your brain.

Furthermore, taking the time to chew your food allows for better digestion and greater absorption of nutrients.

It’s easy to explain away reasons why we might not want to cook.

Sometimes we feel uninspired, fatigued, think of it as a waste of time, or just have a lot of self-doubts. Cooking your own food can easily become a habit and a skill. The more often you do it, the less taxing it will eventually start to feel.

“It’s Time-Consuming”

While it may sound counter-intuitive, cooking at home can actually save you a lot of time.

You don’t have to deal with transportation or waiting times. In addition, time that you’re not actively cooking at home can be put toward other tasks. While you should be around the kitchen, you don’t need to watch water start to boil like a hawk.

Elaborate, adventurous multi-course meals can be very time-consuming. However, there are plenty of recipes that take just 12-20 minutes to put together, allowing you to keep it simple or make a single skillet or single-pan dish.

Frequently, when we say we don’t have the time to cook, we are often talking about effort or motivation as well. Think of cooking as a healthy exercise. You can stand on your feet and move quickly throughout your cooking process. If it still feels like wasted time, try it listening to an audiobook or podcast.

“I’m Not a Good Chef”

Learning to properly cook, balance ingredients and spices, and create delicious textures takes practice.

Fortunately, if you’re cooking for yourself almost every day, you can work your way through this learning curve quickly. You will be surprised at how easy cooking starts to feel.

“I Don’t Have the Amenities for Proper Cooking”

If you’re working in a kitchenette, you may find yourself having to be creative with how you cook your meals.

A hot plate can become a stove, while a toaster oven can bake some of the baked goods that you want to make.

Eating out is an enabler that makes us more likely to indulge in things that we might know are bad for us while simultaneously blindfolding us about other harmful ingredients that may be used in our foods.

Ordering food can make us subject to peer pressure, allowing us to overeat, desire unhealthy foods, and explain away our concerns.

Additionally, we are more likely to order a sugary beverage in a restaurant, claiming it a special occasion. This goes double for what we are likely to consume in cocktails and alcoholic beverages.

If you drink while eating out you then have to carefully consider how to get home. At least these days you can purchase a personal breathalyzer, and leave it in the car, to check your alcohol content to ensure you are within the legal limit to drive home.

Problem Ingredients Often Used In Fast Food and Restaurants

Sodium

Added Sugar

Our bodies don’t actually need added sugars. They get all the sugars they need for our daily energy by breaking down other foods.

Sugar is a highly addictive ingredient that causes insulin resistance, leading to Type 2 diabetes. Additionally, sugar packs on extra calories to your meal and causes dental cavities.

To put it in perspective, a 12-ounce soda contains about eight teaspoons of sugar (39 grams). The AHA recommends that a person limit their added sugar consumption to 6-9 teaspoons a day, including sugar added into bread, muffins, their morning coffee, and the honey glaze on a salmon entree.

Carbohydrates

Many fast foods use empty carbohydrates as a primary ingredient. Carbohydrates are the problem behind food-related acne and eczema. When they are broken down, they release sugars and acids that wear down dental enamel, making teeth more vulnerable to cavities.

What makes a carbohydrate “empty”?: It is so refined that it contains little to no fiber, and it is very quickly released into the bloodstream as glucose-increasing blood sugar. This can lead to frequent insulin spikes and as a result, insulin resistance.

How These Ingredients Hurt Your Body

The long-term effects of processed foods on your body normally come in the form of illnesses that are difficult to reverse or control.

Overeating leads to weight gain and obesity. Having too much sugar frequently spiking your bloodstream can lead to Type 2 diabetes. Sodium’s effect on high blood pressure can lead to heart disease and stroke.

Not only do these illnesses potentially harm someone’s general health, quality of life, and ability to do the things they find valuable in life, but they are expensive diseases that often require costly long-term medications.

What is Insulin? And Why Does it Matter?

Insulin’s job is to distribute the sugar in your blood to the cells that need it for energy.

Your pancreas releases insulin when it notices a spike in your blood sugar. Your cells use the sugars for energy, and excess sugars are stored. Once the insulin has transported the sugars, your blood sugar levels return to normal levels.

Eating lots of carbohydrates causes your blood sugar to spike frequently, forcing your pancreas to send out insulin repeatedly. Continuous spikes like these can cause your normal insulin response to falter, leading to insulin resistance, Type-2 diabetes, and weight gain.

Body Mass and Weight

Eating out is extremely conducive to overeating. Studies have shown that even when individuals eat at restaurants they perceive as “healthy,” they underestimate the caloric value of their meal by 20 percent.

It’s also more likely in a restaurant setting to ignore the warning signs of being full and overindulge to finish unnecessarily large portions.

Overeating causes weight gain and obesity, which leads to stress on the body as a whole (especially the respiratory system). Obesity can cause reduced bone density as well as shortness in breath and asthma.

Mental Health

This study shows that processed foods, such as fast foods and processed pastry and bakery items, can cause depression.

There is a similar link between obesity and depressions. Removing processed foods from one’s diet could be a way of improving your mental health and battling depressive symptoms.

The Reproductive System

Why Can Restaurants Be Bad For You?

Restaurant food wants to keep our taste buds excited.

This means that, while it may contain fewer preservatives and chemicals than fast food, it is still higher in sodium, fat, and sugar than we would normally allow ourselves to eat.

What Goes Into Fast Food?

Fast foods are produced and chemically altered in a factory setting.

In the factory, these foods are pumped with artificial and natural flavors, which keeps the food standardized and tasting exactly the same, every time. They are frozen, shipped, stored, and reheated when ready. Within the speedy kitchen of the fast food restaurant, all the cooking processes and times are exactly the same.

In general, fast foods are higher in fats, sugar, and salt than their fresh equivalents, making them altogether higher in calories. They are also lower in fiber due to the production process, meaning that they make us feel less full than they should.

Major and Common Ingredients:

What are Processed Foods? And Why are they Harmful?

Many of the foods we eat are processed in some way, and much of it is repackaged for selling. In general single ingredient foods, meant to be cooked at home, are good for us.

The problem is chemical processing. Chemically processed foods are made from refined and artificial ingredients. While they may be enriched with vitamins and minerals, enrichment is incapable of giving us all the nutrients that we would get from fresh or natural foods, since many of these are still being studied by nutritional scientists and do not have artificial versions yet.

10 Processed Foods to Avoid

7 Processed Foods You Can Eat

What to Look for When You’re in a Hurry

Look for:

Always check the ingredients on:

Eating out at restaurants can be very enjoyable, especially when it’s done infrequently.

Eating out too often can make you lose appreciation for the things that you enjoy about eating out, such as its variation on your favorite foods and ability to offer you a new experience. In some cases like if you’re on a wonderful vacation, you might not have much of a choice to eat at home.

Picking the Spot

Ordering Wisely

Helping Out Your Impulse Control

What About When You’re Bored of Salads?

There’s no substitute for leafy vegetables in your diet.

However, you can certainly cook those leafy vegetables along with some of your favorite squash and peppers in healthy oils.

Say You’re in an Airport or Traveling?

If you’re new to eat at home, you might first experience a detox phase.

Your taste buds might be used to the exaggerated flavors of chemically processed foods. You might expect everything to taste sweeter than it is, or find that many dishes taste under-spiced as your body learns more normal levels of salt and sugar intake.

Once you become more used to cooking at home, these instincts will quickly disappear.

In contrast, dishes out at restaurants might taste overly greasy, or in some cases, everything might taste a little too sweet.

While it may not sounds as glamorous as eating out frequently, eat at home gives you some of the best benefits when it comes to your dietary and nutritional health. As your cooking skills grow, you will be able to tailor healthy meals to work with your particular preferences and favorite flavors. This means less compromise and more control.

You Completely Control the Ingredients

Eat at home means that you can buy fresh ingredients and single-ingredient products from the store, allowing you to control the amounts that you cook with.

You have the freedom to use only as many fats and oils as you’re comfortable with, and you will be able to use salt for spicing without worrying about it being too much. Cooking for yourself will also help to show how unnecessary added sugars are in most dishes.

Each meal can inexpensively be well-rounded with the addition of produce, protein, starch, and fruit. In many restaurants, ordering sides that make your entree into a full meal can cost a hefty price.

This also means you can tailor dishes to be just what you like, so you don’t have to worry about an eating establishment not carrying your favorite salad dressing, you can add your favorite vegetables to just about every dish, and you can combine whatever themes you want in experimentation.

You Choose What to Eat According to the Following:

1. Lifestyle

Cooking for yourself means that you can choose to make meals that work for your lifestyle choices.

2. Physiology

Many individuals realize that they need to begin making their own meals after experiencing physiological problems.

3. Location

Cooking on your own means that you have the opportunity to eat local goods. Farmer’s markets are an amazing place to find minimally processed foods while decreasing the carbon footprint of the transportation of your food, as well as helping farmers and small business owners in your area.

Another reason for cooking at home is that secluded towns and areas may not have as many options for healthy eateries and farm-to-table restaurants as the downtown of a larger city. There are many locations where the only restaurants available are chains that serve chemically processed, preservative-packed, high-sodium foods.

The Cost of Eating Out

Eating out is expensive.

When eating in a restaurant, you find yourself paying not just for your food but also prep, rent, storage, and a part of the business’s cost of operation. These inflated costs also translate to increased taxes and tipping costs. This is not a sustainable daily, or even weekly, expense for many individuals and households.

Eating establishments encourage consumption and indulgence so that you spend more on sides, appetizers, sodas, and especially alcoholic beverages. These extras may not only overshoot your daily budget but may also push you over your calorie count.

Even in the grocery store, ready-to-eat foods such as microwave dinners and snacks, are more expensive than their ingredient counterparts. This is not evident when it comes to the individual meals, but becomes obvious when you’re buying enough food for a whole week.

What About Eat at Home?

Home cooked meals and healthy eating are sometimes stigmatized as being more expensive or only attainable to a luxury lifestyle.

The thing you have to think about when comparing the cost of a meal eaten in a restaurant and a meal eaten at home, is that buying the entire ingredient list might shore you up to the same cost of consuming the food in a restaurant but at home, these ingredients will go much much further.

For instance, buying a whole head of romaine for a single salad is expensive, but when you consider that the same head of romain will make six or more salads, then you’re by far extending the value of the grocery goods. Check out this calculator to see how you can tighten up your own budget by cooking at home.

The other benefit you might derive from eat at home is that it’s an investment in your health. Illnesses that you can contract from eating out frequently, including weight gain, high blood pressure, or insulin resistance, might all cause potentially expensive health complications and the requirement of long-term medications.

The One Week Challenge

If you’re still skeptical about the money-saving benefits of eat at home. Try a one week challenge, where you keep track of the money you spend for a full week on foods that you didn’t buy on your grocery trip.

Restaurant Recipes that You Can Make at Home

Being a proficient cook means that you’ll never want to pay for restaurant shrimp fried rice ($10) or spaghetti ($14) again.

And if you’re a little addicted to your restaurant favorites, then check out a few of these simple home cooking versions of your favorite meals.

Fast Food Recipes that You Can Make at Home

If you’re used to eating out frequently, it’s inevitable to have cravings for some of your favorite fast foods. Fortunately, there is very little fast food that you can’t cook for yourself, given the right recipes, methods and spice mixes.

Cooking at home takes commitment, since early on it can feel like it’s taking your time, cramping your social life, and making you trade delicious restaurant and fast food for home-cooked meals. Fortunately, the better you get at cooking, the better-tasting your meals become and the less your body will crave the high sugar and sodium versions offered by the food industry.

The cherry on top is that the health and budget benefits far outweigh any drawbacks you may feel by offering you a better quality of life, greater appreciation for what you put in your body, and less likelihood for contracting expensive illnesses.

Depending on the day, you’ll find Rebecca in a well thought-out ensemble that she handcrafted herself, or in hiking and rock climbing gear. An avid outdoorswoman, cyclist, and cat lover, Rebecca reminds us all on the Groom+Style team just how much we need to get outdoors. She’s worked in spas and salons off and on before going full-time with the G+S team.