There are more good reasons to cook at home than there are good reasons to eat out. You might not think it at first because of the amount of choice and the convenience of choosing to eat at a restaurant. Plus, these days, many restaurants offer gluten-free, salt-free, and sugar-free options. However, when you really start to look at the menus, you’ll notice that the choices when it comes to healthy food are actually rather limited in most cases. 

Now consider that a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2014 found that people who cooked at home ate fewer calories and less fat, sugar, and carbs than those who ate out often. And people in the study who cooked at home six or seven times a week also ate less when they went out to eat. 

As much as it might be fun to go out to eat, it’s something that should really be reserved for a treat or special occasion. It might be a hard habit to get out of, but understanding the benefits of eating at home might be a good motivator. Read on to find out what those benefits are, and it could make a big difference to the choices you make in the future. 

Spending your lunch break at a fast food restaurant or diner is a certain way to eat with your money. A cheap lunch at a restaurant can cost you $10 or more. Multiplying it by five days a week, twenty days a month, you have a substantial amount of money going toward potentially harmful food. 

When you make dinner at home, you could have enough delicious leftovers for lunch the next day, or at the very least, you’ll have the skills to make something tasty to take to work for lunch. Not only are you saving money at lunchtime this way, but at dinner time too. The money you save means that a pizza delivery once a month or a meal out for a special occasion is a much easier cost to bear too. 

Families eat on the go or in front of a screen in the fast-paced, digital age we live in now. This is not the best way to bring the family together. When people cook, eat, and clean up after a meal together, it makes them feel closer to each other. It’s a great way to really bond. 

It’s also a great way to enhance your own cooking skills and ensure your children have this skill for when they are older – it’s something that a lot of young people aren’t really able to do, and they, therefore, eat badly or spend too much money eating out. If they can learn to cook delicious dishes like marry me chicken by themagicalslowcooker.com, they’ll have useful life skills and get to spend time with you. It’s perfect. 

One benefit of cooking at home is that you can eat more nutritious meals. By getting fresh fish, poultry, and butcher-cut meat from a grocery store and fruits and vegetables from a farmer's market, you can make meals with more vitamins and minerals your body needs to stay healthy. When you order food at a restaurant, you don’t have any control over the way it is cooked or what the ingredients are, and that means you could be eating things that are bad for you without even knowing it sometimes. 

By carefully planning out the meals that you intend to cook at home, you’ll be able to make sure that each one has the right healthy elements included. You can also look at recipes and switch unhealthy items for healthier ones if that works for you. The point is you’re in control of what you’re cooking, how much you’re cooking, and exactly what goes into every bite. 

Putting together your own meals makes you more aware of what you eat and how healthy it is. When you grab food quickly, you don't really think about how much you're eating or even how it tastes. When you shop for groceries, plan meals, and cook, you learn the value of different foods and think more about serving sizes and calories. So, you'll eat less and learn to choose food based on how good it tastes and how much it costs instead of just ordering something quick from a small menu.

Everything we mentioned above gives you a greater appreciation of the food you’re eating. 

You created it from scratch, and you know what went into making it. The more you enjoy food, the more you’ll do with it, and the further you’ll take your cooking, which means you’ll be healthier.