The portion problem when going out was a catalyst for changing how we and when we cooked. If you want portion control you almost have to make food yourself. That doesn’t mean it has to be hard, time-consuming, or taste terrible. This post will focus on why we chose to start cooking at home over eating out.
Cooking Only Once in a While was Wastefull
We have always cooked our meals in some fashion or another. When younger it was simply a necessity. As time went by, it was more about food as fun. This change led us to attempt impractical recipes and to a lot of waste of ingredients. Even using one of my favorite magazines, Cooks Illustrated, we had a lot of wasted ingredients. We started to find we had a ¼ jar of this and ½ a jar of that left over from recipes. The more we saw of this, the less practical cooking ourselves became. As a result, if we wanted something special we went out.
Both wastefully cooking at home and eating out had the same effects on us. They both blew up our calorie budget. Each was also costing us a lot of money. The latter one we will dig into more in another post. As I said in the earlier post the portion problem was such an epiphany, this is why.
Cooking a Few more Portions Saves Time and Money
We decided to re-learn how to cook and plan. Why? We realized it takes roughly the same time to produce 10 servings of something as it does two. It’s that simple. We would go on to realize once we got good at it, it took about the same time to go out for a meal.
Don’t think it was easy giving up eating at restaurants. Eating out was another dopamine hit for us. It is for many people. Most people will also feel that they can’t cook or make restaurant-quality food. We learned the opposite. I can make a decent bowl of ramen and also can make some mean corn dogs. It took a while to get there but, hopefully, we can shorten the journey for some.
Would You Pay for a Horse You Can’t Ride?
We also started to look at this through a completely different lens. In our case, we were paying for calories we didn’t want. Most of us realize there is a cost to calories. We associate that cost with weight gain or loss. What most don’t equate is the cost of those calories you pay for but don’t eat.
When you buy food at a restaurant you are paying a premium for the calories. The reason it is a premium is that the food is created for you by others. Would you pay for someone to paint your house and your deck if you didn’t have a deck? Of course not! Then why pay for food you aren’t going to eat?
At the Core of the Issue was Waste
We started to identify both of these issues. Ultimately our calorie budget made us use restaurants as little as possible. We recognized that the cost of the calories we were wasting was very high. As a result, we started to think we should invest our money in ourselves. We decided to get some decent kitchen equipment and start to cook at home more consistently.
Truth be told, it wasn’t just the calories or unpredictable portion sizes of restaurants. We learned quickly that counting calories was a pain. What made it worse was never knowing what was in the food. How much butter was in those mashed potatoes? Was that 4 or 5 ounces of fries? Not only was counting calories becoming more tedious, but it was also becoming completely unreliable.
Our Solution Was Imitating MREs and TV Dinners…Sort Of
Loving or hating the military is up to you. We feel we can learn from anyone. The one thing the military knows is logistics and the importance of food. The MRE or Meal Ready to Eat was the US evolution of food rations. It is designed to be stored for a long time and then used in the field. It has a description of everything in it nutrition-wise. What a brilliant idea for counting calories! Supposedly not too bad tasting as well? You know what, they weren’t too far from a civilian TV dinner either.
Now I’ve never had an MRE but I will make a huge assumption my food was better than a standard MRE. I know what I cook is way better than the TV dinners. We know the idea of an MRE doesn’t sound great to some. To be clear, we weren’t out to re-create them, we only wanted to use the concept.
We started creating our meals and storing them. This was a great way for us to create portions we wanted. We froze most things. The microwave was elevated in importance in our daily routine. They were easy to take to work. We also could put the dish in an app and not have to enter a guess for what we were eating. Because we made it ourselves, we could create it as a meal in our apps, and calorie counting became as easy as selecting it.
Wrapping Up
We had begun solving the problems of waste, and portion size, and making counting calories easier. This led to performing meal planning and learning a system for it. We will discuss how we worked through that in a post that follows.
Hopefully, at the end of this post, you can understand some of the challenges of eating out. It becomes an issue of control of calories and waste. While our previous post details come of the ways to work in eating out, overall, it wasn’t sustainable on a daily or even a few times a week. By re-learning to cook and package our meals we gained back money, time, and predictability. All of this helped us stay on track for our goals.