epidemic.

No one has time to cook at home these days.

I'm fortunate to be able to work from home and have a stay at home wife. Because of this, we are able to prepare almost all of our meals at home (she does the initial prep work, e.g., chopping up vegetables etc., and I do the rest after finishing my work day).

When you cook at home you not only control your portion size but also the ingredients. Along those lines, I'm a big believer in following satiation per calorie principles where you focus on preparing meals that are high in protein and/or fiber and/or include low caloric density ingredients (i.e., food that has high volume per calorie). The bottom line is that, by cooking at home, we can engineer our meals to feel satiated on fewer calories.

In contrast, when you eat out (or order take out) and/or eat a lot of ultra-processed food, you lose control of of this. Moreover, instead of being engineered to have high satiation per calorie, this type of food is, instead, designed in the exact opposite way - principally as calorically dense food that is enriched in refined carbs and refined fats (and diluted in fiber and protein) while being engineered to be hyperpalatable and addictive.

I'm on a business trip this week and have been going out to lunch and dinner every day. Even with just having a protein shake for breakfast, not ordering appetizers or desserts, only drinking water or diet soda with my meals, and not snacking, my average daily caloric intake has been well north of 2,500 (with snacks and/or desserts, I'd be well over 3,000).

Even with that, I feel like I'm starving. On a per calorie basis, the food just doesn't fill me up as much as what we cook at home. But if I ate like this all of the time, I'd slowly and steadily gain weight.