Six months ago I made a deliberate rule: no takeout, no delivery, no restaurants except once a week with people. Every other meal, I cook. I want to write down what actually happened, because most posts on this topic are either sanctimonious (“here’s why home cooking will change your life”) or defeated (“I lasted three weeks”). The truth is messier and more interesting.
What I thought would happen
I expected: I’d save money, feel better, maybe lose a bit of weight, and get some meditative pleasure out of chopping vegetables at the end of the day.
What actually happened
Money savings were smaller than I expected. Groceries went up. Even cooking simple things at home, I was spending maybe €80-100 a week on food for one person eating well. Comparing to my previous “one lunch out, one dinner delivered per week” habit, I saved maybe €120/month. Real, but not the “you’ll save thousands” a lot of people claim.
I got better at cooking much faster than I thought. By month two, I could improvise a decent meal from whatever was in the fridge in 25 minutes. I stopped following recipes for the third or fourth time I made something. That compounds — every meal is faster than the last.
Decision fatigue went up, not down. This one surprised me. I thought cooking would be relaxing. What I underestimated was the shopping part — planning meals, checking what’s in the fridge, deciding whether to walk to the good greengrocer or the closer one. It’s a low-grade constant admin overhead that takeout doesn’t have. I eventually solved this with a weekly meal plan on Sundays, but it took a few months to admit that “figure it out day by day” wasn’t working.
Physical effect was real, but small. I lost about 3kg over three months without trying. I sleep marginally better. My grocery bill has more vegetables in it. None of this is life-changing, but it’s real.
The unexpected thing
The biggest change wasn’t physical or financial — it was that my evenings shifted shape. When you cook, dinner is a 40-minute event instead of a 10-minute “unwrap and eat”. You’re standing up, moving, listening to something, and the day has a clearer edge between “working” and “not working”. I didn’t expect a lifestyle rule to accidentally give me back a boundary my remote work had erased.
Would I recommend it?
Not as a life-hack. Not as a moral position. Maybe as an experiment: try it for eight weeks and see what shifts. It’s not going to be the money. It might be something else you didn’t know you needed.