I am tired of listening things like “Bro, I just eat ‘home-cooked food’ still gaining weight“, “Why I am not able to keep myself healthy even after not eating outside food at all?” And I absolutely despise those who say “I just eat home-cooked food bro” with a weird sense of ego and pride. Really? in 2019 people still thinks ‘Ghar ka Khana‘ is healthy and will keep them diseases free and fit? A big NO!

Let’s first understand from where this ‘Ghar ka Khana is healthy‘ came from

If we look back 60-70 years back, outside food and restaurants were not famous at all. All our grandfather and father used to do is eat at home and once in a blue moon eat outside, that too not a full meal just snacks like bhelpuri or some chaat. But as our nation grew and it gave spaces to more business developers and owners, we saw emerging of a huge ‘outside’ food industry. During the start of the 2000s, many international food chains came here and with the development of IT sector in metro cities, new food stall got establish around the vicinity of the industries. And with the competition, the emergence of media like television and the internet, the ‘food’ industry grew like anything which also resulted in competitive pricing and quality.

But, apologies to stereotype us, we Indians rarely checked the quality of things, we always cared about price. And this became the cheat code for food stall owners, restaurant owners and other food outlet owners. To keep the price minimum they started compromising with the quality of ingredients used in the food they were selling to masses. And for an obvious reason, ‘bad quality’ of food made many of us sick with issues like food poisoning, heartburn, acidity, etc. And whenever this happened, we went back to ‘Dal khichdi’ cooked by our loving Dadi or Nani or Mom or Wife. This gave birth to the ‘Ghar ka Khana‘ is always healthy.

Now why home-made food is not always healthy?

Emphasis on the word ‘always’, I am not saying it is not healthy, I am saying not ‘always’.

We got so much comfortable with this ‘home-cooked’ stuff that we forgot to even count the amount of food we are putting inside our mouth. Just by simply thinking of a ‘fulka‘ with ‘bhindi‘ on a plain steel plate gave us ‘good’ feeling of “this food must be healthy’. But we didn’t question the number of ‘fulkas’ or the amount of ghee/oil used in cooking that bhindi. In addition to that, our Nani-Dadi stuffed us with that one extra chapati (sometimes three), that one extra piece of sweet and one bowl extra dal. Our mom packed ‘home-cooked’ wafers, snacks with us for hostel/college days. We never realised the extra amount of calories we consumed under the ‘home-made’ tag.

That one extra chapati loaded with ghee, that one extra sweet loaded with sugar made us obese and unfit, in short unhealthy.

I know, some of you might get offensive on this and will say “Bro calories are not everything every time”. They are. It doesn’t matter what works for you, but for masses, counting the amount of food they eat will help them in living a healthier life.

It is not late yet. Make your own diet chart, just a click away. Calculate how much you really need to fuel yourself. Also, you know what, you can be ‘healthy’ by eating pizza, burger, etc. if you know how to calculate your food in exact amount.

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