I quit Swiggy, Zomato for a month and cooked my meals instead. This is what happened

After deleting Swiggy and Zomato for a month, the writer cooked nearly every meal at home. The experiment cut habitual ordering, reduced spending and turned meal prep into a lasting routine.

In Short

• The first week was hardest, balancing cooking, planning meals and office work
• Family recipes and online creators revived a fading interest in cooking
• Meal prep exposed routine overeating and replaced easy takeaway with homemade alternatives

There are so many like me who want to quit eating out, but thanks to convenience apps like Swiggy and Zomato, that's become a far-fetched idea. Now you can just laze around on your sofa and the food you desire will be delivered to your doorstep, you don't even have to step outside or walk to your favourite joint to get what you want. It's a double whammy: you don't burn the calories you would have walking to the eatery, and you end up with the extra calories you'd have otherwise skipped if things weren't this convenient.

This takes me back to the Covid-19 days, when food delivery apps had stopped operating and if you were craving junk, cooking at home was your only option. I remember losing about 8 kg just by eating home-cooked meals, along with a bit of exercise.

I found myself wanting to do the exact same thing again. Except this time, the pandemic was long gone and everything was easily accessible, so I'd have to rely on my own (weak) willpower to pull it off.

My goal was simple: see if I could lose weight by eating home-cooked meals, delete the food delivery apps, and see if I could actually save some money. I call this ek teer se do nishane!

The first week was difficult

If you have someone cooking for you at home, your mother, husband or cook, life can be easier. But if you have to plan everything yourself, cook, and also hold down a job, it gets difficult. That's exactly what happened to me in the first week.

Managing my schedule was a challenge. I'd wake up earlier than usual to cook breakfast and lunch. On most days, breakfast was simple — avocado toast with a side of boiled eggs and fruit, or chia seed pudding.

Lunch took more time, because I wanted something protein-rich and healthy, but still easy to prepare. That's when I started trying recipes I had almost forgotten about — ones I'd grown up with. In the process, my love for cooking was renewed, and that's really when the experiment took off.

The second week was kind of cathartic

No one really believes this, or can wrap their head around the fact that cooking can, in fact, be cathartic. Once I started prepping my own meals, I realised how much I used to overeat — almost daily, one of my meals would be ordered in, and even dishes that were genuinely easy to cook at home, I'd get delivered instead.

What eventually happened was I started calling my mom for recipes, hunting for healthier alternatives, and — honestly — social media helped a lot. There are millions of people like me trying to get back in shape, and home chefs running healthy-cooking series online turned out to be a great resource.

One of the first dishes I tried was fried chicken — don't be shocked, this was made entirely in an air fryer, without a single drop of oil. And I didn't even use maida to prep it. In case you want a glimpse, take a look at the picture below.

I also made a healthier version of papdi chaat, and used similar ingredients to whip up dahi bhalla that weekend.

Then came my temptation phase

Bunny in 'Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani' had rightly said: “Shaadi is dal chawal for pachaas saal till you die arre life mein thoda bahut keema pav, tangdi kabab, hakka noodle bhi hona chahiye nah?” Before readers lash out at me for comparing shaadi to dal chawal — in my defence, it was Bunny, Ranbir Kapoor's character, who said this, not me. What I mean is I'm just drawing an analogy for how eating the same food every day can get a little tiring.

Sometimes you need a bit of tangdi kebab and hakka noodles in your life. In my case, it came wrapped in a box from Taste of Sikkim — chicken momo.

I felt a little guilty for partially giving in to temptation, but made sure I was back on track the next day. Breakfast, of course, stayed a staple — chia seeds with fruit and curd. For lunch, I made a batch of kebabs and used them in multiple ways. For instance, I made tacos where the "shell" was nothing but a ragi roti, spread with a hung curd dip and topped with pickled onion and avocado.

I also made pizza, with a base made out of ragi.

The fourth week, cooking stopped feeling like a task

Things had settled into a "new normal." I realised that making a timetable made everything easier — I no longer had to wake up wondering what I needed to cook that day. And I'll take a grocery or mandi haul over ordering in from Blinkit any day — you get to pick your own fresh vegetables and fruit, and there are actually more options, maybe not the exotic kind, but local and fresh.

I'd catch myself meal-prepping on a Sunday evening while watching a show, barely even registering it as an effort. That's when I realised the experiment had quietly turned into a habit.

This was also the week I stopped missing my apps. Not in a dramatic, willpower-triumphs way — I'd just genuinely stopped thinking about them. Early on, not having Swiggy on my phone felt like a loss. By week four, it just felt like normal life.

The numbers didn't lie

In an average month before this experiment, I was ordering in five times a week (weekends were worse), which came up to roughly Rs 8,000-Rs 8,500 a month — a conservative estimate, since it doesn't count the "just one more item" additions that always crept into my cart at 11 pm.

This month my grocery bill had increased (only a little) but of course my food app bills were negligible. I just paid about Rs 300 for the momo I ordered. The month’s grocery bill came to Rs 2,500, an amount I was already paying even when I was ordering out. So, you can do the rest of the maths. Also, the weighing scale showed 2 kg down, so that was another feat (mind you, this was without any exercise).

What I actually missed

I won't pretend this was a flawless, monk-like month. There were things I genuinely missed, my favourite Chinese fare, for one, and honestly, some days I just missed not having to think about food at all.

Cooking every single meal, even once it becomes second nature, still asks something of you: time, energy, a little planning ahead. That's not nothing, especially on the days work runs late.

So, will I go back?

Here's my honest answer: I'm not swearing off Swiggy and Zomato forever. I don't think that's realistic, or even necessary. What this month actually taught me wasn't that food delivery is evil — it's that most of my ordering wasn't hunger, it was habit. Boredom, laziness, a bad mood, convenience for convenience's sake. Now that I know the difference, I've settled on a middle ground: the apps stay off my home screen, reserved for genuine occasions — when I have guests over, when I'm too unwell to cook, or when I simply want to treat myself. Everything else, I'm cooking.

- Ends