We live in times of convenience. Everything we eat nowadays comes in a package and a lot of it is ready to eat. Although buying and eating ready-made meals allows us to focus our time and energy on other things it also lowers the quality of what we fuel our bodies with. After all, no one cares about what goes into our meals more than we do.

Cooking our own food allows us to pick higher quality ingredients, cut back on preservatives and make a lot more nutritious meals. Making things from scratch also helps us better understand what goes into each dish and what we put into our bodies. We really are what we eat and what we digest. We can't hope to build better, healthier and stronger bodies if we don't pay attention to our nutrition.

This challenge calls for 100% homemade meals. It challenges each of us to cook everything we eat from scratch for 30 days. The meals are not required to be complex, low fat, low carb or high protein. You can make anything you want as long as it is made from basic ingredients whether it's soup or bread, salad or muffins. The challenge here is to not rely on anything that comes prepackaged or processed. You can adjust the degree of complexity for this challenge to fit the time available but we recommend making as many things from scratch as possible. For example, try baking your own bread and if you are making beans, use dry beans and not the ones that come from a can. Avoid using any quick mixes or shortcuts altogether during the challenge.

When we make our own food we inevitably increase the nutritional value of every meal. And when our body gets all it needs it stops being in a constant state of distress, our hunger goes down because our nutritional needs are met and we feel more content and satisfied.