What is Invisible Labor and the Hidden Costs of Fad Diets and Cooking from Scratch?

What is Invisible Labor and the Hidden Costs of Fad Diets and Cooking from Scratch?

Many times, we hear from nutrition gurus that cooking from scratch or making food at home using recipes is the healthiest food you can make. This also includes pre-made meal kits that require you to make food using portioned foods. Though the latter can be an expensive home experiment, there's one major cost that is completely ignored in this narrative: Invisible Labor. 

What is Invisible Labor?

Invisible labor is any form of work that is required to make something happen in your day. This can be anywhere from watering the lawn, cleaning up the living room, washing your car, and performing any activity at home or work that doesn't pay you. Though some people do enjoy doing these tasks, generally speaking, when done repetitively, these activities start turning from joy to a burden. Here are some things that cost you in invisible labor in nutrition and health:

  • Time is taken to read a diet, blog, or article
  • Time spent on social media to engage with the content
  • Time spent looking up and reading recipes
  • Time spent tracking macros, calories, and/or biomarkers
  • Time spent weighing foods
  • Time spent grocery shopping to create niche and diet foods
  • Time spent driving
  • Time spent cooking/baking/grilling
  • Time spent setting up food
  • Time spent cleaning and putting away dishes
  • Time spent constantly upgrading and repairing the kitchen
  • Time spent cleaning and sanitizing the kitchen

What about Behind the Scenes Costs?

When you embark on a lifestyle change, you may be adding some extra costs to your life. This would include:

  • Cost of travel, fuel, and vehicle 
  • Cost of coaching and training
  • Cost of memberships
  • Cost of useless, re-packaged, and overhyped supplements
  • Cost of monthly apps and subscriptions
  • Cost of groceries and ingredients
  • Cost of appliances that may work as a paperweight down the road

What about Mental Toll and Lifestyle Loss?

The story doesn't end with just invisible labor. Diets fail long-term and that is a recurring theme. Hence, you have to also deal with the following:

  • Failure of a diet or lifestyle
  • Unhappiness and restrictiveness
  • Not having time and willpower for constructive and joyful activities
  • Not enough engagement with loved ones and family
  • Re-gaining all the weight loss and rebounding to square one
  • Loss of self-esteem and constant need to compete or validate
  • Toxic online environments and engagements
  • Constant fearmongering based on poor science and sensationalism
  • People may not like what you made

Do You Get Paid for All This?

Being healthy has always been as simple as finding tasty foods and eating them. That's always been our goal at Ketogeek. We had thought many times of initiating a service-based solution for our customers and clients, but we believe that the solution to the modern obesity and chronic disease environment will come from a product-based solution. That's why we have been heavily focused on improving and evolving our Energy Pods. Notice that you will never get paid for all of these aspects of diet and lifestyle and long-term results are not only not guaranteed but also abysmally low. Even if you get paid $15 per hour, you can see how all of these time and money sinks can take you away from productive, creative, and constructive things you could be doing with your life.

This is exactly the vision we embody with our Energy Pods: focus on improving your life, seek adventure and create memories while we do all the work and give you an amazing product that fuels you on that journey. Focus on quality processed foods that make your life better rather than junk processed information that makes your life far worse.

Now go grab an Energy Pod and make the most out of life while supporting us on the journey to create better foods! Meanwhile, do you have more costs and tolls for this? Comment below and let us know: