And preparing meals certainly puts oneself in better control over what goes in.

It's just been my experience that as a bachelor preparing meals for individual consumption, particularly as the ability to make tasty meals improves, weight gain is still a problem. It's challenging to make single servings from scratch without going even a little overboard, and for me at least, it's all getting eaten in one sitting.

Cooking for me has become viewed more as just a DIY form of JIT-processed food. It tends to be healthier than food processed by someone else, for lack of preservatives and less salt/sugars, and higher quality ingredients, but the cooking process still tends to produce something more calorically dense and unnaturally delicious I have difficulty resisting overeating.