Why You Should Get An Air Fryer

I’ve spoken before on this blog (to the extent that text can really count as “speaking”, though that’s a topic for another day) about my weight loss journey. Truth be told, I never had an obscene amount of weight to lose, but every little bit helps. Conversely, when you’re overweight, your blood test results might be perfectly fine…that is, until they aren’t. 

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve been tailoring my lifestyle a decent amount. How do I hit the “magic” number of the habits that will keep me healthy and allow me to keep this weight off (or possibly lose more), while also being something I can realistically maintain for the rest of my life? It’s a dilemma many people face when trying to adopt a healthier lifestyle - it’s far from unique to me.

Today, however, I’ll talk about something that has thus far proven very helpful for me in my efforts to slim down and remain that way. I’m not saying it’s a panacea for everyone, or that it’s even a silver bullet for one person. If there truly were a “silver bullet” that would end obesity in the United States, then guess what? Obesity…would have ended in the United States, not to mention the rest of the world. 

A few years ago, during the COVID-19 pandemic my parents purchased an air fryer to keep in our pantry. It must have cost a couple hundred dollars at the time (more on that later). But it’s an investment that may very well pay dividends in the near future.

The air fryer is pretty simple in concept. It cooks food items using hot air rather than hot oil. This is crucial, because when you’re getting fried food at a restaurant, you don’t know what’s in that oil. It could be vegetable oil, or it could be lard like at that infamous Las Vegas restaurant where you dress in a hospital gown. You never know, and unless you’re gonna give up fries entirely, you have little to no control over what sort of oil your food is cooked in. 

Enter the air fryer. It’s the reason I bought three more sweet potatoes today. My father, for instance, loves sweet potato fries, but he doesn’t want to eat them from a restaurant anymore because of the aforementioned oil. If not for the air fryer, he would need to give them up completely.

So here’s what you do. You acquire a sweet potato and peel it until there’s as little skin left as possible. You then slice the sweet potato into pieces that are your desired size and shape. I usually cut horizontally so that there are roughly circular slices, then cut each of these circles into quarters. But that’s just my preference, and others can cook their sweet potato fries however they want to.

After that, I sprinkle my yam slices with a bit of garlic salt and some ground black peppercorns. The smell is downright heavenly, and that’s before the olive oil comes in. (Truth be told, it’s possible I’ve been putting too much olive oil in for the dish to be properly healthy. Everything in moderation, I suppose. But it’s still better than the alternative!) And of course, you’ll want to shake the bowl up so that the mixture coats as many of your slices as possible.

You then dump the sweet potato slices into the air fryer once you’ve preheated it. I advise cooking them for about 10 to 12 minutes, turning over as many slices as you can roughly halfway through. When that timer runs out, you need only open that tray and admire the results.

Again, I don’t want to oversell this. If you don’t have the right reasons for wanting to lose weight, or if you don’t truly want it enough, the air fryer isn’t going to change that on its own. But I’m sure it helps a lot of people, including me.

There are any number of popular, addictive foods that are less than nutritious, particularly here in the United States. They say McDonald’s is better in Europe due to the EU food laws, and I don’t doubt that is the case. But plenty of people in Europe still struggle with their weight, even if not as many as on this side of the pond. Junk food can be highly addictive, and that’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s public information.

Let’s suppose you were to conduct a census of the LoseIt subreddit. Let’s say you asked every member of the desired population, all subreddit users worldwide, to name the one food item that they had the most trouble avoiding on their quest to lose weight and keep it off. There’s little doubt in my mind that fries would be in the top five most common problem foods, likely in the top three. And there’s a reason for that - it’s a major craving for so many people. As high as the percentage of the population who ate fast food was at the time Super Size Me came out in 2004, that number has grown in the intervening time.

Donald Trump, once and future President of the United States, working the fry counter at a suburban Pennsylvania McDonald’s as part of a campaign stop. Image taken from the BBC.

That’s why the air fryer, to me, is so valuable. It allows one to give in to their craving for one of the most common problem foods without doing too much damage to their efforts. And in the grand scheme of things, relative to many other healthy dishes, air-fried sweet potatoes don’t require a lot of, well, effort. You can have a batch ready in roughly twenty minutes, but it still counts as cooking for yourself.

That’s another thing: If you’re going to lose weight, or even if you don’t need to lose weight but must still be healthy, you need to cook your own food at least much of the time. There’s just no way around that fact. The air fryer is currently giving me practice in using cooking appliances on my own, and these are habits I want to maintain for life.

There’s another reason the air fryer is worth its weight in gold. It used to be that people went to McDonald’s for two reasons. People were willing to overlook the fact that their fare’s claim to being considered “real food” was tenuous at best because it was cheap and convenient. Well, it might still be convenient, but it’s no longer cheap.

I’m not kidding. Because prices at McDonald’s and other fast food chains have gone up, Mickey D’s is no longer making as much money. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a corporate giant that most progressives probably despise, but they’ve lost revenue due to the fact that a Big Mac costs like $6. In fact, The Damage Report did a segment on this back in May where they framed this story in the funniest way possible. And I can’t help but get a kick out of that. Amidst all the turmoil, all the terror in this world as a result of one man and the voters who enable him, we’ve got that source of comic relief.

While we bought our air fryer for a couple hundred dollars, they’ve become quite a bit more affordable since then. A cursory Google search tells me that some cost as little as $60 USD, and that’s presumably even with the Trump Tariffs in place. Depending on how often you’d otherwise eat at Burger King, Mickey D’s, or Wendy’s, the device will eventually (or quite quickly) pay for itself. 

To be clear once again, I’m not a nutritionist. I’m just a random guy who’s navigating this journey one day at a time. I’m not saying this is going to work for everyone, but if my advice helps even one person forge a healthier lifestyle, writing this article was well worth it.