Original email for context: My husband and I like to travel when he is able to get away. If we go to another country like Italy where pasta is a part of every meal, will we ever get to eat pasta again?
While I can’t guarantee how things will pan out for each person – our lifestyle habits and metabolism and body composition, age, and hormone levels, are all in different places, but to encourage you first, I will share my experience.
I do eat simple carbs! Daily in fact. I eat on average between 80-150 grams of carbs per day. Every afternoon I have 2 sandwiches on gluten free bread – this is 4 slices of gluten bread total which is 80g of carbs right there. I maintain my size 4 frame at about 127-130 lbs with this. I eat organic corn tortillas toasted in the toaster with butter as a snack at times. I can have gluten free pasta- I just don’t because I don’t care for it. I eat french fries whenever I go out to eat. I eat tortilla chips and regular potato chips.
So while I’m personally gluten free due to my autoimmune disease, you can see that the type of carbs I’m able to eat and maintain are very similar. It’s likely with the right lifestyle you could incorporate pasta again.
I do crossfit every week, but I only do it 3 days a week- so I’m not an exercising extremist by any means. Outside of these 3 hour classes, I’m actually almost completely sedentary due to my chronic illnesses that really limit my energy. I sit in a chair a LOT of the time….typing stuff like this. ;)- So eating carbs doesn’t necessarily require that you be super duper active. But I do think the level of activity I do, that’s rather intense, and includes heavy weight lifting (not just 10 lbs folks) goes a long way into keep my metabolism high enough to allow eating these sorts of foods.
I keep my thyroid medication dialed in.
This is important to me- if your hormone levels are off, there is no amount of proper eating or dieting that will allow complete control over your weight- I’ve seen it too many a time.
I hope this helps!
