Pasta is SO calorific!

Yep. It's depressing. Peanut butter too! After I got a food scale, I was so sad about those serving sizes

Everybody has their own food priorities, but I still eat pasta and don't find it to be so caloric. I think sometimes people get confused on dry weight vs. cooked weight. They think the weight cooked is the nutrition label on the back of the box is the cooked weight, when in fact it is the dry weight. That pasta once cooked gets much heavier.

I find the standard pasta serving (2 oz/56gram dry) to be too small, but I tend to find that about the serving size of every food. However I've found somewhere around 80-90 grams, about a serving and a half, to produce a sufficient amount of pasta. That's about 300-320 calories. I can then dress it up with something low calorie (tuna, chicken, or turkey) and a low calorie sauce and get a filling dinner in around 500-600 calories. On most diets, that's a reasonable dinner. And I find it more filling than a lot of other dinners.

Yup and high glycemic too.

Personally, I haven't eaten any pasta and very little bread or flour based products for this reason. Don't miss them and don't feel "deprived." Lots of other great things that I still eat & enjoy.

goatelope wrote: »

Plus how do Italian women stay so thin?! Olive oil + pasta?!?!

More than likely they move more and they don't eat 100g servings of pasta as a huge main dish.

This hasn't been my experience. It isn't any more or less calorific than any other grain based dish. A 600 calorie pasta dish looks fine to me and keeps me just as satisfied as any other satisfying 600 calorie dish. What's calorific is not the pasta, but the sauce, depending on how you make it. Thankfully I like tomato based sauce more and I like vegetables added, so the calories weren't shocking when I first logged it.

MikePTY wrote: »

Everybody has their own food priorities, but I still eat pasta and don't find it to be so caloric. I think sometimes people get confused on dry weight vs. cooked weight. They think the weight cooked is the nutrition label on the back of the box is the cooked weight, when in fact it is the dry weight. That pasta once cooked gets much heavier.

Same here. I tend to enjoy meals that are a combination of protein, vegetables (that gives me my volume), and starch, with a little added fat, and I don't find that pasta is any more calorific or lower volume than whatever else I would want.

Of course, while I enjoy the pasta itself, it's mainly a vehicle for what I add to it/put on it for me, and I'm actually happy with a 2 oz serving (I'm only 5'3, however). I add lots of veg and meat (shrimp is a favorite) or beans, and cook them in a little olive oil. Or I make a tomato-based sauce (with or without meat) and add lots of veg.

Cream-based sauces were never my favorites and I found it easy enough to use less oil (unless I'm doing a pesto), so my sauces are typically not particularly high cal.

I make a lot of skillet pasta dinners because it's easy and my kids never complain about vegetables when they're mixed up with other things. The pasta is probably less than 1/2- 2/3 the volume of the dish. I'm not currently eating at a deficit, but it fits in fine when I do, particularly when I use our favorite 150 calorie, high fiber pasta (which helps with satiety too). When people complain about calories, I'm envisioning a plate heaped high solely with pasta and some calorific sauce, which just seems unpleasant to me.

For pasta I think using one serving and then bulking everything up with a bunch of low calorie veggies and light sauce is good! Fills you up and it can be made to fit in your calories.