5 Ways to Lose Weight with Pasta

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5 Ways to Lose Weight with Pasta Everyone knows pasta causes weight gain. Would you be surprised to learn that scientific studies show the opposite? In this article, I cover the latest pasta study and share five ways to lose weight with pasta. The Latest Pasta Study In a study published this week in the prestigious British Medical Journal, researchers from Canada pooled together the results of 32 studies looking at 2,448 people. And what they found goes against what you read in all of the popular health books... When carefully analyzing the results of 32 different studies of 2,448 pasta eating people, these researchers found that eating pasta, as part of an otherwise healthy diet, doesn't cause weight gain. In fact, those eating pasta every day actually lost about one pound provided pasta was part of a healthy diet. How Can this Study Be True? This study must be wrong. Everyone knows pasta makes you gain weight. Let me give you four reasons why this study may be right. 1. Pasta is relatively low on the glycemic index. The glycemic index measures how fast food is converted to sugar in the body. Foods high on the list, like bread, are instantly converted to sugar. White bread has a glycemic index in the high 70s. Even "healthy" whole wheat bread also has a glycemic index score in the high 70s. These high glycemic scores tell us that the standard store-bought bread is little more than just sugar. At the opposite end of the spectrum, you have foods like nuts which have almost no sugar response in the body. With nuts, the glycemic index will typically be under 20. Pasta, surprisingly, has a relatively low glycemic index score in the 40s. Thus, it is somewhere between bread and nuts when it comes to how fast it is converted to sugar in the body. Foods with a low glycemic index are generally healthier and promote weight loss as they are much more filling and don't throw off your metabolism. 2. Pasta Portion Sizes were Controlled. While the portion sizes of pasta varied in these 32 studies, in general, a reasonable portion size is about the size of your fist. These studies didn't include the massive pasta bowls that you might see in a typical U.S. restaurant. 3. What You Put on the Pasta Matters It should come as no surprise that a lot of the 32 studies came from Italy and other Mediterranean countries. Thus, pasta sauce using tomatoes, vegetables, and olive oil were common. It wasn't a big bowl of cheesy pasta like you might see at the Olive Garden restaurant. 4. It Matters What the Rest of Your Diet Looks Like As mentioned, only those who ate an otherwise healthy diet didn't gain weight with pasta. If the rest of your diet is healthy, pasta won't cause weight gain. 5 Ways to Lose Weight with Pasta Depending on where your current diet is at, let me suggest five ways to lose weight with pasta. I have listed these in order of their nutritional value and the likelihood that you will lose weight with pasta. 1. Use Vegetable Noodles Using fresh vegetables as your noodles is clearly the healthiest option. Zucchini, carrots, squash, cucumbers, or sweet potatoes can easily be cut into spirals with a machine to create incredibly healthy pasta. While vegetable noodles are off the charts nutritionally, there are a few downsides. First, you need a vegetable noodle maker. For about $15 you can get one of these at Walmart or on Amazon. For those of you who don't want to use a machine to cut up your veggies into noodle strips, Whole Foods always has fresh vegetable noodles available, but you will definitely pay for this convenience. Second, vegetable pasta doesn't taste like regular pasta. It is for this reason that I struggle with vegetable noodles. Don't be fooled by a little spinach in your typical pasta. That little bit of spinach doesn't do anything to the nutritional aspect of your pasta. If you want the best pasta when it comes to nutrition, it has to be all vegetables. 2.