Let’s Talk Carbs

Let’s talk carbs, as a jersey girl who comes from an Italian American household, carbs are a part of your everyday life. Bread and butter was the go to snack when you were waiting for dinner or you ate it with dinner. Sunday pasta days, pizza during lent on Friday’s.  Now you may wonder, so if she’s been eating carbs since birth basically how on earth could she give them up because that’s basically what i did.  

April 2019 I made the decision that I needed to change up my diet, and work to lose weight. I also found out due to the issues with my neck i really could not workout so focusing on what i was eating was all i could really do. The first month was the biggest struggle of my life, what could I eat, what should I eat, how many carbs were in xyz. 

Everyone who stops eating carbs for different reasons, some due to an allergy some for diet or just a lifestyle/ health change. When i started down this no carb path it was strictly for diet reasons. I figured let me drop some weight, reset my body, get in a good rhythm of healthy eating and i can go back to eating my italian bread and butter whenever i want.  Well I was so wrong with that mindset. What started out on a diet journey became a health journey. 

Slowly the longer I was not consuming carbohydrates the better my body felt and then when i “slipped” and ate something like bread, pizza, pasta anything along those lines i would start to feel horrible. I would feel heavy and sluggish, something i never noticed before when i was eating whatever i felt like.  Before i gave up carbohydrates i had arthritis flare ups in my ankle so bad at one point i thought i had actually fractured it. I went back to my doctor in january after giving up carbohydrates  for almost a year at that point and she told me there wasn’t any sign that I even had arthritis in my ankle.  

Now i am not saying giving up carbohydrates is the thing to do, because everyone is different and everyone works differently. All I am doing is sharing my experience and my perspective, this is what ended up working for me.  If you haven’t figured out by now i’m not going back to the carb lifestyle, cauliflower has become my best friend.  I love cauliflower pizza and it’s my guilty pleasure. If I want pasta I do like chickpea or lentil pasta which has a lot less carbohydrates. Sometimes when i need a break from everything i will do a meal or a day where i just eat vegetables, roasted or raw though i have always loved veggies even before i switched up my diet.   

Within one year with only really exercising the last two maybe three months very lightly i was able to lose 32 pounds. Since hitting the one year mark I have continued to lose weight which is a really amazing feeling. If i can figure out what works best for me then i know anyone can figure it out for themselves.

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