Hi everybody this is Monica Reinagle the nutrition diva here with your quick and

dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous a listener recently wrote to ask

whether pasta is the enemy when it comes to weight loss.

This week I've got some tips on how you can enjoy pasta without blowing your car budget.

Pasta's gotten a really bad reputation for being some sort of carbohydrate nightmare,

but I'm not sure that that reputation is entirely deserved.

It's true that pasta is high in carbohydrates and it's probably not going to fit into a low-carb diet plan. But as I've discussed in

previous shows, the low-carb life isn't for everyone and if you're not on a low-carb

diet then there's no reason you can't eat pasta, within reason, of course.

A one-cup serving of cooked pasta contains about 40 grams of carbohydrates.

And in the context of a balanced diet, 40 grams of carbs isn't a big deal. It's the same amount of carbs as in a cup of rice for example.

The problem is that for some reason when it comes to pasta we seem to suffer from some pretty crazy portion distortion.

For example, a one cup serving of rice looks perfectly appropriate to us, even generous, but put

one cup of pasta onto a dinner plate and it doesn't look right at all. Think of the last time you saw a

television ad for pasta or pasta sauce or for an Italian restaurant. Now picture

the dinner plates. They've got piles of pasta higher than your head.

A plate of pasta at an Italian restaurant might contain six to eight cups of pasta.

We might not be quite that excessive when we make pasta at home,

but few of us would serve

ourselves just one cup of pasta.

It's just not what we're used to seeing on the plate.

Now personally, I'm a big fan of pasta and I always keep it on hand. It's inexpensive, it's fast to cook, and you can serve it in a million different ways.

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