February 3, 2022

Pasta!

Sometimes you get the perfect Italian pasta picture, sometimes you don’t. The pasta fangs in picture two were too funny not to post.

Then there’s me. Sitting happily in front of a plate of amatriciana. There was a point in time where I never ordered pasta. It had been demonized by the majority of the #wellness people I followed and I was (erroneously) convinced that I should never indulge. I wanted to embrace living in the Italian pasta-loving culture but I often found myself flooded with guilt, even if my body had no actual physical reactions to it.

How funny we are. If you do that too, my gentle whisper is: remember that you’re worth treating. You’re worth indulging. You’re worth not caring if your pants are a little too tight, honestly. We are humans and we are resilient and our bodies are literally designed to change; by seasons and over the years.

My old reality? I used to find myself openly encouraging people to eat pasta (especially health conscious tourists and friends) while not fully embodying the practice that I was preaching.

And like so many things that have changed in me over the past years I now find myself embracing the changes, being intuitive about when my body wants pasta and generally saying yes more often. Yes, to pleasure. Yes, to listening to my body. Yes, to shirking off guilt. My god. The sheer concept that we can have an emotion as strong as guilt around indulging in something as delicious as pasta is almost incomprehensible.

I find myself thinking a whole lot about bodies lately, about how precious it is to treat them kindly and to befriend them. How amazing they are. How amazing we are. So yeah, that’s that. As much as I’d love to say I’m ‘on the other side’ of this whole body journey- I’m really not. But I order pasta more often and that’s a small but deliciously measurable step.