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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

As an Italian, my experience is that I can’t have any satisfaction with less than 180g of pasta. Therefore I only eat it like once a week and make it a little event. Growing up I had similar portions almost on a daily basis and I was never overweight. Trick: do sports. A lot.

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As an Italian, that's really a lot of pasta.

I eat 80gr of pasta, a bit more at the restaurant (they make larger portions), I hate big bowls of pasta and have it no more than 2/3 times a week, usually less.

Pasta is a kind of food you have to eat and then wait that gastric acids kick in to take the hunger away

If you're trying to eat pasta until it makes you feel full, you're having too much of it.

Pasta releases water over time and too much of it will also make you very sleepy, especially after lunch.

That's why there is a tradition in Italy of not working too much after lunch and shops used to reopen in the afternoon at 16. People had too much pasta (they had not much more to eat, until they had it)

But if you eat it once a week I guess it's ok, my grandma used to eat pasta with bread everyday and she lived 96 years...

I did a lot of sport in the past, it doesn't really keep your weight down, to lose weight doing sport, while also eating a lot without limits, you should do it 12 hours a day.

I was luck enough to be born genetically skinny, but now that we are older many of my friends are fighting against weight daily, despite being professional players on a strict diet until their 30s.

180g cooked or uncooked?

Portions with 125g of uncooked pasta feel fine to me. That‘s 450 calories. Plus sauce (200 on the low end, 350 calories on the high end, depending on what exactly you want to eat – 200 calories would be something like a 400g can of tomatoes, garlic, onions, some olive oil) and cheese (100 calories for 25g Parmesan) you end up with a meal that‘s between 750 and 900 calories.

That between a normal and large-ish meal, though in both cases not exactly huge. Definitely something you could conceivably eat every day without much trouble, though I do agree that something with less carbs would probably be a bit more filling.

125g uncooked dried pasta should be about 280g cooked pasta.

Don’t get me wrong, I can eat 180g of uncooked pasta no problem. But that tends to go right up to the line of feeling very full.

Why would you ever eat uncooked pasta?

You weight pasta when it's uncooked. That's the usual way.

Ah. Haha, ok. That clears everything up, thank you.

Uncooked. depends on the pasta type though. Spaghetti can be easily 180g. Penne, Fusilli or Rigatoni, let's say 150g.

My sauces are generally quite light. I'm vegetarian, so they never involve calorie-dense ingredients such as guanciale or pancetta. (I know, I know, what am I missing and so on... :D)

For me pasta means less ingredients as possible, at the highest possible quality.

Examples: Fresh Tomato-Basil Spaghetti. I use only spaghetti from selected Italian brands such as De Cecco - low end but extremely good in my opinion - Rummo or Gentile, organic Tomatoes from a fresh food store, my own home-grown basil, extra virgin olive oil from Calabria, chili also from Calabria, extra-fine tomato extract from Mutti.

Fettucelle burro e limone: Fettuccelle DeCecco, Irish butter, Bio shallots, Phu Quoc black pepper, organic Lemons (from Sorrento when in Italy, just bio when here in Germany) for the juice and the zest.

Fusilli or Rigatoni alla Norma. Organic tomato sauce from Mutti with pieces of tomatoes, organic aubergines from Italy, same olive oil from Calabria, same chili from calabria, my own basil...

And so on: Aglio e Olio e Peperoncino, Arrabbiata, Puttanesca, Pasta all'aglione, ecc.. The sauce is never heavy, and the pasta itself can shine. As you can see I also never cook pasta as an afterthought. This way, you can definitely control how much you eat.

Habits subjected to radically change when I visit mamma e babbo back in Italy.

Now I’m hungry.

Don’t get me wrong, 180g is no problem for me, I can even over-indulge and go for more, but that insures feeling disgusting afterwards (in that sense 180g seems like a pretty good delineator between large but possible and too much).

Currently I’m losing weight (very necessary) so I’m hyper-aware of portion size and while the first couple of weeks 125g portions felt unimaginably small I think I got used to them and they don’t leave me back empty anymore. But, yeah, not as filling as something with much more vegetables and, say, tofu and some rice.

Why should it depend on the pasta type? 100g penne is same as any other type.

Curlier pastas carry more sauce into your mouth so when you eat 100g of fusilli you're eating more total food than 100g of spaghetti.

Not sure I agree. In my house, if we make a sauce regardless of pasta served with it, it will be entirely eaten. Then the plates licked.

I agree that pasta shapes are required for certain dishes.

To be honest? I don’t know. My take is that they carry more sauce, as said above, but also penne and similar pasta suck in more water than spaghetti.

You nearly had me, but then wouldn't the same quantity absorb the same amount of water? I've no idea really, but wouldn't you serve the same quantity of sauce with the pasta?

I work on the basis of 80g of uncooked pasta per person for our family.

We aren't exactly skinny, either, despite being pretty active (an average of 70 miles of cycling a week).

The difference is probably made up with vegetables, fruit etc.

Growing up in Rome, our rule was 100g per person, and 100g for the pot if it's just a light sauce.

Basically, a box fed about 5 people.

That seems like a pretty good rule of thumb. I tend to eat a bit less than that. If I'm planning for a group doing some activity like strenuous hiking, I'll plan for a bit more. But 4-5 people to a box/pound sounds about right.

I'm trying to get an understanding of the portions that you guys are talking about. Am I correct that:

125g would be roughly .3 liters or 1.25 cups of a pasta like spaghetti (i.e. one that isn't hollow so it fills up most of the available space)

25g of cheese would be just enough to melt and form a thin layer over the top of the pasta

I think that I would want some meatballs or cubed chicken (or a vegetarian equivalent) to feel satisfied. However, I also probably wouldn't add the cheese so maybe it equals out somewhat.

Good luck measuring spaghetti in cups. 125g is 4.4oz

In Italy we always measure pasta weight when uncooked. I'm pretty sure he meant 180g uncooked.

If you put a lot of fat in your pasta (e.g., guanciale) then you get filled with a much smaller serving, like 100g.

Your mention of guanciale reminded me of this delicious video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AAdKl1UYZs

The serving seems gigantic though.

Cool video! It's very easy to do (provided you have the ingredients). The serving in the video seems to be for 3 people. It's a really greasy dish, there's no way you can eat all of that alone.

While cutting the guanciale he says "quite a lot for two people" and later while adding eggs he says "for two people you take two eggs" so it must be intended as a portion for two.

Big mistake: no olive oil should go in the pan where you cook the guanciale. Otherwise, everything else is legit.

This. Stuff like guanciale should cook in its own fat.

Yes, even more that at some point he removes some of the oil/fat mix. What was the point of the oil, then?

I (an Englishman) ate large portions of pasta until about 5 years ago when someone suggested weighing it and now I use 85g per portion. It never seems like it's going to be enough, but it always is.

If that's uncooked pasta, that's about 650+ calories, right? If the sauce ain't too heavy and that's the main dish of the day, even without sports that shouldn't be a big issue.

Wow, we usually eat around 250g of pasta divided by 3 people. 180g only for you? Congratulations!

Full disclosure: we're also all very sedentary

Yep, only once or maybe twice a week. Always for lunch, on a day I train ;)

I eat 250g (uncooked) alone. Add to that sauce and vegetables, sometimes meat.

I'm nearly forty, and 1,74m and weigh between 76 and 78 kg (depending on the time of the year). I'm a software developer and only do loaded carries three times a week.

My wife always asks where all the calories go ;-).

That typing all day long can be quite stressful, you know!

As a student, when I ate nothing else during the day, my standard amount for dinner was 125g (so you get 4 meals out of a standard package). When combined with vegetables, it is more than enough.

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