Italy In SF

Last week I was writing about Italy and how I usually loose weight when I am over there. Andrea was telling me in the comments that it sounds too good to be true, and so I ended up thinking what exactly I was eating differently. In fact, I am much more active in Palo Alto than in Cesenatico, at least in terms of workouts!, so it needs to be a food thing. My husband, who spent the same amount of time in Italy but visiting his family, gained 4 pounds in the same time frame.

I have been considering what it might have been when it occurred to me I hadn’t eaten a single processed food. Nothing- cookies and pies were homemade and so was the gelato. Pastries and breads were made fresh every morning, pasta didn’t come out of a box but was handmade, no frozen anything- just plain, made from scratch foods I could easily track down to the last ingredients. Sure, I had salami and mortadella and prosciutto, which are technically processed foods, but they have been processed in the same way for centuries, so no chemical addictive were used in their making. Could that be the answer? Is my body really more sensitive than average to chemical and preservatives and sulfite and all those industrial ingredients that make the writing on the boxes longer and longer and smaller and smaller?

One thing is for sure- it is a refreshing time when you can visit a country and never once have to resort to food that comes out of a box, that has to be shelf-stable and where choices for your consumptions are so varied, and still still the same available maybe 50 years ago, before the industrialization of the food chain really took over the kind of foods we put in our bodies…

Filed under: italy