To cook more than 15g pasta or 10g rice?

[WrongWayApricot]

I've been doing an NHS diabetes prevention program because I'm at high risk for diabetes. We've been learning about portion sizes and I knew from news and telly that modern portion sizes are too big, but I didn't know they were 85% bigger than they should be. Apparently 30g cooked rice and pasta is the right portion size. The 200g~ on packets is way off then? I usually do about 75g dry pasta, less than the 90g recommended on the packet. Pasta doubles in weight and rice triples in weight when cooking so, I should be putting only 10g rice in the saucepan and only 15g pasta? I thought this was mad so googled what I could, but British Heart Foundation recommend about the same. I want to ask my health coach about this but wanted to check here first if I really am an absolute glutton for cooking 75g dried pasta/eating 150g pasta?

[quote WrongWayApricot]@goodnessidontknow could be but this is what it says in the resources section [/quote]
I think you're reading this wrong, this is advice for the proportion of carbs in a meal if the carbs were only part of the meal, ie pasta or rice on the side of a meat/fish/protein along with vegetables.

If you were just having pasta with say bolognese, you'd have more because you'd not be eating the other vegetables and should be balancing out the higher carbs in that meal with less carbs in your other meals throughout the day.

For example, my breakfast was high protein high fat, but my lunch will be high carbs.

@SchrodingersImmigrant

I am not low carbing and even I don't reach 250g a day😳 That must be a typo on the website surely!

Nope - that was given to me by the Diabetes nurse at the surgery and is the current advice given by the NHS

www.diabetes.co.uk/diet/low-carb-diets-and-nhs-advice.html

In fact I was wrong they say 50% of your diet should come from starchy carbs up to 300g a day.

In fact I was wrong they say 50% of your diet should come from starchy carbs up to 300g a day

Nhs website says third starchy + third fruit and veg. I can easily imagine that food then and it's similar to what I eat. But yeah. I am not a fan of low fat diets as well. Tbf not even the high fat diets.

I would cook 50g dry rice or pasta per person usually when not trying to lose weight.

That is really interesting about the cooked pasta! I have just lost two stone and have half a stone to go to a healthy bmi, eating very low carbs. But when I get to maintenance I will definitely try that!

@ThatOtherPoster

OP - welcome to my world! I did WW recently and that’s now pushing people towards a lower-carb, lower-sugar lifestyle. Their suggested pasta portion was 25g (dry). When I weighed it out I felt like a 70s housewife living through the miners strike on two shillings a week or something.

I pile on the healthy bolognese sauce and it does actually fill you up. But it’s WAY less than I’d been eating, it just bobs around in the saucepan. You can count the individual pieces of pasta. 😬

This is why I've failed at the 'new' WW every time I've tried! I need to lose weight so I'm digging out my old Pro Points stuff so I can have more points and feel as though I'm actually enjoying my food!

I do a small mug of pasta per person (not sure how many g that is) and about 200ml of rice per person (uncooked volume in a Pyrex jug).

Portion/serving sizes are different for people who need to restrict food groups.

Portion/serving sizes also assume you'll be eating other things on your plate, and it depends if they're defined per meal or per day. If you don't care about carbs/protein/fat macros and just calories, a serving size of pasta depends massively on whether your meal is say, a chicken breast, loads of veg and some pasta on the side, or if it's just a bowl of pasta and pesto.

OP if you want more information about low carb high fat eating then there’s lots on the Bootcamp threads here run by BIWI.

I do 130g dried rice for two adults and that doesn't look particularly generous but it usually does the job. 10g is madness.

@mrstea301

It is quite shocking when you see the size of a proper portion though. I've got one of those plates from Amazon with areas to show what your servings should be of meat, veg and carbs - even the plate is about half of the size of a standard dinner plate to start with!

I also have a microwave pasta cooker and it has a single portion as 57 grams of dry pasta.

I’ve seen this mentioned a lot on here, but I don’t fully understand it. If I ate these supposedly recommended portions I wouldn’t take in enough calories to maintain my (non-pregnant) weight of 9 stone at 5’7.

55g of dry spaghetti makes 125g cooked. When i add sauce and 1 courgette it's a nice portion. Top with cheese and it's easily towards 500. And that's not Bolognese, just nive veggie tomato sauce i make. I am sure that's an ok calorie portion per meal even for non dieter. Can be easily made few hundred more by adding meat and bit of oil

I find portion sizes scarily small.
What about less rice and pasta? As a diabetic there are loads of lower carb options including cauliflower rice and courgetti, edamame type pasta.

@R0SEMARY and @Gracesquirrel thank you for the advice, I will take a look at those sites and threads it's already been really interesting on here and I've learnt so much.

"If I ate these supposedly recommended portions I wouldn’t take in enough calories to maintain my (non-pregnant) weight of 9 stone at 5’7."

@SparrowNest I agree. I always see these posters saying 'portion sizes are far too large these days'. My portion sizes are surely by definition exactly right, since I'm a healthy weight! If I ate less, I'd lose weight when I don't need to

You would. Depends on what's on that pasta. If you look at spaghetti Bolognese (which seemm to be the most popular thing to cook) on bbc good food, it gives you 66g spaghetti per person yet the meal is about 650 cal. So with 57, as in the post bit above) it will still make just over 600.
That's absolutely normal calorie portion per main meal... Someone will have more pasta, lesa topping, or vice versa or more of both but eats lighter lunch. Many variables.

They thought I had GD during my last pregnancy so I was advised to eat 4-5 tablespoons of basmati rice with my meal- apparently that was the correct amount. Absolute insanity, there’s no way I did that.

Should add that I’d give my 11 month old 4-5 tablespoons of rice with his meal, not a fully grown heavily pregnant adult!

10gr of cooked rice is one spoonful