Life Is Short, Eat The Pasta
By: Kat Merry
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Body Image, Mental Health

…how I stopped wasting time, chasing ‘skinny’

Image from Nicole Width article on TheList.com

In 2009, a reporter asked model and actress Kate Moss what her life-mantra was. She replied, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I was 18 when I read this, a highly impressionable teen, and this mantra stuck with me.

It inspired a core belief that lasted almost a decade: to be happy, I had to be skinny.

Over the years, I went on countless diets: Weight Watchers, Atkins, Keto, High Protein, Intermittent Fasting, The Apple and Water Diet, The Master Cleanse…if you’ve heard about it on Doctor Oz, I’ve tried it. Often, when I didn’t find results in dieting, my efforts turned into disordered eating.

I would opt for calorie restriction or over-exercising, sometimes both. At very desperate times, I turned to more unhealthy and often dangerous methods on my quest to be smaller.

When I entered my twenties, I avoided social events where I knew people would be drinking alcohol, because I was threatened by the consequences of consuming liquid calories.

If I absolutely couldn’t miss an event like a wedding or a birthday party, I’d make sure I didn’t eat anything leading up to it, or I’d choose to either eat or drink my calories that evening- and you guessed it, this often ended up in monstrous hangovers, drunk ugly-crying, and me punishing myself on the treadmill the next day for ‘losing control.’

In my mid-twenties, I moved in with my then boyfriend (now husband) and these patterns weren’t my little secret anymore. My friends and boyfriend started to notice my unhealthy behavior and self-deprecating comments about my weight, and they were quick to call me out on it. Yet, none of it seemed to phase me or deter me from my behavior.

I still jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn every morning to do a spin workout while my husband, seeing the bags under my eyes, would beg me to slow down. I still continued on, even when a friend expressed her concern and frustration that I was reprioritizing dinner plans with her for a double session at the gym.

Image from Emily DiNuzzo article on Insider.com

These comments and worries were received as just distractions to me, keeping me from what I needed to do everyday, get smaller…because like Moss said, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”

My quest to be thinner didn’t just play out in my personal life, but affected my professional life as well. At a lunch break or during a lull at work, I’d be scrolling on an instagram ‘Fitspo’ page or I’d google things like ‘How many calories in an orange?’ or ‘How to lose 10 lbs before the weekend.’ I’d scribble calorie math or new-diet grocery lists on post-its and spend my lunch break making Google spreadsheets of eating plans, structuring my weekly meals meticulously, making sure to offset each consumed calorie with an appropriately assigned daily workout.

Exhausting right?

Now here is the kicker… in all this time and with all this effort, I never saw any truly dramatic weight loss, EVER. Sure, maybe 5 lbs up and down, here and there, but as I spent all my spare time reaching for model-thinness I only found unhappiness, anxiety, low self-esteem, and loneliness in my suffering.

I didn’t notice at the time, but the amount of energy I was spending on my quest to become smaller, was keeping me from relishing all the joys in my life.

Things really came to a head when I got engaged over Christmas in 2018. As a bride-to-be, I quietly kicked my weight loss efforts into high-gear. The diet-culture around being a bride ran absolutely rampant in my private repertoire. After so many years creating excuses, I finally had a ‘real’ excuse to back out of social events or squeeze in a third workout of the day. I loved playing the “Bride Card” because everyone knows that brides want to look their best on their wedding day.

Hungry and anxious, 3 months before my wedding, my (now husband) and I went out for dinner with our friends, another couple. Noticing me pushing food around my plate, my friend boisterously and almost-maternally called me out, “KAT! Why aren’t you eating?” Ah, I thought, perfect time to use the Bride Card. So, I replied, “I’m a bride! It’s crunch time with the wedding only a few months away.”

I figured my response would be enough for her to lay-off and let me pick at my sad bowl of lettuce, but my friend just looked at me straight in the eye and sternly said, “You know, I did the same thing leading up to my wedding- I dieted and exercised like crazy. It was exhausting.” She went on to tell me that a few nights before her wedding, her parents took her out to a beautiful Italian restaurant for dinner. She was avoiding carbs like the plague and her mom noticed that she begrudgingly didn’t order pasta, like she always does. (Important to note, my friend is Italian and a serious foodie) I looked at my friend not sure where her story was going. Then she continued,

“My mom said to me, ‘a bowl of pasta tonight won’t have any affect on how you look tomorrow. Life is short, eat the pasta.’ So I ordered pasta and never looked back.”

I don’t remember my response to this or how the rest of the dinner went, but I’ll never forget her story and her mom’s words:

“Life is short, eat the pasta.”

BOOM. There was the ‘Ah-Ha’ moment I didn’t know I needed.

Her mom’s words suddenly embodied all the things I had been missing out on in my life. The ‘pasta’ became a metaphor for all the joys of life I’d been avoiding. I’d been focused so much on getting skinny that I forgot how unhappy I was becoming in the process and

for the first time, I felt the weight of all the things I missed out on, because I was so focused on losing weight.

After that night, I decided it was time to adopt a new mantra. So, I traded in Moss’s “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” for “Life is short, eat the pasta.” With this mantra in mind, I started a new journey and my life began to open up.

For so long, I thought one bite of a bagel or one missed workout would send me into a spiral, ending in failure and pounds gained. So, I began to trust myself and I loosened the reins a bit. I started by taking a rest day from the gym each week. Then, I let myself have carbs on a weekday (Yep, I used to not allow myself to eat bread Monday-Friday). I even had a few pints of beer at my friend’s 30th birthday without thinking about the calories.

Little by little, I learned to trust myself and actually listen to my body and my stomach, instead of punishing and restricting them.

I engaged in small practices like this, everyday. Before I knew it, it was my wedding day. That morning as I brushed my teeth, I felt a panic and these thoughts filled my head:

“I should’ve fasted yesterday.”

“People are going to notice that I didn’t lose weight.”

“Should I skip breakfast?”

The anxiety rose and tightened in my chest. Then, I remembered that new mantra, “Life is short, eat the pasta.” Those pesky thoughts started to slip away and the anxiety went with them, leaving me completely present and focused on the pure joys of that day. The only thing that truly mattered was the incredible man waiting for me at the end of the aisle- Oh, and the gooey mini grilled cheese sandwiches we were serving at cocktail hour.

My husband and I, about to crush grilled cheese and pork sliders at our wedding >>> Photographer: Alanna Hogan Photography

Married a little over a year now and approaching 30, I am damn proud of myself for every moment I’ve succeeded in redirecting and reframing my thoughts and behavior patterns around my body and my weight, but the process certainly hasn’t been rainbows and butterflies. Spending so many years practicing unhealthy habits, living in a skewed reality, and following a set of deranged priorities, solicited a new set of challenges.

I’ve had to be uncomfortably vulnerable with my husband and close friends to build a support system. I’ve had to be brutally honest with myself, recognizing and avoiding triggers around me that could lead me back into a dangerous cycle.

Sure, I still struggle with doubt and insecurity about my body size, but those thoughts are now very rare and fleeting. I have reassigned all the energy I spent restricting food and exercising excessively, towards building my life. Social events, cheeseburgers, gentle movement, sleeping in, ice cold beer, (just to name a few), which were always a threat to me, now bring me so much joy.

No longer spending hours a day at the gym or calculating calories, I have more time to be a better friend, to connect with my family, to hone my writing skills, to educate myself on world issues, and to enjoy my marriage.

Sure, I workout and eat healthy most of the time, but I do it because it makes me feel good, not because I feel the need to be thinner.

It isn’t easy and it’s sometimes been very painful, to look back at all the time I wasted worrying about my weight — the things I could’ve accomplished, the happy hours I missed, the relationships I could’ve saved, the desserts I could’ve tasted…

But I am hopeful that my story will resonate with someone else who might be stuck in a weight loss rate race and might need a reminder that life is short and honestly, everything tastes better than skinny feels.