Jennifer Aniston Says She’s “No Longer Afraid” of the Bread Basket
Just “as long as it’s all done in moderation,” the actress added.

Jennifer Aniston has been on a low-carb diet for decades in order to keep herself in tip-top physical shape. But the actress confessed that, as she’s getting older, she’s learning to embrace the bread basket.

Aniston revealed that she’s recently started incorporating the much-maligned food group back into her diet. “[I] started to give myself a break, allowing yourself to have pasta, a sandwich,” she told People in a new interview. “Everyone’s very afraid of the bread basket, and I’m no longer afraid. As long as it’s all done in moderation.” And since adding various glutens back into her life, she says her body has never been happier. “There’s something my body appreciates about [having carbs], like, ‘Oh, thank you! Why are you depriving me of things I love?’” she said. Besides, her newfound love of pasta winds up being balanced out as, “I kind of naturally do intermittent fasting, just because I’m not a breakfast person,” the actress explained. “I just like a cup of coffee and my collagen.”

Aniston initially confessed she was slowly letting carbs back into her life in 2015, telling InStyle, “I’ve been allowing myself a lot more in the past few years.” She confessed that type of food “does make it harder to lose those last few pounds. But you have to live. And so what? You go up a size. What’s the big deal?” And pasta and pastries are certainly more enjoyable than the “greens and vegetables and lean proteins and kale,” she says she was exclusively eating up until then. She added the even more haunting revelation that, “When I really wanted to have a cheat day, I had to have a kale chip.”

These days, the Friends star is more focused on mixing health with pleasure anyway after injuring herself last fall. “Back in October my back went out,” she explained. “I’d done a really hard workout, and then one day I tried to get up and couldn’t. I literally fell to the floor and ended up having to go get an MRI. Sure enough, I had a 9-mm bulging disc, which is really intense. So my whole workout had to change.” So she started doing Pilates to “rehab” her back, which taught her that fitness can still be effective even when it’s not super intense and complicated. She said, “When I threw my back out, I was like, ‘Maybe it was that lunge twist squat move.’ We can’t just do one simple move. We try to add four moves to one.” That being said, Aniston still dreams of being able to strap on her sneakers one day and start running again—an exercise she refers to as “my love.”