As an Italian-American, my fondest memories are of coming home from school to my mom cooking a massive pot of spaghetti and homemade garlic bread, or getting takeout pizza as a family on Friday nights.

But as much as I love pasta and a slice, they don't exactly love me. As I've gotten older, increasingly they leave me stuffed and fatigued for hours post-meal.

Like many Americans, I'd heard stories about people traveling to Europe and being able to eat anything without suffering bloating like they would at home.

So you can imagine my excitement as I prepared for my honeymoon in Italy last month, the Mecca for carb lovers like myself.

I decided the trip would be a perfect time to test for myself whether something genuinely different happened, physiologically, when I ate my favorite dishes there versus at home.

I wore a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), a device inserted under the skin that monitors the amount of sugar in your blood. 

Big spikes and dips are often responsible for the tiredness, dehydration and other negative symptoms people feel after over-indulging. 

I logged my results for a week before my trip and then during the first week of my honeymoon and the results were, quite frankly, startling.

I used a device called Stelo that gets injected into the arm with a small needle and stays there for weeks.

It measures the amount of glucose in the interstitial fluid, a body fluid that surrounds cells and tissues. 

According to the company, a normal blood glucose level for a non-diabetic is 70 to 140 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter of blood).

Any time my levels spiked or went over this threshold, I would get a notification on my phone, and a prompt would come up and ask me to explain what I was doing and eating around that time.