If Your Man Is Being Cranky, Just Tell Him To Eat Pasta

Being hangry is totally a real thing, and so are dudes who have IMS.

What’s IMS? It stands for Irritable Male Syndrome, and it’s basically the male form of PMS. Similarly to PMS, there isn’t a cure-all for IMS. But there is something that might be able to help your man stop being an asshole, and that solution is carbs.

Seriously. While talking to Dr. Jed Diamond, the lead researcher on IMS in humans and author of The Enlightened Marriage: The 5 Transformative Stages of Relationships and Why the Best Is Still to Come. He explained some things that can be done to help prevent IMS in men, and one of the things is to make sure they’re getting enough healthy carbs (a.k.a, they can’t be on the Atkins diet).

“Turns out, if you lower good carbohydrates – the healthy carbs like vegetables and potatoes and pasta – it actually lowers your serotonin level. Serotonin is the chemical in your brain that gives you a sense of peace and well being,” explains Diamond. “Don’t lower your good carbohydrates needlessly. If you’re finding yourself more irritable on your low carb diet, you may want to look at changing that.”

If your boyfriend is really cutting weight or allergic to all the healthy carbs, no worries, there are some other things you can do “like lowering stress, getting a better night’s sleep,” explains Diamond.

But getting him to order a big plate of spaghetti seems a lot easier than trying to lower every god-damn stressor in bae’s life, doesn’t it? Or maybe you can act like you’re playing wifey for the night and cook him up some pasta to disguise the fact that you’re actually just trying to solve his crankiness? And if bae gets to eat pasta, that means you might as well eat some pasta too, right? F your stupid gluten-free diet, at least for the night.

Okay, in all seriousness, if your dude actually seems to be affected by IMS, you should have him take this quiz and talk to each other about it. But talking about his current state over a bowl of mac and cheese definitely won’t hurt. Yay carbs!

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