Got healthier on pizza

Stuff reports:

What better way to restore myself to peak physical condition than to hit the gym hard while devouring an entire pizza every day? With a whopping 1600 calories and a decent chunk of protein, the Domino’s $5 range represented absurdly good value for money.

To top it all off, I could bug people out by getting jacked while gorging myself on the most sinful food imaginable. I took a blood test and some other baseline measurements, and thumbed open the Domino’s app.

So how did it go?

Around 200 days later:

It took two weeks to muster up the courage to check my bloodwork. Praise the pizza gods! My cholesterol was not only in the healthy range, but had actually fallen. So had my triglycerides and LDL (bad cholesterol) levels. HDL, the good cholesterol, had slipped slightly. I’d hoped things would stay about the same, but three out of four measures had miraculously improved.

How did this happen:

Context is everything. The calories in a large pizza would cover about 80 per cent of the average person’s energy needs. For me, due to my exercise regime, it was more like 40 per cent. The bulk of my calories came not from pizza, but from green protein smoothies, chicken, rice and vegetables, bananas, and oatmeal. I dragged myself to the gym four times a week, and did some sort of cardio most days.

The lesson here is there is no such thing as food which is inherently unhealthy. If you also exercise a lot, and eat other foods, you can get eat a pizza a day.

When public health activists insists certain foods must be banned, taxed, stopped from advertising, they think the food is the problem, rather than the choices the person makes.

A pie a day is a bad idea. A pie on a cold winter’s day at school is a great idea.