As long as you stick to these hard-and-fast rules, having pizza night can help you achieve your weight loss goals.
Pizza shouldn’t be too detrimental to your health. To tell you the truth, it is a Caprese salad slathered on some bread. Unfortunately, American food manufacturers have transformed this Mediterranean masterpiece into a caloric monstrosity with enough sodium and fat per slice to make an artery cry. This horror has enough sodium and fat to make an artery cry. Welp. However, pizza is delicious, and we want you to enjoy it. And you can! You can make a regular pizza night to support your efforts to lose weight and even improve your health if you follow these six straightforward rules to reduce the number of calories in pizza. Mangia, mangia!
1. Don’t Be Plain
By topping a pizza with ingredients high in fiber and protein, you can bring down its Glycemic Index (GI), which measures how rapidly blood glucose levels rise in response to a particular food. For instance, while a basic cheese pizza receives an 80 (out of 100), a supreme veggie pie only receives a score of 49. The best toppings are raw vegetables and lean meats like chicken breast and ham. Stay away from processed meats like bacon and sausage, as well as vegetables that have been fried, roasted, or grilled (onions and eggplant are frequently first cooked in oil!). This will help you reduce your sodium and fat intake.
2. See Red
The lycopene-rich tomato sauce that pizza is topped with provides the greatest potential health benefits. Recent research has shown that lycopene may play a role in lowering the risk of developing prostate cancer. Unfortunately, white pizzas lack the most important nutritional component of a traditional pie, so take some advice from Quentin Tarantino and go for the redder the pizza, the better.
3. Think Thin
The pizza crust is mostly bad for you because it’s high in calories but has no nutritional value. Pizza dough is typically made with refined white flour, which provides very little nutrition to the body. Eating pizza dough will cause an increase in insulin levels and a desire for more food. The less crust you consume, the better off you will be. That being the case, pizzas with thin crusts will almost always be the superior choice.
4. Turn Up the Heat
If you add a bit of spice to your pie, you can trick yourself into eating less and simultaneously speed up your metabolism. According to the findings of a study carried out by researchers from Canada, men who ate spicy appetizers had a caloric intake that was 200 calories lower than that of men who did not consume any hot sauce. Adding a few grinds of fresh black pepper, some red chili flakes, or stingers to your pizza is an easy way to reduce the number of calories you consume without sacrificing flavor.
5. Cut the Cheese
Simply requesting “half cheese” when you order pizza is an easy way to cut the amount of saturated fat on a pie with a plain or vegetable topping by 50 percent! Even if you decide to add an extra tablespoon of pungent parmesan to your reduced-calorie pie to increase the cheese content, you will still save mega pizza calories by doing so. One tablespoon of parmesan contains only 22 calories.
6. Go Green
A salad served as an appetizer can cut a person’s overall calorie consumption during the course of a meal by as much as 11 percent. In the case of a pizza binge with 600 calories, this would mean a savings of approximately 120 calories, which is equivalent to running more than a mile. Vinaigrette, of which you should use only a scant tablespoon to dress your greens, may help you shed extra pounds by maintaining a steady level of blood sugar in the body, according to some preliminary research. According to the findings of a study published in Diabetes Care, for pre-diabetics who added vinegar to a meal that was high in carbohydrates (like pizza!), the subsequent rise in blood sugar was reduced by 34%.
Learn more: The Best Taco Pizza Recipe