It may sound like the world's most ideal cleanse, but eating nothing but pizza straight for a week can leave your body feeling highs and lows.
Posting her journey on Cosmopolitan on Wednesday, writer Charlotte Palermino outlined her day-by-day eating habits and how she felt after consuming slices and slices of pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
To start, Palermino notes she had several rules for her cleanse — this is a cleanse, after all. The pizza must contain crust, there had to be cheese or toppings, there must be a type of sauce (olive oil is fine) and no supplementary foods or alcohol were allowed.
She began outlining her full seven days (she even had bonus slices on day eight), along with her slice count, mood, and pictures of New York's finest slices like this one below:
In the first few days, Palermino explains, she was bloated, constipated and experienced heartburn. By day five, she writes, it was more of a roller coaster.
"I go from loving my life to hating everything. At times, my water tastes like pizza. The air tastes like pizza. I wasn't that hungry for life anymore, so I didn't eat anything for breakfast. At lunch, I had two slices from Angelo's Pizza. Look at my sad picture. I'd lost the will to Instagram. I used four lemons on this pizza. It didn't help."
But by the end of the week, things had changed. In fact, Palermino felt better and ended up losing five founds.
Brooke Bulloch, a registered dietitian at Food To Fit in Saskatoon says when it comes to cleanses, losing actual fat doesn't happen as quickly as you would think (or want it to).
"Nobody likes to hear this, but losing fat is a slow weight loss," Bulloch says. "When people take a cleanse and they lose more than two or three pounds a week, it is water weight."
Palermino also talked to a dietitian, who explained why she could have lost weight over the week (we won't give it away here).
In 2009, pizza shop owner Matt McClellan dubbed the term "pizza diet" after eating nothing but pies for 30 days. At the end, he lost 24 pounds, dropped an inch on his biceps and dropped his cholesterol by 86.
McClellan's pizza diet included healthier pizza toppings like skim milk cheese, fresh veggies, avocado and chicken. He also continued to exercise and weight train within the month. He attributed his health changes to portion control and eating in moderation.
"With the pizza diet Matt proved that pizza can be part of a healthy diet if moderation and wise topping choices are selected. He believes that the key to any diet is portion control and that’s basically what his pizza diet is, a way to enjoy a great food, but not eat the whole pie in one go," notes the Diet Blog.
Bulloch adds that for anyone who does any type of cleanse, weight you've lost will eventually come back if you go back to your old eating habits.
And while Bulloch adds there really is no research behind doing cleanses in the first place, her advice on eating less has to do with being more mindful and alert of what you're eating.
"We just want to go on restrictive diets and we forget were humans and we are meant to enjoy food," she says. "When we're thinking about what we're eating, we eat less of it because were more satisfied."
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