A Tale of Two Pizzas

Balancing weight loss and good-times continues to challenge me. Last night, the White Tiger and I met some Metlife friends at Kathy's on Hickman. One drink turned into several, and after eating light all day, and missing dinner, both of us were starving when we left the bar at 10:30pm. Neither one of us wanted to cook, so we stopped at Dahl's and got a frozen pizza.















Boy, how the calories add up. I don't even want to tell you about the liquid-calories; let's focus on this pizza. So delicious, so bad for you. One sixth of this pizza has 360 calories, 15 grams of fat--yikes. And, completely lacking any will-power and forgetting completely about my goals, I ate 810 calories worth of this pizza.

But, it didn't have to be that way. On Tuesday, I thawed a loaf of 100% whole wheat bread dough thinking we would make our own pizza. Instead of eating at home, we went downtown and had some drinks and tapas with some friends. We didn't make this pizza last night either, obviously, so this morning, thinking that the bread dough wouldn't last much longer in the fridge (yeast some some wacky stuff), I whipped up what I am calling a homemade ghetto-pantry pizza.















The White Tiger and I love pizza, and we especially love Hawaiian pizza--salty ham, sweet pineapple, savory onions--oh, so good. We had everything we needed.

100% whole wheat bread dough 1170 calories
1 small can tomato sauce 70 calories, plus some spices.
3 gloves of garlic, minced 13 calories
6 slices of deli-ham 50 calories
1/4 cup parmesan cheese 110 calories
1 cup low fat mozzeralla 180 calories
1/2 cup onion 24 calories
1/2 cup pineapple chunks

The whole pizza has 1697 calories, compare that to the 2160 in the frozen-pizza. If we cut it up into 10 reasonable size slices that's only 170 calories a slice. Heck, two slices is only 340 calories, still less than one slice of Digiorno's.

In hindsight, I would have done things differently: two drink maximum, plus lots more water. I am sure my brain and body would love me a lot more at this point. We should have made pizza at home; it would have taken just as much time as stopping at the store, pre-heating the oven, and cooking the frozen calorie-bomb.

What have we learned? Booze makes me lazy and facilitates bad decisions. It's easy to forget my larger goals when I am taking a gin-bath. Cooking at home is not that hard or time consuming and the rewards are great. I'm not going to beat myself up, but I am going to let those dueling pizzas be a reminder that I have amazing alternative to eating crap that won't derail my goals.