Pasquale Cozzolino - The pizza diet: how I lost 100 pounds eating my favorite food--and you can too!

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Copyright 2017 by Galvanized Brands

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Published in the United States by Galvanized Books, a division of Galvanized Brands, LLC, New York

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ISBN9781940358024

Ebook ISBN9780399179976

Interior design by Judy Ross

Interior photography by Jennifer May, adapted for ebook

Cover design by Joseph Heroun

Cover photograph by Getty

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It was August 2015. I tipped the scale at an enormous 370 pounds. My doctor told me to stop eating so much. If you keep this up, she warned me, youll be dead of a heart attack soon.

It wasnt always this way. When I came to New York from Naples in 2011, I weighed 254 pounds, which is fairly healthy for a guy who stands 6-foot-6. I had a dream of opening my own restaurant, but I needed investors, and investors had to be convinced I could run it myself. So I did my research. I rushed around New York City tasting every new experience, visiting two or three restaurants a day. One day, Id visit a restaurant posing as a reporter from Italy and ask all the questions I could think of. The next, Id just eat my way through the menu. When you eat and eat, your stomach stretches, and mine did. To feel satisfied, you have to eat more. I ate a lot more.

It began with an occasional soda. And then something tasty and fast to go with it. Fast food made me feel goodfor a moment. When youre trying to build a career and raise a family, youre hustling; everything else isnt so importantlike what youre eating. You grab whatevers easy and fast. It never occurred to me, but Id stopped paying attention to food, and I ignored what poor eating was doing to my body. I just bought bigger pants. Here I was an expert in food, a chef who had spent years studying how to create healthy meals with the freshest ingredients, and I was eating myself to death with junk food.

My wife Jordie and friends noticed the change in me, and they started to get upset. Okay, I said, Ill take care of it. But I didnt. And then I couldnt bend over to pick up my son at the playground. There was a hundred pounds of fat between me and my Francesco.

I had dangerously high cholesterol, shockingly low good cholesterol, with triglycerides at 464 when they shouldve been under 150. My doctor pleaded with me, Think about your wife, your young son, and the second child on the way.

That woke me up. I finally realized I had a responsibility to survive. And if I wanted to survive, I had to change.

EXTRA CHEESE: At my heaviest, I weighed 370 pounds. It was time to get serious about my diet.

I had tried diets before, of course, but I found that I could never stick to them. I would drop a few pounds, then lose the discipline to continue and ultimately gain all the weight back. Youve heard the statistics: Between 80 and 95 percent of people who diet end up putting weight back on and then some. Is it the dieter who fails, or is the diet so restrictive that its too difficult to follow? At the doctors office, in that moment, I resolved that whatever changes I made this time had to be permanent. I would find a way to lose weight on my terms and keep it off for good. But I needed a strategy that was different from my previous attempts to lose weight.

That summer I went home to Naples and ran into an old friend whod lost a lot of weight. I asked him how he did it. He introduced me to Giovanni Moscarella, an Italian nutritionist whos famous for his book