Benny Blanco says he's lost weight after only eating pizza
Music producer Benny Blanco posed a serious health question to his fans: Is it really possible to lose weight if he eats pizza every single day?
Pizza can often be demonised as a fatty, fast-food item that should be avoided at all costs when on a health kick or living a healthy, balanced, ‘locked-in’ lifestyle like Chris Daughtry.
However, Angel Planells, a Seattle-based registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, isn’t as convinced.
“Rather than say it is healthy or unhealthy, I will say that it can depend on what we do with the pizza in regards to the size, sauce, and toppings,” he claimed.
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“The reason why pizza may carry the ‘unhealthy’ moniker is that it’s usually tied to the calories, sodium, and carbohydrates.”
Blanco, whose real name is Benjamin Joseph Levin, recently embarked on an experiment to discover whether pizza was really that bad for you.
His findings suggested that eating a pie could help you drop pounds.
Benny Blanco’s pizza weight loss experiment
The crux of Benny Blanco’s pizza experiment was to highlight that you don’t actually have to jump into gruelling crash diets to see results.
“You can lose weight by literally eating anything,” he alleged on day one of the investigation.
The 38-year-old started the video by hopping on a pair of scales. He weighed 152.2lbs (69kg).
After the first weigh-in, Blanco explained that he would be digging into a pizza every day for the next five days, with the first being a Domino’s thin crust.
The second day saw the ‘Love Yourself’ hitmaker heading to a restaurant with his wife, Selena Gomez, where he pulled a slice of pie out from underneath a tablecloth.
However, his enthusiasm seemingly began to wane on day three of the project; Blanco opened up a pizza box and stated: “I hate my life.”
The penultimate day continued in the same vein, with the fifth and final instalment causing him to claim he couldn’t ‘remember who [he] was as a human’.
“What was life before pizza?,” he questioned. “I’ll tell you something: I feel f***ing good. Spring in my step!”
After consuming his fifth and final Domino’s pizza, the five-time BMI Songwriter of the Year winner headed back to the scales for his final weigh-in.
After eating nothing but pizza for 120 hours, Blanco revealed that his finishing weight was 147.5lbs (66.9kg)—a 4.7lbs (2.13kg) reduction.
“I just lost 4.7 pounds in five days eating only pizza.
“Nothing matters; you can eat whatever you want. Fk failure. Fk everything.”
The Buff Dudes YouTube pizza experiment
Blanco’s five-day pizza adventure comes after popular YouTubers, the Buff Dudes, took on a similar challenge.
The pair also ate nothing but pizza for an entire week whilst also making sure they stayed within a daily target of 2,700 calories, ate 200g of protein, consumed 250g of carbohydrates, and had 100g of fat.
“We thought it would be a great challenge because pizza is sometimes vilified as a cheat food,' they said.
“We wanted to prove that you can almost eat anything as long as you stick within your calorie and macro range.”
At the end of the seven days, the Buff Dudes explained that they weren’t ‘unhealthy’ and that pizza can definitely have its place in a balanced diet.
“It's not so much what you're eating, it's how you're designing what you're eating,” they concluded.
Experts weigh in on eating pizza regularly
In 2025, Lisa Powell, PhD, professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, authored a study suggesting that when children eat pizza, they consume more calories, saturated fat and sodium than usual.
Despite the findings, the expert did not state that the popular fast-food item should be binned for good.
Instead, she recommended offsetting the item with big bowls of salad and staying ‘away from eating numerous slices at a time, and pizza laden with salty and fatty toppings’.
The idea of pairing pizza with salad has been touted by Dr Caroline Cederquist, a board-certified bariatric physician and weight-loss specialist based in Naples, Florida.
She told Men’s Health Magazine: “This helps me get nutrients in and eases hunger, so I don’t feel ravenous once the pizza arrives.
“Any addition of vegetables also makes for a health-savvy pizza night.”
Meanwhile, Dr Emilie Combet, professor of human nutrition at the University of Glasgow School of Medicine, previously explained to Time that with the ‘right ingredients and the right proportions, pizza can be part of a nutritionally balanced meal’.
Jennifer M. Poti, a research-track assistant professor in nutritional epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recommended making pizza with a ‘whole-grain crust and fresh vegetable toppings’.
She added that it should be prepared with lower sodium and be served in ‘reasonable portion sizes’.
Ella Scott