If you’re trying to watch your weight, you need to do more than count calories. You need to make your calories count. Many foods — particularly prepared and processed foods — include a plethora of empty calories. They don’t add vitamins. They don’t make you full, They don’t improve the taste. Why are they there? To make the product last longer on the shelf. Thus the pizza you make at home tastes better and has fewer calories than one you’d buy in the store. Many of the same empty calories are included in the foods you have delivered too.
Is the lower calorie count worth the time it takes to prepare your own? I’ll let you decide. Let’s compare the caloric and nutritional details of the veggie and the pineapple/sausage pizzas on this site to similar pizzas you could buy at Domino’s.
Since Domino’s doesn’t have an exact fit for either pizza, we’re using their “calometer” with their “build a pizza tool” to make the closest comparisons. (And, by the way, nice job Domino’s for making this easy for your calorie-counting customers!) For the veggie pizza, we compared a large Domino’s hand-tossed pizza with marinara, cheese, onions and spinach.
For the pineapple sausage pizza, we’ve compared a large hand-tossed pizza with marinara, cheese, sausage and pineapple.
The result? While our veggie pizza adds up to 170 calories per slice. Domino’s adds nearly 100 additional calories at 260 calories per slice. Where did all those extra calories come from? Mainly from a bunch of ingredients that you can’t pronounce and that have little or no nutritional value. Importantly too, where our pizza accounts for roughly 11% of the sodium you should have in a day; their’s has twice as much — 22% of your recommended daily allotment based on a 2000 calorie diet.
Our pineapple and sausage pizza adds up to 250 calories per slice. Theirs: 316.
If you took a look at the pizzas you could buy in the market, the comparisons are even more compelling. Consider this: A Boboli pizza crust has 180 calories per slice. That’s before you put a single thing on it. Our home-made pizza crust sets you back just 120 calories. Assuming the same toppings, you can eat three pieces of ours and consume the same number of calories as you would eating just 2 pieces of theirs. Again, sodium — essentially salt, which contributes to high blood pressure, bloating and other dietary ills — is vastly higher in the store-bought pizza. Boboli pizza dough includes 15% of your daily allotment of sodium; our dough has just 3%.
One more thing: If you’re also watching your budget, ordering a large Domino’s pizza will cost you $12.99 versus about $2 for the pizza you make on your own.
