Richard Meadows ate pizza for 222 days in a row in an attempt to get fit eating the "most sinful food imaginable".

The chest pains started on the afternoon of Day 104. As I walked home from the office, they graduated from an annoying cramp to a stabbing staccato that left me breathless.

I ploughed into my daily deep-dish pizza dinner (plain cheese with a BBQ swirl), but lacked the usual gusto. Hot knives driving into your ribcage really take the edge off your appetite. By 10pm, I could barely move. Clutching a packet of frozen peas to my side, I contemplated a trip to the emergency room, and my life choices in general.

Three months earlier, the daily pizza project had seemed like a great lark. I'd been feeling weak and out of shape, with nagging injuries that hobbled my amateur career in strength sports before it began.

JASON CREAGHAN "At times, I wasn't sure if I was consuming pizza, or if it was consuming me."

What better way to restore myself to peak physical condition than to hit the gym hard while devouring an entire pizza every day? With a whopping 1600 calories and a decent chunk of protein, the Domino's $5 range represented absurdly good value for money.

To top it all off, I could bug people out by getting jacked while gorging myself on the most sinful food imaginable. I took a blood test and some other baseline measurements, and thumbed open the Domino's app.

Day 49. Starting to hit the wall? #eatpizzaeveryday #🍕 #pizzagram #peakpizza #cleaneating #paleo #fitfam A photo posted by Richard Meadows (@richard.meadows) on Dec 14, 2015 at 11:54pm PST

Now I lay immobilised in bed, thinking dark thoughts. The pain in my heart was as much emotional as it was physical. Only a few days earlier, my beloved Domino's had betrayed me – their biggest fan and most loyal customer.

To commemorate my 100th pizza, I'd posted a photo to their Facebook page, reclining on the boxes I'd collected and sharing a few highlights from the journey to date: "Bowel movements now arrive every hour on the hour, and the cheese nightmares are becoming less frequent!"

It racked up several thousand likes that night, with luminaries like All Black Brodie Retallick throwing their considerable weight behind me. When I woke the next morning, my heartfelt tribute had been deleted without explanation. I felt like I was choking on a particularly jagged shard of thin 'n' crispy crust. Domino's hadn't just disrespected me; they had disrespected World Rugby Player of the Year 2014. The relationship was over.

DAY 101. Happy birthday to me! Eating all this good pizza nutrients is making me age in reverse, sort of Benjamin button-style. Turned 19 years young today n got treated to an extra large dish from Pizza Hut. Considering moving all my business away from Dominos after they ripped my heart from my chest cavity (Will explain tomorrow) Today is a day for celebration n joy 🎉🎊😇 #eatpizzaeveryday A photo posted by Richard Meadows (@richard.meadows) on Feb 9, 2016 at 1:51am PST

I'd hit rock bottom, but the only direction to go was up. The next day, the chest pains eased. Pizza wasn't killing me after all; I'd just pulled a muscle in my ribcage from going too hard at the gym.

The prognosis: One month with no heavy lifting. Eating a whole pizza every day while remaining sedentary sounded like a fast track to blowing up like the Michelin Man.

Nevertheless, I decided to slash the rest of my food to the bare minimum and forge on ahead. There was a new love in my life, keeping my spirits up and nursing me back to health: Pizza Hut.

Within days, I was on first-name terms with the Dominion Rd store manager. Hriday never judged me for my gluttonous ways, and we soon built a rapport. He worked long hours, and Sunday was his only day off. If I went to a different branch during the week, he would worry. On Day 151, Hriday finally put a ring on it. A burnt onion ring, admittedly; the first in a series of slightly charred but complimentary food items this lovely man would present to me.

The Pizza Hut chain also offered a whole new menu to tickle my tastebuds, even if most of the items were difficult to distinguish from the cardboard box they arrived in.

"Aren't you sick of pizza yet?" asked literally everyone other than Hriday. Never! Most people won't admit it, but bad pizza is still pretty good. On Christmas Day, revellers stuffed with turkey and ham and all the trimmings jeered at my pathetic dinner; a cold, stale Hawaiian pizza I'd strategically bought the day before. But mockery soon gave way to envy, and in no time I was having to defend my plate from drunken pizza bandits.



One man and his pizza pie. Photos: Jason Creaghan

My capacity to eat pizza ad infinitum was a surprise even to myself, and it came with an unexpected benefit. Not having to think about cooking dinner, buying groceries, or where I felt like eating out was liberating. When your thought process only stretches as far as "BBQ or aioli swirl?", it frees up a lot of time and mental energy to focus on other things.

Of course, it wasn't all sunshine and pepperoni. Choking down an entire pizza after already eating two burgers for dinner is no fun at all. Confession time: On Day 173 I donated two slices to a hungry homeless guy, and more than a few crusts went to my girlfriend. If I physically couldn't finish, I made up for it the next day. At times, I wasn't sure if I was consuming pizza, or it was consuming me. I blew up at my boss when she wouldn't let me do a routine interview with the CEO of Domino's, fearing a conflict of interest. A red mist of tomato paste had descended upon me.

Reactions to the pizza project were mixed. "The dreeeeam," breathed one girl at the gym. Others had their doubts about my health, both physical and mental. A company offered to sponsor me for a range of tests, but got cold feet when they realised the full extent of what I was doing.

I was determined to prove the doubters wrong. By the time I cracked the 200 day mark, things were going swimmingly. The weight I had put on was mostly on my chest and back, with a little fleshing out of the chicken legs.

My waist was unchanged, and lumps faintly resembling abs could be observed in the right lighting. My body fat percentage was the same from start to finish, and came down on one measure.

In the gym, I did chin-ups with an extra 50 kilograms hanging from my waist, pressed my bodyweight above my head, and squatted 160kg, despite my dodgy knees. It was the fittest I'd been in years. On the outside, everything looked good. On the inside, for all I knew, my arteries resembled a stuffed crust oozing mozzarella. If so, the only thing the experiment would prove was the extent of my own stupidity.



Day 222 had a nice symmetry to it, so I went in for a final blood test and called the whole thing quits. I'd consumed my entire bodyweight in pizza, and then some. That weekend, my flatmates and I built a funeral pyre for the hundreds of greasy boxes, which were hidden from the landlady in hermetically sealed rubbish bags on top of my wardrobe.

We got drunk and set them on fire. I ate chicken soup for dinner. Green and blue chemical flames leapt into the night. The neighbours looked anxious, but refrained from calling the fire department. It was a cathartic experience, but I couldn't fully relax yet.

It took two weeks to muster up the courage to check my bloodwork. Praise the pizza gods! My cholesterol was not only in the healthy range, but had actually fallen. So had my triglycerides and LDL (bad cholesterol) levels. HDL, the good cholesterol, had slipped slightly. I'd hoped things would stay about the same, but three out of four measures had miraculously improved.

Pizza is the poster child for unhealthy food. It packs a boatload of calories, carbs, fat, salt and often processed ingredients into every slice. Rumour has it that it was invented by the devil himself. Yet after taking in over 350,000 calories of the stuff, my vital signs improved in almost every measurable way. How can this be?

Context is everything. The calories in a large pizza would cover about 80 per cent of the average person's energy needs. For me, due to my exercise regime, it was more like 40 per cent. The bulk of my calories came not from pizza, but from green protein smoothies, chicken, rice and vegetables, bananas, and oatmeal. I dragged myself to the gym four times a week, and did some sort of cardio most days.

Without the exercise component, the end result would not have been pretty. Likewise, if I'd taken the Super Size Me approach and eaten a pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner, they wouldn't have been able to fit my bloated corpse on the mortuary slab.



Richard Meadows, pizza glut. Photo: Jason Creaghan Richard Meadows, pizza glut. Photo: Jason Creaghan

Everyone knows pizza is 'bad' for you. From childhood, the healthy vs unhealthy binary is drilled into us. A compulsion to pigeonhole everything into distinct categories is probably human nature, but it sure causes a lot of problems. The truth is, there are almost no objectively 'good' or 'bad' foods; only good or bad diets. That diet in turn depends entirely on each person's circumstances.

The false dichotomy presented by finger-wagging public health experts, #cleaneating social media influencers, and scaremongering documentary producers is messing us up. The enemy isn't carbs, or sugar, or fat, or whatever else is at the centre of the latest witch hunt. It's ignorance. Unnecessarily restrictive diets have never been more popular, while juice fasts, 'detoxes' and other such quackery continue to run riot. Some of these fad diets are one step removed from eating disorders, but they're socially acceptable ones that rack up hundreds of Instagram likes.

The kicker is that overly restrictive diets don't even work. Any dietitian worth their salt knows adherence is the number one factor for making a sustainable lifestyle change. Cutting out any food deemed "dirty" only sets us up for failure, guilt, and an endless loop of self-flagellation.

It should go without saying that my pizza journey wasn't a scientific experiment. It was simply a very tasty stunt. If there's one takeaway from my takeaways tale, it's this. Short of a medical condition, there's no reason we can't find a way to fit the food we love into the overall context of our lifestyles.

Even a decadent, deep-dish pizza; groaning under the weight of its toppings, drowning in barbecue sauce, and enjoyed guilt-free down to the last strand of mozzarella.