Music producer Benny Blanco has drawn attention after revealing the results of an unusual five-day diet experiment in which he ate only pizza. Blanco said the challenge was designed to demonstrate that weight loss can still occur while eating foods that are generally considered indulgent. After starting the experiment at 152.2 pounds, he finished at 147.5 pounds, reporting a total loss of 4.7 pounds over five days.
Blanco, 38, documented the experiment through a series of videos shared online, giving followers a look at what happened when pizza became his only source of food. Rather than following a conventional diet built around vegetables, lean proteins or carefully measured meals, the music producer decided to rely exclusively on a large thin-crust cheese pizza for the duration of the challenge.
The idea behind the experiment was straightforward but provocative. Blanco wanted to demonstrate that a person could potentially lose weight without completely eliminating foods they enjoy. At the beginning of the challenge, he explained his motivation by saying, “prove you can lose weight eating literally anything.” His experiment quickly attracted attention because it challenged the common assumption that certain individual foods automatically determine whether someone will gain or lose weight.
On the first day, Blanco showed the pizza he had selected and explained how he intended to divide it throughout the day. Holding a slice, he said, “This is 1/16 of everything I can eat today.” The comment illustrated just how carefully he was approaching the limited amount of food available to him. Although pizza was the only food involved, the overall quantity he consumed remained an important part of the experiment.
The challenge became unexpectedly complicated on the second day when Blanco discovered that some of his food had disappeared. While at work, he said someone had eaten a significant portion of the pizza he had planned to use for the experiment. “Just came back into work and someone ate like eight slices of my pizza,” he said. The incident left him with fewer slices than expected and added another unusual problem to an already restrictive eating routine.
Blanco also continued his normal life during the experiment, which made the pizza-only challenge more difficult. On the same day, he visited the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles with his wife, Selena Gomez. While Gomez enjoyed a meal at the hotel, Blanco continued following his unusual pizza-only routine. The contrast highlighted one of the practical difficulties of maintaining a highly restrictive diet while socializing and eating outside the home.
By the third day, the novelty of eating pizza had clearly begun to disappear. What might initially have sounded enjoyable had become repetitive, and Blanco openly expressed his frustration with having the same food repeatedly. “I’m tired of pizza. I hate my life,” he said. His reaction captured an important part of the experiment that is often overlooked when unusual diets become popular online: eating the same food repeatedly can become psychologically exhausting even when the food itself is something a person normally enjoys.
As the challenge approached its final day, Blanco continued to joke about his increasingly unusual relationship with pizza. Reflecting on how repetitive the experience had become, he said, “I don’t even remember who I am as a human being. Like, what was life before pizza?” Despite the complaints, he also said he felt physically good during the experiment and described himself as having a “spring in my step.”
The final weigh-in produced the result that Blanco had been waiting for. After five days of eating only pizza, his weight had dropped from 152.2 pounds to 147.5 pounds. That represented a difference of 4.7 pounds. Reacting to the result, Blanco said, “I just lost 4.7 pounds in five days eating only pizza,” before adding, “Nothing matters. You can do whatever you want.”
While the result may appear surprising, a short-term change on the weighing scale does not necessarily mean that all of the weight lost was body fat. Body weight can fluctuate because of changes in water retention, glycogen stores, sodium intake, digestive contents and overall food intake. A five-day experiment therefore cannot establish that eating pizza alone is an effective or healthy long-term weight-loss strategy.
The experiment also raises an important distinction between calorie intake and food quality. Weight loss generally depends heavily on the relationship between energy consumed and energy used by the body. A person can potentially lose weight while eating foods that are high in calories if their overall intake remains below their energy requirements. At the same time, nutritional adequacy matters. A diet consisting exclusively of one type of pizza would provide a limited range of nutrients and would not normally offer the variety of protein sources, fruits, vegetables, fibre, vitamins and minerals associated with a balanced eating pattern.
