Healthy Pizza Toppings

Wouldn’t it be amazing if eating pizza was actually good for you? You laugh, but with the right combination of ingredients, pizza can be made into something your body will thank you for later.

Pizza can make you fat if you’re not careful. Check out our article “Will Pizza Make me Fat?” if you want to read more about this. A careful selection of healthy toppings, however, will help you lose weight and feel better about yourself.

We’ve worked really hard on coming up with the list below for you. In it, you will find a breakdown of over 50 of the most common pizza toppings, along with their fat content, carbohydrate count, and calories in order to help you make healthy choices when it comes to making a homemade pizza pie.

Contents

How to Use This List

If you’re trying to be careful about what goes into your body, a little planning goes a long way.

Take a look at our list below and choose some of the healthier options. Make a list and go shopping – stick to it…no cheating.

When you’re ready to make your pie, only get out the ingredients you planned on using. Keep serving sizes in mind and, of course, have self-control when it comes time to eat.

One of these would help a whole lot!

Pass the Salad, Please

Have a healthy salad as a side dish and only put one slice of pizza on your plate at a time…that way you won’t feel obligated to eat another piece when you begin to feel full. Enhance your salad with lots of fresh ingredients – cucumbers, celery, peppers, carrots, broccoli, onions – these all contain fiber which will help you feel full and speed up the elimination process.

your body will thank you for it! I promise!

Say Cheese!

As you’ll see below, cheese contains a lot of fat, but really, what’s a pizza without it? Go ahead and enjoy some but be careful how much you put on. Measure out how much you want to use before you start. If you don’t, you’ll likely end up piling on an excessive amount.

The extra fat and sodium will catch up to you in the form of a bloated belly and high cholesterol. My favorite lower fat choices for cheese are mozzarella, parmesan, and goat cheese.

Slow Down!

Eat slowly – I know you’ve heard this before, but if you want to lose weight this is a solid strategy to employ.

There’s also ample science to back this up. According to this article, Harvard Medical School writer Ann MacDonald states that the feeling of a full stomach is just a part of the body’s reaction to being satisfied after a meal – it’s the brain that is key as it must receive a number of signals from digestive hormones produced by your intestines.

So be sure to slow down and let your body have time to send those signals. If you don’t you’ll eat more than your body wants or needs, and even more than you need to “feel” full (if you slowed down, you’d feel full before you overate!)

No, don’t eat this! I just mean eat about as fast as this guy moves!

Preparing the Crust

If you’re using a ready-made pizza crust, you’ll likely find the nutritional facts on the back of the package. Use this to help you calculate your serving size and nutritional intake – ie: how much fat is in the serving.

If you’ll be making homemade pizza dough, here are some general helpful guidelines for fat, carbohydrates, and calories:

a 2.2 oz or 57-gram serving which is about one slice of pizza from a 12” pizza contains about 3 grams of fat, 22 grams of carbohydrate and 120 calories
a 2 oz or 55-gram serving which is about one slice of pizza from a 14” thin crust pizza contains about 2.8 grams of fat, 18 grams of carbohydrate and 109 calories

If you want to lighten up your pizza, even more, consider using a tortilla as the base.

one 6” flour tortilla contains 3 grams of fat, 16 grams of carbohydrate, and 95 calories

Another healthy option is a cauliflower crust.

one slice (or 1/6 of a crust) contains 5 grams of fat, 3 grams of carbohydrate and 84 calories

I hope you find this useful, but more importantly, I hope this helps you in your journey to a healthier YOU!