Nutrition from a Costco Pizza
I ate an entire Costco pizza, and I felt good running the next day. So let’s smash some science together and learn some things through this experience.
When I say I ate an entire Costco pizza, I mean I didn’t get up from the couch until every crumb was consumed. Why? I wanted to see if I could, and the founders of the Fishbyte App said I couldn’t (#FreePublicity).
It was not a fueling strategy, and I felt pretty awful when I was done. Food coma took on a new meaning, and I would not recommend it. BUT, the craziest thing happened. 18 hours later, I had a really good run. Not fast or long, but just a really good feeling hour-long run where my heart rate was low and my pace was easy and consistent. Objectively (as a coach), the numbers look better than any other run in the last two weeks. So, I thought this would be a good way to convey some nutrition thoughts and numbers using a fun delivery method: Pizza!
What had I just eaten?
This article is feeling a little embarrassing to write, but I also don’t want to lie; I am a bit impressed I consumed this much without the need to purge. Considering the staggering nutritionals, I felt pretty good when I was done. Along with the pizza, I took down about a liter and a half of water. So what can we learn, other than I can eat an entire pizza without standing up?
The unexpected experiment
I’m running around 60 miles per week right now, including two workouts. It’s not the biggest volume, but there is quite a bit of intensity. I am trying to get faster and fitter in the first extended break between goals in over a year. 60 miles is less than half of what a lot of people run at this time of year, but I’m asking quite a bit of my body every week.
And through this block I have been wondering how I can improve efficiency, results, and recovery. I never thought 4,000 calories of pizza would have a positive effect. And I don’t want any of the following to come across as recommending others follow my unique idea. But, maybe we need to conduct a more standard study. Researchers contact me.
Maybe I have been looking for gains in the wrong places.
There are so many little levers we can pull with training. I enjoy pulling them as a coach with different athletes aiming for all different types of goals. But there are way more levers in nutrition. As a species, we don’t even know all of them!
But, nutrition doesn’t show up on Strava, so endurance athletes probably ignore them too much. So, I am here to use my glutony to offer some science that you can apply in a more controlled way.
464 grams of carbs
This number is incredible. Good job belly!
The human body doesn’t have an unlimited supply of carbohydrate. If you have ever bonked, you know this well. We store carbohydrate primarily as glycogen in our muscles and liver, and training draws that supply down surprisingly quickly. The higher carb revolution was destined to succeed. We have to replace those carbs!
Here is the carb loading science. A small 2026 study gave endurance athletes 6, 8 or 10 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight per day for 48 hours. The athletes eating 10 g/kg finished with significantly more muscle glycogen than either of the lower-carb groups. The amazing thing is that the experiment didn’t find a limit to the “carb loading.” But let’s use caution because it was a small study of only three levels of carbing. But, for context, I weigh 180 pounds, so under this study I would have consumed 820 grams of carbs a day if I followed the 10g/kg. The pizza was only 464 grams of carbs. It is starting to not feel like such a dumb thing I did.
The point isn’t that I should start eating 820 grams of carbs every day. The study was looking at carb loading, not normal day-to-day fueling. But it does illustrate how many carbs an endurance athlete can actually store and use. Filling up the gas tank both literally and figuratively may not have been such a disaster. Maybe that’s why I felt good running.
10,600 mg sodium experiment
This is a truly incredible number. In a way I can’t describe as positively or negatively incredible. Seeing it say 461% of my daily value of sodium is a bit scary. But I did it for you guys, mostly, well just kind of for you guys. This article is just a biproduct, along with all the other biproducts that come from four pounds of pizza.
A quick Google says the FDA Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 mg. But none of us think in milligrams. Anything to avoid the metric system, so buckle up:
10,600mg of Sodium is equivalent to:
1 liter of ocean water
4.6 teaspoons of table salt
42 salt pills (250mg per pill)
3 times the salt the average American eats per day
6.2 liters of my sweat: I am a salty sweater at 1,700 mg sodium/L
That was all in one 59 minute sitting. Go me… I guess
But, I don’t think this is as detrimental as it sounds. Am I really advocating for increasing pizza consumption?
Yes, I am. And here is one example of the power of pizza. In Hayward, California, in 2018, an officer was talking with a man threatening to jump from a parking garage. The officer offered to buy him a slice of pizza and a soda if he'd come down. He agreed, came off the ledge, and was taken to a hospital (he got his pizza too).
Sodium setup
I ran for two hours in the morning and probably lost between 2 and 3 liters of sweat. Sodium is the primary electrolyte we lose in sweat, and I lose a lot. Sweat and sodium are extremely subject, like 10x person to person subjective, but I am on the high side for both. I probably lost around 4,000mg during my morning run. Although I did take in 1,000mgs, I was already in a deficit. Just not a 10k deficit. But, sodium also helps us retain fluid, and I definitely didn’t drink enough during my run either.
Let’s throw a recommendation in here too: you don’t have to replace every milligram of sodium you lose while you’re running. It is not a milligram out, a milligram in system.
For one, we don’t start a run with only the sodium we’re going to need for that run. Sodium is already throughout the body’s fluids, and the kidneys constantly regulate things. After a run, the kidneys keep things smooth while we restore lost sodium. If recovery isn’t dramatic, the kidneys will easily find the baseline with a pretty standard diet. The bigger goal during exercise is keeping fluid and sodium reasonably balanced, but now we are losing our pizza plot.
But first, one more study on all this salt. A 2023 study had athletes exercise until they lost 2%+ of their body mass and then rehydrate with different drinks. After 3.5 hours, participants had retained 58% of the plain water compared with 74–77% of the carbohydrate-and-sodium drinks. Good job to me on combining my sodium with plenty of water. But, more on that below.
But oversalting isn’t the answer, although my pizza had just done this. Preloading salt is actually a strategy I have experimented with a nutritionist in the past for Cocodona, but never to the 10 grams level. And after researching for too long, I don’t have any other good science to say that this was a healthy amount of sodium.
I had an absurd amount, but at least that means any sodium deficit was erased…
Water
To finish the pizza I needed plenty of water. I drank a liter and a half. In fact, I lied earlier. I got off the couch one time to refill my water bottle.
This brings us to another little lever: carbohydrates and hydration aren’t completely separate.
When we store carbs as glycogen, we store water along with it. A 2015 study measured what happened to participants after they exercised and as they restored glycogen. The findings are fun for my own little experiment. Each gram of stored glycogen was associated with roughly three grams of water in the muscle.
My pizza contained 464 grams of carbohydrate. If we do some math ignoring decimal points and pretend all 464 grams immediately became newly stored glycogen, we’d hit just about 1.4 liters of associated water. I think I drank roughly 1.5 liters. Isn’t that cute? And the math only works because this is not a dissertation and I ignored enough bodily systems and timelines to help support my diet choices.
Perfect hydration strategy. Pier review complete.
But, I can’t just take shortcuts with shotty advice, or else they would replace RFK with me. So, I have to come clean at the fear of ending up president. Obviously, this math isn’t perfect and things don’t work this well in real life (unless you quit reading at the end of the last paragraph). Some of those carbohydrates were used for energy, and my muscles and liver already contained glycogen. There’s a limit to how much glycogen we can store. The equation doesn’t just start at zero, and three grams of water isn’t exact. I just don’t want any of you to get any big Costco pizza pre marathon dreams going because of me.
Just take away that fueling and hydration aren’t independent and water is good. For the real nerds, here is a more recent review of glycogen and hydration showing that 3–4 grams of water is associated with each gram of muscle glycogen. But this study also shows it is a lot more complex than simply a 3:1.
But I had accidentally combined three things that influence hydration and recovery: a huge carbohydrate load, an enormous sodium load, and 1.5 liters of actual water.
More on water: That pizza made me so thirsty all evening!
Which is why I like the pizza experiment
I know we love counting calories in our society, but I think the 4,230 calories are the least interesting thing about this poorly designed experiment.
I got 464 grams of carbohydrates, 10,600 mg of sodium. I drank a bunch of water, and I got 195 grams of protein. I consumed enough total energy that there was virtually no chance I finished the evening in an energy (or sodium) deficit.
Then I slept after feeling awful the rest of the evening.
A day later
The next day I felt great running.
That does not prove the pizza is great for running. Although this double colorblind n of 1 group without control shows positive results, PubMed has informed me the results are not truly publishable at this time.
But it makes me wonder how often we look at training fatigue as purely a training problem without broadening our search for answers. Maybe we are just a large Costco Pizza away from feeling great for the next workout.
Fueling is important. I hope I didn’t make too much light of it and maybe you learned something along the way. If I am allowed to write one more sentence, I would say carbs are great during heavier training but consuming 10 grams of sodium in a sitting is probably not worth the food coma that follows.
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