Cauliflower Pizza: A Healthy Alternative?

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of my Unhealthy Podcast, the show that explores health beyond diet and fitness. Basically we're here to talk about changing unhealthy habits and transforming them into healthy ones and creating a life where we can live better and be happy. I am joined by my good friend, Diana Feinstein, and we are going to talk about pizza because I had it.

Diana, how are you?

[Diana Feinstein]
I'm good. How are you doing, Uncle Marv?

[Uncle Marv]
I am good. So of course, for those listeners that might be new, I had Diana on a previous episode. She is the founder and head coach of Max Pact Health, a holistic company focused on transforming lives through fitness, nutrition, and mindset coaching, all the stuff that I try to talk about but I'm not an expert in, so I have to bring on the expert.

So thanks for joining me.

[Diana Feinstein]
I'm excited to be here.

[Uncle Marv]
So folks, I'll link the previous episode if you want to go here, but basically I wanted to chat with Diana because at the end of her show, she talked about sending me this cauliflower pizza, and I don't know if I said ooh on the air, but my thought was, yeah, I'm not so sure about that, but I said I would try it. And you did send me the recipe, basically because a listener actually had written to me and said, hey, have you tried the pizza yet? And I had to say no, and I had to remind you that, yeah, I said I'd try this pizza thing.

Can you send it to me? And you did. So first of all, thank you.

[Diana Feinstein]
You're very welcome.

[Uncle Marv]
Second of all, you sent me two freaking things. You sent me this pizza thing, and then you sent me this cauliflower pizza crust that we would have to make from scratch.

[Diana Feinstein]
Well, if you're going to do it, you're going to do it all the way.

[Uncle Marv]
So I brought this home to Kim, my wife, and showed it to her, and she kind of looked at me a little funny like, you're going to eat this? And I said, yes. And then we spent about a week going back and forth with, are we really going to make this?

Because when she looked at it, it's basically what she said was this. Now, first of all, she's a cook, so cooking is not really her issue. Her issue was, for me, knowing how I am and knowing how picky I am, in her words, that do we really want to go through all of this process and you not like it?

And I said, look, I said I would try it, and I'm in the mindset now where I've got to do stuff to make my life right when it comes to eating. I've already started the clean eating phase. We've downloaded the apps.

We're going to the store and scanning food. We look like idiots in the stores. But her concept, I mean, her process was, look, are you going to sit in the kitchen with me and make this?

And my first thought is no, because I didn't want to argue over stuff, because she was literally looking at the ingredients and saying, okay, we have this, we have this, we need to get this. And why would we do this? And I'm like, don't question it.

So we had to get over that hurdle as to whether or not I'm going to sit in the kitchen with her for 40 minutes, I think was the process, just to do the crust. So let me first ask you this question. Is this something that you made up on your own or is this something you adapted or you found somewhere?

Let me start with that.

[Diana Feinstein]
So homemade cauliflower, pizza crust, you know, for people that are super into optimizing their micro gut biome, I mean, this is like a staple, you know, like in our diets. So it's something that you just kind of do because it tastes really good, right? So, you know, all of us grew up really loving pizza, but pizza, you know, like as you get older, it doesn't, you know, a lot of the flour, all of that, like, you know, refined sugar doesn't necessarily serve you.

So in like our quest, you know, to be healthy while still wanting to live a little bit, this is the level that we all kind of fall to is like this cauliflower pizza crust. So it's just like a staple that my clients have.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. But was this something that you saw and got inspired to make yourself? I mean, how did that, how did you stumble across a cauliflower crust?

[Diana Feinstein]
So it's, it's just, it's something that's swirled around like in my ecosystem a lot. So a lot of my clients, you know, they are, they're huge foodies, huge foodies, and they're not willing to give up that, like, you know, really like robust, flavorful experience. So a lot of the things that I work with people on are, you know, not about restriction, but about shifting from where they are, you know, from an unhealthy perspective.

And how do we actually pay homage to the things that really light them up? Right. And so cauliflower pizza has just been a staple in the kitchens of people whose health I transform.

I mean, like, can you remember the first time that you actually had a piece of pizza? Most of us were kids.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah.

[Diana Feinstein]
Right.

[Uncle Marv]
I mean, I can't remember the first time, but I do remember that that was a big deal.

[Diana Feinstein]
Exactly. And so to tell somebody like, you can't have pizza anymore, that's like taking away a piece of their identity. And so the moment that you start peeling away at somebody's identity, it's like that's when like we start revolting and that's when we feel like we're on a diet.

The moment you feel like you're on a diet, you start feeling restricted. It's not working for either one of us. And so cauliflower pizza was like the optimal shift, right, that my clients, you know, pretty consistently make towards this like better lifestyle.

So if you think about what pizza is right, just like the traditional pizza, it's made with flour. Now, flour is like one of the worst things that you could eat in terms of metabolic dysfunction. You know what it does, you know, to your body.

That being said, I love regular pizza, right? Can't take that away from me. Can't have that seven days a week.

And so like, what's the next best thing? So if you keep everything else the same and you just like change the crust, you've made a shift in the positive direction. So yeah, that's kind of like why it's like a staple in my program is because it's a huge identity and like all Americans is pizza.

You can't take that away from them.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. All right. All right.

So for listeners, I will be putting these on the website that you can download. Diana has given me permission and you can see exactly what we're talking about here. There's two parts to this.

There's the cauliflower margarita pizza. And then there is the cauliflower pizza crust that you would make from scratch. Now I'm going to admit right here to you, Diana, that we did not make the crust.

We actually, although I will say in fairness to my wife, she actually did make sure that we had all the ingredients. But we happen to be going to a store to look for some other stuff. So I've been away at conferences, three conferences in three weeks.

So we had to refill my pantry of stuff that I need because I've literally changed stuff I'm eating with this clean eating thing. So I'm using the Yuka app and checking all of our food products. So we had to go there and we stumbled across this rustic crust.

I don't know if you can see it here.

[Diana Feinstein]
Oh, nice. Okay.

[Uncle Marv]
But it is a rustic cauliflower crust and it got a 78 out of 100 rating on the Yuka app. So it came up as excellent.

[Diana Feinstein]
Nice.

[Uncle Marv]
And of course we were both like, yeah, we'll use this instead of making our crust. But first I will say that we didn't follow the recipe a hundred percent. We did put pepperoni and mushrooms on it, which is what I did, but, you know, she had some onions, she had some of the other stuff that matched it and I have to say, pretty good.

[Diana Feinstein]
Excellent.

[Uncle Marv]
So I had it, I had most of it on Saturday night and then saved the rest for lunch on Monday.

[Diana Feinstein]
Terrific. I love that.

[Uncle Marv]
And listen, I think the biggest hurdle would have been making the crust because of how long it takes. But having the crust that we could get and then just putting on the toppings ourselves, we've done that before, you know, where she buys a pizza crust and we do that stuff instead of ordering from, you know, the big stores that, you know, delivery places that we used to get from. But this is so much better, so much healthier.

[Diana Feinstein]
I love that.

[Uncle Marv]
So a lot of the questions that I was going to ask you were really based around making the crust. Okay. But since we didn't have to do that, let me ask, you already talked about how, you know, this cauliflower pizza is, you know, fitting into your overall philosophy of the holistic wellness, but what other feedback besides like what I've given you have you gotten?

I mean, other than, yeah, it tastes pretty good. I mean, has there been anyone that has come out and said, you know, I'm never eating regular pizza again?

[Diana Feinstein]
Oh, no. That's not a thing. Okay.

All right.

[Uncle Marv]
So reality.

[Diana Feinstein]
That's not a thing. So I'm a huge, I'm a huge math person, right? You cannot better what you cannot measure.

And so, you know, when I coach people for sustainability practices, oftentimes when people quote unquote go on a diet, they have what's called like black and white thinking or like all or nothing, right? It's either I'm going to sit here with the kale salad and I'm going to restrict myself and I'm never going to have alcohol again and I'm never, it's not happening. But if we went by the 80-20 rule, what if we just reimagined what 80% of your meals look like and just shifted it 5%?

What if we did that? And then the next week we shifted it to another 5% and then we shifted it another 5%, right? So there's that concept of like compound interest.

The power of compound interest is the consistency of how often you do that. Now, if you shifted just 5% every single week, that is like an 80% confidence interval, and you do that for an entire year, what would that look like for you, Uncle Marv?

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, for the math nerds that might be listening, let's first start with 5%. You would hit 104 weeks, but you're not talking like 5% in terms of increments. You're talking about just, you know, maybe a 1% type of thing?

Okay.

[Diana Feinstein]
Yeah. If you were just 1% better, what if you ate just one handful of vegetables more than you did the day before or the week before? What if you ate, instead of the entire bag of chips, you ate half of the bag of chips and you replaced the other half with, let's say, you know, hummus and carrots?

You're not completely eradicating it on day one. You're just shifting, right? So when it comes to the science of behavioral change, right, there are three distinct parts of a behavior loop, right?

There is the anchor, the actual behavior, and then there is the positive reinforcement. Now unless the habit is intentionally created, it's not going to form. So for example, the anchor, you know, I eat a bag of, I don't know, Doritos every single day, let's say, right?

Like the big Costco bag. Now the habit could be, you know, when I eat the Dorito bag, I will eat half the bag. And after I eat half the bag versus like, let's say, the whole bag, I will, you know, the dopamine hit will be, okay, I will applaud myself for like practicing, you know, practicing, you know, moderation.

And then you eat only half a bag every single day, and then you replace it with, let's say, an orange, or you replace it with something else that has a skin or a peel, as opposed to like a wrapper. And you keep on making that shift so that the behavior becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, and then the new behavior becomes larger and larger and larger. So this is the science of actually crowding out the maladaptive behavior.

So just by slowly shifting it and realizing, oh, this isn't so bad, and I actually feel a lot better, just by eating foods that have a skin or a peel, as opposed to coming out of a box or a wrapper, you're actually going to sleep better. When you sleep better, you're going to have more energy. When you have more energy, you're less likely to make less than stellar decisions the next day, right?

It becomes this really great reward cycle in the end.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So challenge one was accepted. So this is my 1% to the pizza.

I think we will obviously do this again. Now it's just a matter of how much we substitute regular pizza for this, right?

[Diana Feinstein]
Excellent. That's right.

[Uncle Marv]
That'll be the thing there. Let me ask this before we move on to one more point here. What other things can you do with cauliflower crust?

Because I think when we were in the store, we had come across like cauliflower pita bread or something like that, and there was a couple other things. So is this cauliflower crust kind of like a basis for other recipes?

[Diana Feinstein]
Yeah. So you can like, let's say, make calzones with it, right? You can also make, let's say, flatbread with it.

You can make cauliflower pita chips with it, with hummus. So any kind of like bread-like product, you can basically take that same crust and transform it into something else. I've coached a lot of people over the years, and like the moment you say like, you know, you cannot have this automatic restriction, all of a sudden the binge starts, right?

So like the cauliflower dough or the cauliflower crust, and there are other like bread substitutes that give the same kind of like visceral or emotional response. It takes that feeling of restriction out. It's like, I can have it.

It's just, it's slightly different from like what I'm used to. And it's not like you're never going to have pizza again, just not at this moment, like not right at the second. That's all.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. I have to ask you, because you said hummus again, I don't think I've ever had hummus. Is that another staple in the foods?

[Diana Feinstein]
It is. It is. It's because it has that like, it has like that creaminess, right?

So you know that it's like that creaminess, like that sauciness that, you know, and also you can use that as a replace for, let's say, like mayonnaise, right? You can also use that as a replacement for any kind of like condiment. So it has that same, that like nice textural flavor.

It also lends itself to like a lot of other seasonings. So I love bagels. Hey, if you put, let's say like in everything but the bagel seasoning on the hummus, it gives that same as, you know, if you close your eyes, you're like, oh, it gives me like that same memory of like when I was, you know, seven years old and I used to go to the bagel store every day with my dad on Sundays.

And so it gave me that same memory.

[Uncle Marv]
I'm sorry, I don't have that memory. And I'm looking up hummus on my phone right now, looking at pictures. Yeah, it looks like a dip.

[Diana Feinstein]
Yes. It's like a nice creamy spread. Highly recommend it.

It has a nice umami flavor.

[Uncle Marv]
We'll talk about hummus later.

[Diana Feinstein]
Yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
All right, folks. So Diana Feinstein, my good friend here, Diana, what do you have coming up? I know we're going to have you back on the show again, but what do you have coming up that you want listeners to know about?

[Diana Feinstein]
So I'm running a really fantastic two week intro to Max Pax Coaching. So for two weeks, you know, you get to have life coaching with me. It has, you know, accountability metrics.

It has education. It has workouts in it. And you know, we actually just get to know each other like on a more personal level.

You know, I really do believe that everybody deserves clarity, you know, when it comes to their health journey. You know, before I, you know, went full time into the fitness and nutrition industry, you know, with Max Pax Health Coaching, I remember just throwing tons of time, energy, and attention on just about anything to get the results that I was looking for. And so my answer to that, you know, for people now that I look back, it's like that gift of clarity.

Everybody deserves to understand why it is that they're stuck, right? And so that's just why I offer, you know, the two weeks, the first two weeks of my program, just to understand, oh, okay, that's what blood sugar is. Oh, okay.

That's why I'm tired. Oh, okay. That's why I'm, you know, doing the things that I'm, that I think that I'm doing, right?

Because what you think you do versus what you actually do, and you have to report into a health coach, that's like a whole another level. So yeah, that's what I'm working on right now.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you can try that out, contact her and it says it right in her LinkedIn profile. Do you want to lose weight, tone up, burn belly fat in 30 minutes a day?

Let's make it happen. So Diana, thank you very much for agreeing to chat with me and hear my pizza response. And we'll be chatting again soon.

[Diana Feinstein]
I look forward to it, Uncle Mark.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. There you have it, folks. Thank you to Diana.

And we'll be back soon with more episodes of the Unhealthy Podcast. I've got some more food app reviews coming up and I've got some new friends that are going to help me get rid of my unhealthy habits and turn them into healthy ones. So go out there, folks, live healthy, be happy.

See ya.