The next, I’d just eat my way through the menu. When you eat and eat, your stomach stretches, and mine did. To feel satisfied, you have to eat more and I ate a lot more.

I ignored what poor eating habits I was developing and what they were doing to my body. My doctor made me realize I was eating myself to death with junk food. And I had to change for the sake of my wife and son.

I started a lot of diets, but I found that I could never stick to them. I would drop a few pounds and then lose the discipline to continue and, ultimately, gain all the weight back. Statistics say that between 80 and 95 percent of people who diet end up putting weight back on—and then some. That was me. At the doctor’s office, in that moment, I resolved to find a way to lose weight and keep it off. But I needed a strategy that was different.

During the summer I went home to Naples and met with a well-known Italian nutritionist who told me: “You have to eat something that tastes good to you.”

That evening, walking through Quartieri Spagnoli, the neighborhood in Naples where I grew up, I recalled my own childhood memories and promises: “One day I will be a pizza maker so I can eat pizza every day.”

Then it hit me: Pizza! Pizza, the most important food in my life. Pizza, the reason I became a chef. If I cannot have pizza, I reasoned, I cannot follow a diet!

But what if I could make a healthier style? Knowing there’s a pizza waiting for me in the middle of each day, I could follow any diet.

The day after, I began to develop my Pizza Diet…