Hungry Girl helps Americans slim down with Fiber One, Reddi-wip and Splenda

IT'S THAT TIME of year when gift baskets the size of shopping carts start piling up around the office: smoked salmon, Godiva truffles, cookies in obscure nutty flavors. And what would a gift basket be without those charity pieces of fruit that are the last to be consumed? Christmas calories accumulate a lot faster than you can Stairmaster them off.

Former Hollywood media exec Lisa Lillien created Hungry Girl, a website and daily newsletter, to help slim people down. Hungry Girl features daily recipes and tips and tricks for anyone trying to lose weight. Her tips have earned the trust of more than half a million people and her newsletter is expanding at a rate of 700 new subscribers a day. Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list last April and a sequel is on its way early next year. “Hungry girl is about celebrating food, it’s about learning how to navigate the supermarkets,” says Lillien. “It’s not about deprivation.”

Lillien isn’t a nutritionist and doesn’t claim to be. She’s just a New York transplant living in Los Angeles with what she calls “fantastic taste-buds” and a fun, sassy, pony-tailed avatar, Hungry Girl, who talks like a cheerleader when describing a “Too Good To Deny Pumpkin Pie.”
“No one loves pumpkin as much as Hungry Girl does,” she writes. “The fat orange fruit (yes, it’s technically a fruit ‘cuz it has seeds!) and HG have been BFFs forever.”

Lillien battled weight fluctuations all her life. “I grew up with a yo-yo dieter mom and I’d been on diets from the time I was pretty young,” she says. “For most of my adult life I was probably trying to lose 10 or 15 pounds [4.5kg to 7kg].” In 2002, she lost 11.3kg and has managed to keep it off.
The idea for the Hungry Girl site came in 2004 after Lillien was driving in Los Angeles with a box of supposedly low-fat, low-calorie pastries that tasted too good to be true. She decided to keep on driving up Highway 101 to a food laboratory to have them tested. Sure enough, they contained twice as many calories as advertised. A salad dressing popularized in NBC’s reality show The Biggest Loser was another product she took to the lab. It was loaded with twice as many calories per serving than advertised.

Lillien responds to her market by promoting lots of products not available outside the US and some that would give organic foodies mental indigestion. To gourmets, certain ingredients barely qualify as food, such as Breyers Double Churn Free French Chocolate fat-free ice cream or Kraft fat-free cheese slices.
 “Don’t get us wrong, we LOVE these slices (and ALWAYS keep them on hand). But melting these things can be like a science experience gone awry,” Lillien wrote in her “Girls Bite Out” column. “They kinda bubble for a second and then sort of spring back to their original shape (weird!). If you’re a true cheese fan, you may not love this stuff. However, if you’re a calorie-counter looking for a simple swap, the slices are the way to go.”

A recipe for “Swirls Gone Wild Cheesecake Brownies” includes Coffee-Mate sugar-free French vanilla powdered creamer, which contains 11 ingredients, the first of which is vegetable oil and somewhere in the middle is “natural and artificial flavors.” The apple cobbler calls for an optional packet of Splenda, an artificial sweetener that contains sucralose, dextrose and maltodextrine. The crust of “Loaded ‘n Oated Pepperoni Pizza,” is made of oats and one of Hungry Girl’s favorite ingredients, Fiber One bran cereal. 

“People who are true health buffs would find some of the ingredients questionable,” admits Lillien. “But we’re not saying you have to follow this program or shop the perimeter of the grocery store [where the fruits and vegetables are located]. It’s about the real world.

If you don’t like fat-free cheese, use reduced fat. Use sugar instead of Splenda. This is about how to survive in the real world and take what works for you.” Lillien also lends her Hungry Girl logo as an endorsement for several products, including Fiber One. She has no plans for a Hungry Boy service because men comprise less than one percent of her subscriber list. That’s beside the point anyway. The information is universal, says Lillien, “It’s just wrapped in a cute pastel package.”