I’m one of those women who craves the kind of advice Hungry Girl serves up each day. It’s friendly and practical guidance on eating well and still being able to zip your pants. When a friend introduced me to HG’s daily emails last year, I was hooked.
But as Lisa Lillien, a.k.a., Hungry Girl, tells her fans, she’s not a nutritionist. She’s just a chick who’s hungry. Her stay slim tricks have steadily attracted an audience of more than 400,000 people over the last five years, who gobble up HG’s daily emails about guilt-free eating.
The forty-two-year-old former Nickelodeon producer was not always so wise to the ways of weight maintenance. She grew up in New York, the daughter to a mom she describes as a yo-yo dieter who tried everything from Optifast to Nutrisystems.
“From a very young age, I was very conscious of dieting and food,” she told The Well Mom in a recent interview.
Despite all of the focus on fighting flab, Lillien struggled to lose the same 15 pounds through early adulthood.
“I used to pretend that pretzels were a good food and then eat 11 servings while sitting at the computer,” she recalls.
Until one day eight years ago, when she decided to go extreme. Lillien cut out all of the starches in her diet.
“Bread, pastas, rice, potatoes … I decided these were my trigger foods and I stopped eating them,” she says.
In her mind, this was the final attempt to jumpstart her weight loss once and for all.
It worked. She ended up losing 30 pounds and turned to Weight Watchers to learn how to maintain her new figure. The program taught her about portion control. It was a revelation that would later fuel HG’s success. Today, she’s even developed recipes for the weight loss giant.
