Why is 'Hungry Girl' Always So Hungry?

Several years ago my daughters turned me on to Hungry Girl, a website and email subscription service run by a media savvy woman named Lisa Lillien who turned herself into a profitable brand by selling out her site's content to to the highest bidders under the guise of helping American women get slinky.

Hungry Girl founder Lisa Lillien

Buying into the whole low-fat myth as the preferred route to Skinnytown, many of the recipes on Lillien's site use anorexic products that leave her female fans perpetually hungry.

The legion of hungry hounds following their alpha bitch will always be craving their next fix, because the foods they are eating will never satisfy them.

Let's start with one of Hungry Girl's breakfasts, the PB&J Yogurt Parfait, composed of fat-free strawberry yogurt, chopped strawberries, low-fat peanut butter cereal and peanut butter baking chips. With about 2g of fat and 37g of carb, this crazy creation should really be called the crash and burn. When you take the fat out of peanut butter and yogurt, you also remove their satiety factor, virtually guaranteeing an emergency visit to the vending machine the minute you get to work.

Hungry Girl makes a lot of money
hawking products on her website, 
such as this "diet" ice cream 
whose first three ingredients are
skim milk, corn syrup and sugar.

Hungry Girl does no better with desserts like her Freezy-Tart Peach Cobbler Squares. These misguided pretenders contain canned peach slices, Cool Whip Free, cinnamon, Splenda, and low-fat cinnamon graham crackers. Again, the macros are skewed, with only 1 g of fat and 20 g of carbs, half of which are from sugar.

The point is, Hungry Girl still clings to an old paradigm of weight loss, which posits fat = bad and butter is the devil. This view was popular for many years but is quickly being replaced by growing scientific data and anecdotal evidence that sugar and most processed carbs could be more threatening than fat to our body weight and physical health. In fact, without enough fat, we may be doomed to always be Hungry Girls.

Satisfied Girl eats (gasp!) the whole egg.
Did you think the yolk was there for decoration?

I suggest we send Hungry Girl home and replace her with Satisfied Girl, a healthy and happy woman who eats real eggs, avocados, full-fat yogurt and almond butter.





More from Diet Skeptic:

Why I'm Addicted to Chia Seeds

Why Fat Head Pizza Is the Holy Grail of Low Carb Pizzas 

The Shocking Truth About Imported Olive Oil 

Making Cauliflower Rice in the Vitamix 

Follow Nancy's board Low Carb Recipes on Pinterest.