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Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World | 
| Author: Lisa Lillien
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $12.21
You Save: $5.74 (32%)
Rating:  273 reviews
Sales Rank: 207
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.4 x 1
ISBN: 0312377428
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5635
EAN: 9780312377427
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Hit the Kitchen with Hungry Girl Just because you're watching your waistline doesn't mean you need to go hungry. Recipes from Hungry Girl--like the Fiber-Fried Chicken Strips featured below--feed your every craving without piling on the calories. What's more, Lisa Lillien's lighthearted love for food and fun shines through in every recipe, making it easy to follow her healthy example and even come up with your own simple calorie-saving shortcuts.
Product Description
Do you want to eat burgers, chocolate cake, frozen margaritas, fudge, and French fries--and still fit into your pants? Is life not worth living without brownies and onion rings? Do you want a surefire way to tame your cravings? From breakfast ideas and chopped salads to guilt-free junk food and cocktails, Hungry Girl recipes taste great but are low in fat and calories. Check it out! * Eggs Bene-Chick: 183 calories
* Bring on the Breakfast Pizza: 127 calories
* Ooey Gooey Chili Cheese Nachos: 216 calories
* Big Bopper Burger Stopper: 202 calories
* Dreamy Chocolate Peanut Butter Fudge: 65 calories
* Lord of the Onion Rings: 153 calories
* Rockin' Tuna Melt: 212 calories
* 7-Layer Burrito Blitz: 277 calories
* I Can't Believe It's Not Sweet Potato Pie: 113 calories
* Cookie-rific Ice Cream Freeze: 160 calories
* With easy instructions, simple steps, and hilariously fun facts and figures, Hungry Girl recipes are as fun to read as they are to make! And when you're not in your kitchen, check out HG's 10 mini survival guides, plus tips 'n tricks that'll help you make smarter food choices anywhere, anytime!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 268 more reviews...
 a huge disappoinment May 5, 2008
215 out of 247 found this review helpful
I really, really wanted to like this book, partly because of Hungry Girl's easy, breezy style. I had been forewarned by one of the recipes that appeared on the HG website (for mock French onion soup) that I never made again, but since I am always searching for good low-points WW recipes, I thought I'd give the book a try.
So far, I've made a handful of the recipes, all of which have resulted in varying degrees of disappointment as is most often the case when making mock foods. For instance, the mock chocolate peanut butter fudge (a potentially promising combination of brownie mix, canned pumpkin and peanut butter) counts on a tiny bit of peanut butter to mask what turns out to be the much too prominent taste of pumpkin. I admit that one small piece was quite filling, but at the price of sitting in my stomach for hours like a rock. Even the non-mock recipes, like the "Yummy, Yummy Eggplant Goo," are largely poorer versions of better recipes that are just as low in fat and calories as the HG version.
The cutesy recipe titles are somewhat grating (which would have been easily overlooked if the recipes were good) and the author's descriptions of the finished products won't measure up unless you have fairly dull taste buds and an overactive imagination.
If you just want to stuff yourself with mock and/or fiber-filled recipes and don't really care what the food tastes like, then this is your book. My bet is that most people will try a few of the recipes before deciding that it is better to have occasional smaller portions of real food.
 You have to understand the Hungry Girl philosophy May 28, 2008
87 out of 92 found this review helpful
In my years of subscribing to the HG Web site and now using this book, it has occurred to me that there are many different philosophies of dieting and weight loss/maintenance. There are WAY more than two, but for the purposes of this review I am going to boil it down:
1. Eat super healthy, nonprocessed, preferably organic foods. Make whole grains, fruits and veggies the mainstays of your diet. Severely curtail fats, oils and sugar. When you want to indulge, enjoy one small portion of something "real" -- i.e. one sliver of chocolate cake, one square of dark chocolate, one cookie, or the like. [And exercise.] People who follow this approach are probably more likely to never snack between meals (or eat only fruits and veggies as snacks), avoid "100-calorie-packs," eschew artificial sweeteners and diet sodas, etc.
2. Follow the above philosophy to the extent that your time and lifestyle allow, but lean on processed low-cal foods to (a) save cooking/prep time and (b) enjoy modified versions of the "junky" foods you feel deprived of when you are dieting or have to eat low-cal in order to maintain your weight. [And exercise.] People who take this approach are probably the lion's share of 100-calorie-pack purchasers, more likely to use artificial sweeteners, drink diet sodas, and so on.
What you have to understand about HG author Lillen is that her Web site and book are tools for those who adopt approach #2. She states repeatedly that she isn't a nutritionist or a dietitian, and she makes no claim for the "healthfulness" of her recipes. They do lean on processed ingredients and tend to contain a lot of sodium, artificial sweetener and chemical ingredients. What they offer is a similar flavor experience to the very high-cal foods lots of people like, with much lower calorie and fat counts (and often more fiber as well).
But for those who would knock this approach (while you certainly retain the moral high ground as organic eating becomes something akin to spiritual cleanliness in more and more people's minds), please bear in mind that for some of us, our eating is always going to be a trade-off in terms of risk. I speak from experience as someone who has maintained a 100-lb. weight loss for over 10 years. For whatever reason, my body processes food in such a way that I gain weight exceptionally easily. I have to be CONSTANTLY vigilant about what I am putting in my mouth and how I am counterbalancing it with exercise. If I relax my vigilance for even a couple of days, it shows up on my body. As a (reformed) compulsive overeater I struggle with eating just one cookie, tiny sliver of cake, etc., every couple of weeks. (Yes, it is true, I would often rather have a larger portion of something that actually isn't AS good as the real thing.) And if you think that this behavior is not incredibly challenging to sustain for a lifetime, you just don't know whereof you speak.
So personally, while I certainly do my best to eat truly healthy, skip sugar, keep fat and meat intake to a minimum, and eat lots of whole grains and fruits/veggies, I salute HG for giving me recipes that allow me to "let my hair down" and enjoy some fun foods along with the rest of the world, without having to lie awake at night and worry about what I ate for lunch.
For the record, among my favorite HG recipes are the butternut squash fries, the turkey reuben and the fettucine "girl-fredo."
Predictable and Processed May 7, 2008
63 out of 70 found this review helpful
I have mixed thoughts about the Hungry Girl Book. If you like her web site, you will like the book.
The benefit of the book is that it provides one with suggestions for swapping high calorie, high fat ingredients with lower calorie, lower or fat-free ingredients. The recipes are also very quick and easy.
The problems with the book are; 1) It relies on A LOT of processed ingredients with nutritionally empty, artificial ingredients - e.g. it is okay and healthy to eat low-fat natural cheese and a whole grain hamburger bun instead of plastic pieces of Fat free American cheese with an overprocessed, white flour, tasteless low calorie hamburger bun 2) There is an overemphasis on getting the calories down as far as possible - interesting, catchy approach to draw people to the book, but IT IS AT THE EXPENSE OF TASTE AND NUTRITION 3) Some of the recipes are not "recipes" - I do not need to be told to use low calorie bread, fat-fat cheese, and lean meat to create a sandwich 4) The descriptions are overly enthusiastic - they will not taste that good. It eventually makes you less willing to believe what she is selling after a while. 5) Hungry Girl has financial tie-ins with certain food products (I don't know if I am allowed to name them by brand), like those shirataki noodles (her picture is on them) and muffins (she has her own flavors). This biases her suggestions and swaps - there are better options available. 6) Most of the swaps that she suggests and similar recipes are available already on her web site. If you want to modify one of your favorites, you can find all sorts of swaps on her site or around the internet.
 My favorite cookbook so far this year April 30, 2008
58 out of 72 found this review helpful
As soon as I saw this book at a bookstore I knew I had to buy it. It's filled with food I want to eat! Its 160 recipes are easy to make, delicious (at least every one I've tried) and guilt-free. In other words, this book is a treasure, and my favorite cookbook so far this year.
As author Lisa Lillien writes, she's not a nutritionist or a doctor, she's just hungry! She's also funny, with the wit of a teenage goofball. The author's photo on the back cover shows her sitting on the floor wearing a Cookie Monster T-shirt. That informal, silly tone is everywhere. Recipe names include the Ginormous Cereal Bowl-Anza, I Can't Believe It's Not Sweet Potato Pie, Lord of the Onion Rings and My Big Fat Greek Pita.
There are lots of extras. Each recipe lists the calories, grams of fat, sodium, carbs, fiber, sugars and protein, and the front of the book has a long list of recommended name-brand products to use for ingredients. Many recipes include Fun Facts (for example, chocolate syrup was used to represent blood in the famous "Psycho" shower scene) or what the author calls Happy Girl Shockers, trivia tidbits scattered throughout the book. Did you know that Taco Bell's Fiesta Taco SALAD has a whopping 840 calories?
In the middle of the book is a full-color, eight-page photo insert, which shows 27 different dishes with the page numbers where that recipe appears. There are photos of all the recipes in the book on its companion website.
Here is the chapter list:
1. Rise & Dine
2. Chop `Til Ya Drop
3. Souper Douper
4. Let's Do Lunch
5. Junk Food Junkie
6. Manly Meals
7. Party Time
8. Chocolate 911
9. Fruity Call
10. Oven Lovin'
11. Zappuccino
12. Happy Hour
13. Fun With...
14. Survival Guides
My other new favorite cookbook: The Most Decadent Diet Ever!
Fun and informative, plus you can find pictures of all the recipes online! April 30, 2008
44 out of 56 found this review helpful
I subscribed to the Hungry Girl newsletter about a month ago and it's one of the few newsletters I actually read all the way through! Hungry Girl is really funny and she dishes out so much good info on new products and new ways to try recipes. I got this book today and I can't wait to try some of the recipes out, they all look so yummy.
The only thing I was a little disappointed about was the fact that there weren't that many pictures. But this disappointment quickly faded when I realized that pictures of all the book's recipes can be easily found over at hungry-girl.com/book. What a great idea! It's probably really expensive to include a lot of glossy photos in a book, especially for a first-time author, so having them available online is a really smart way of getting around this.
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