Making smarter food choices means you won’t feel like you’re depriving yourself

Apr 3, 2014 20:06 GMT  ·  By

Here’s something many dieters have been waiting for: confirmation that you can lose weight while actually eating more. The secret, “Hungry Girl” creator Lisa Lillien says, is to learn to make smarter food choices.

In her new book, the Food Network star claims that you can lose up to 25 pounds (11.3 kg) in two months by simply learning to swap foods – that is, replace calorie-laden items with lighter alternatives.

This doesn’t have to mean that you’ll be eating flavorless food once you start on the program: it just means that you will be eating healthier, and it will inevitably show as your waistline will start to shrink.

By swapping foods, she explains in an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America, you get “more bang for your calorie buck,” which is just a fancy way of saying that you get to eat more while sticking to a 1,300-calorie daily intake.

Lillien doesn’t call herself a nutritionist but a “foodologist” who also happens to be a woman who wants to maintain her figure. Her new diet came about from her desire to help other women lose weight, get and stay healthy, but without feeling like they’re depriving themselves.

So she came up with this idea, which helps her supersize portions considerably. This way, you get all the flavor you want and, just as importantly, that feeling of satiety at the end of a meal. Even her suggestions for snacks seem filling enough to stand in for a proper meal, which is not something that all diets out there can boast of.

“I'm all about swapping foods. It's making better choices,” Lillien says. She suggests using tofu noodles instead of regular pasta for a chicken dish, or crushed high-fiber cereals instead of bread crumbs for breaded chicken fingers.

Lillien also suggests adding pumpkin puree to the morning dish of oatmeal with fruit, saying, “it has a lot of fiber, it's low in calories [and] it adds flavor and texture.” Even her desserts are incredibly decadent for a diet, like the one she presents in the video below: five large strawberries filled with ricotta cheese and chocolate chips, all totaling a mere 100 calories.

Reviews of “The Hungry Girl Diet” book have been overwhelmingly positive so far, with many women saying it’s perhaps the most “effortless” diet they’ve tried so far because they still get to enjoy food, they never go hungry and, with all that, they’re still losing weight. Sure sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?