Her mantra is “I’m hungry!” And Lisa Lillien, aka Hungry Girl (HG), is hungry for information about all things food, especially guilt-free food. Lisa isn’t just passionate about food, she’s obsessed with it – she says she even dreams about it! If it’s the latest and greatest healthified sensation to hit the market, chances are HG was among the first to try it. But with so many foods coming out every day and HG being on the forefront of all this new grub, I started wondering – Wow, does she just eat all the time? How does she do it? No better way to find out than to have a chat with Lisa. She tells FatFighterTV about life behind the scenes of all the tasting… researching… and more tasting… 
Hungry Girl is all about sharing “Tips & Tricks for Hungry Chicks” (and hungry guys, too!) Just look at that table and you can see there’s a lot of sampling to do. Because as new foods make their way to store shelves, many of them also land in the HG headquarters. No wonder there’s a whole of eatin’ going on!
“We have boxes delivered three or four times a week,” Lisa tells FFTV. “Then there’s recipe development. So every day there’s at least two or three things that I’m trying or tasting that are new or different.”
Yes, Lisa and her staff are thrilled to try new foods… giddy even. In fact, she tells me they’re kind of lunatics about the whole taste-testing thing… in a good, fun way, of course.
She says, “When boxes show up we just jump around and scream! We get excited about the smallest things. I love food and I love trying all the new foods.”
Trying all kinds of new snacks and stuff sounds very cool, doesn’t it? But even though the foods are guilt-free, just like anything else, they can add up. Turns out all that fun taste-testing can be tough!
“It’s the hardest part of the job because now I have to think about food all day and I have to taste food that I normally wouldn’t eat,” Lisa explains. “For example, I’m not a big carby-snack eater because it’s too much of a trigger food for me. So I would normally avoid chips and things, even guilt-free ones – I eat them rarely. Last week, we had probably four different kinds of chips show up that were phenomenal! That’s the hardest thing.”
What does Lisa do about it? She exercises a lot… and weighs herself often, too. She says her weight fluctuates three to five pounds, depending on how much tasting she has going on at the time. But she keeps it in check.
And speaking of tasting… Lisa’s constantly working on whipping up something new and yummy in the HG kitchen like Too-Good-to-Deny Pumpkin Pie and Save-the-Day Stuffing.
“I’m not a chef by any means and I don’t cook an awful lot in the traditional sense,” she says. “But I’ve always been good at combining and assembling foods and knowing how to make things taste better or taste like real full-fat foods when they have hardly any fat or calories. It’s just all about finding foods and assembling them and that’s why the recipes are so easy. They’re not complicated in any way.”
Besides all the cooking and tasting, Hungry Girl is a business, so Lisa also has to do typical running-a-business stuff. She didn’t expect it to get so big so fast – nearly 600,000 subscribers! It’s been four years since she started sharing her tips and tricks.
“I just feel really fortunate that I’m able to help so many people,” Lisa says. “At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. It’s fun for me, but it helps so many people.”
Her book is super helpful. And you can get an autographed copy of Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World.
How do you win it? Just sign up for FFTV’s weekly newsletter to get entered in the drawing. If you’re already signed up, you’re automatically entered.
A few contest details: It ends at midnight EST this Friday, November 28… you have to have a U.S. mailing address to enter… and a random number generator will pick the winner.
Thanks, Lisa – for the book and for the behind the scenes look at Hungry Girl!
I’m definately going to need this after the holidays!