Yesterday’s review of the Hungry Girl book sparked an interesting discussion question – does low-calorie food equal healthy food? The answer seems to be sometimes yes and sometimes no. It reminds me of the logic class I had to take in college where we’d have to decipher statements like:

All sparrows are birds

Not all birds are sparrows.

Some sparrows are black.

If Lulu is a black bird, is she a sparrow?

Except this is a more complicated since not all low-calorie foods are healthy and not all healthy foods are low-calorie. How do I write an “if, then” statement for that?

One of the reasons it took me so long to start eating healthy is because I couldn’t figure out what “healthy” meant. What do you eat when you eat healthy? Rice cakes? Tofu? It’s even more confusing because you have to look at a person’s overall diet and not just a single choice they make for one meal. They might eat oatmeal for breakfast, but then chomp on fried onion rings laden in trans-fat for dinner. Or they [...]

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Hungry Girl: Recipes and Survival Strategies for Guilt-Free Eating in the Real World by Lisa Lillien

I think I first became aware of the Hungry Girl web site and mailing list when someone linked to her Rome Apple + Diet Dr Pepper recipe. Cooking with soda seems so inherently wrong that I had to try it. The baked apple itself was rather underwhelming, but I liked the upbeat, fun attitude of the site and the cute illustrations. Plus, all the recipes are low-calorie and aimed at healthy eaters.

Earlier in the month I was trolling around the Amazon best-selling books list, by no means doing anything as self-centered and vain as checking my own book’s Amazon ranking every hour (it was more like every day), when I saw that Hungry Girl, aka Lisa Lillien, has a book out too. How cool! I love to see writers who started on the Internet getting books published. Only, it wasn’t coming out until today. Eager to get my hands on it, I threw what’s left of my weight around and [...]

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