Hungry Girl creates healthy meals that real people can make - and enjoy

LISA LILLIEN was on the treadmill watching a "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" when inspiration struck. A featured dish on the show was a sauerkraut-stuffed pierogi. To the health conscious, the pierogi is an assault on perfectly planned eating habits.

To Lillien, it's a challenge.

On the Internet, Lillien is better known as Hungry Girl, the personality behind the cartoon icon who tells long-suffering dieters how to eat healthily while still eating well. "Hungry Girl" comes to TV at 4 p.m. Saturday, as Lillien debuts her new show on the Cooking Channel.

What Lillien does on her show, she does in real life. She sees things like, say, a sauerkraut-stuffed pierogi, and her mind immediately turns to how she can swap out ingredients to make it healthier. She then takes it to her test kitchen and tries it until - and this may come as a shock to some dieters - she thinks it tastes good.

At the beginning of each episode, Lillien performs. The pilot, called "You Wanna Pizza Me?," opens with two lawyers. One argues that pizza can never be healthy; the other disagrees. Lillien, in full judge regalia, is too busy eating the evidence - pizza - to render a verdict.

It's these skits that hew closest to the tone of the Hungry Girl newsletter and website (hungry-girl.com). In her writing, Lillien uses exclamation points liberally and creates words like "yumtastic," as if traditional adjectives simply aren't enough.

Unsurprisingly, Lillien talks the same way. She speaks quickly and peppers her speech with emphatic exclamations. It's no wonder friends tell her that reading the Hungry Girl newsletter is just like chatting with her.

But on her TV show, she dials down the zeal and is considerably calmer. "I wanted to have that enthusiasm and not [be] acting like a crazy person. . . . I didn't want to be a loon on television. I wanted to be high-energy and fun but keep my eye on the ball," Lillien said. "[The show is] more serious, straight-up information and cooking with just a layer of frosting of comedy on top."

Lillien's show, for which she also serves as executive producer, reflects this desire to tone down the crazy. During "Do You Wanna Pizza Me?" Lillien cooks three pizza variations that seek to take the fat and calories out of the typical pie - including pizza chicken, which uses chicken as a makeshift crust and cuts the carbs.

But then she takes the cameras out of the kitchen and into the real world. First, she stops at a pizzeria to give health-conscious tips on eating out, such as opting for thin-crust pizza with fresh ingredients that won't soak up extra fat, and blotting slices with a napkin to absorb extra oil.

Then she heads to the grocery store to compare the nutrition facts on processed foods, like personal-sized frozen pizzas or turkey pepperoni vs. the pork variety.

It's these segments that separate Lillien from the current crop of foodies who advocate for "perimeter" shopping around the grocery store - the idea that people should avoid the center aisles of the supermarket, where processed and packaged foods are kept, and stick to the outside aisles, where fresh food dominates.

For Lillien, that's just not realistic. She subscribes to the 80-20 rule, in which 80 percent of the time she eats healthily, while the other 20 percent she can eat what she wants. If she wants to eat barbecue pulled-pork pizza, she allows herself to eat barbecue pulled-pork pizza. She just doesn't eat it every day.

She thinks that banning delectable-yet-deadly foods from her diet just isn't realistic when it comes to her eating habits, just like shopping only the perimeter of the supermarket.

"It's not reality for many people," Lillien said. "There are alternatives that are better, and if you are going to shop in the market in the center aisles, what are the better choices? And there are many of them."

The goal of the "Hungry Girl" TV show is to show how readily available these choices are.

Before Lillien was Hungry Girl, she was just a hungry girl who worked as a television producer. She started out sending a daily newsletter to friends and family; now she has more than a million readers.

She had some experience in front of the camera even before "Hungry Girl." Her husband, Daniel Schneider, is the mind behind some of Nickelodeon's tween-targeting live-action shows, like "iCarly," and he would recruit his wife to play bit parts. Even though she was hesitant.

"I was the opposite of Lucy, who always wanted to be in Ricky's show," said Lillien. When Hungry Girl began growing, though, Lillien understood that TV was part of the gig.

"I couldn't say no to appearances on the 'Today' show or 'Good Morning America,' so I just sucked it up and taught myself how to learn to like it," said Lillien. "Then I actually did start having fun."