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Hungry Girl, PopChips stage a potato chip intervention

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When I was assigned to do a story about the Hungry Girl phenomenon, I had no idea it would help me break a long-standing potato chip addiction. Hungry Girl is Lisa Lillien, a Valley girl and former cable TV executive who parlayed her passion for calorie counting into a multimillion-dollar business and a role as Internet taste maker. (Her newest recipe book, ‘Hungry Girl: 200 Under 200,’ has hit the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.)

I spent the day with Lillien and a handful of her team members at their Woodland Hills ‘office’ -- it’s really a unit in a posh apartment complex, chosen for a spacious kitchen that accommodates recipe testing. If you read her daily e-mail blast you won’t be surprised to hear that a day in the candy-colored Hungry Girl headquarters feels like one big slumber party. That’s because much of their ‘work’-day is literally spent dreaming up yummy low-cal recipes, crafting them and testing and re-testing them until they’re good to go. (On the day I was there, they were working on their fourth try at perfecting peanut butter oatmeal ‘softies.’ Not quite cookies, they’re not quite muffins either, hence the name.)

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Lillien considers it her personal mission to find more healthful -- or at least lower-in-calorie -- substitutes for the foods that people crave most. She asked me about my weakness. Potato chips, the saltier the better, I told her. She told me I should try PopChips. I’d never heard of them, and I jotted it down in my notebook just to be polite. On my way out the door that day, Lillien handed me a bag of PopChips -- turns out they are a staple in the Hungry Girl kitchen.

I devoured them before I got to my car, and it was like an instant 12-step program. I’ll never buy regular potato chips again. The original flavor PopChips offer everything that a regular chip does: They’re super crunchy and super salty, and they taste like they’re fried. But they’re not. There’s only 120 calories, 35 calories from fat, in a serving. And it’s a generous serving size too -- not one of those teensy little bags. (There is a downside: The chips seem to be a bit pricier than most.) I interviewed PopChips co-founder Keith Belling for my Hungry Girl story, and a few days later, a sample basket arrived. Since then, people keep coming by my desk ostensibly to say hello, or talk work. But I know it’s really to swipe a bag of PopChips. My favorite flavors are original and salt-and-pepper.

-- Rene Lynch

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