I may be giving away my age, but do you remember Topanga (actress Danielle Fishel) from the early 90's tv show Boy Meets World?  I used to love her and wanted to look like her - I thought she was gorgeous.  She's still very beautiful, but through the years she had put on some weight, and now she has shed 30lbs and told OK! magazine just how she did it.

Her secret?  NutriSystem.  She tells OK!:   

“I thoroughly enjoyed doing it last year, and since then I have maintained by learning portion control.”

“That was one of the greatest things NutriSystem taught me. I cook a lot now. I eat 95% of my meals at home. I never eat fast food, I take protein bars with me everywhere, and I make all of my own food. I eat very low-carb and high fiber and a lot of protein.”

She adds:

“I make a lot of fish, I love vegetables – so that’s a good thing – and then, the working out and the eating well, that allows me – I have a sweet tooth – so that allows me to have a cookie here and there. My mom just baked my favorite – my kryptonite is chocolate chip cookies that my mom bakes that are amazing.”

Danielle's workouts consist of just an hour of cardio three days a week, and a combination of an hour of cardio and an hour of weights the other three days a week - that's a total of six days at the gym for a total of nine hours.  So how does she stay motivated?  Her trainer.

“It’s my favorite part of my day. It wasn’t always my favorite part of my day, but I grew into the lifestyle of working out, and now if I miss a day or I have to skip because of work, I don’t feel like my day is complete.”
One of her dieting dos is enjoying a cheat meal – but not a cheat day because she can get carried away.

“It’s so important to maintaining your overall mental health,” she says.

“It’s easy to know that you only have a week before you can have something that you really want than to know ‘I’m never going to be allowed to eat this again.’”

Her favorite healthy snacks?

“I love my protein bars that I eat. They’re called Pure Protein, and they’re chocolate peanut butter ones. I put them in the refrigerator so they’re really cold, and, to me, they’re like my equivalent of having a Snickers, but it’s super healthy and low sugar.”

Also she likes her wraps.  She uses La Tortilla Factory’s low carb, high-fiber tortillas.

“I make wraps with those. That’s one of my favorite lunches is to make a salad and have a little turkey wrap.”

It wasn't an easy road for Danielle to lose weight.  It wasn't easy to admit to herself she needed to lose weight, it was a gradual process to be get motivated.

“It takes awhile once you put weight on to have the ability to say ‘all right, I’m cutting everything out and starting over from scratch.’ But I just wasn’t happy. I was feeling uncomfortable in my clothes and in my skin. When I’m not feeling good about myself, I don’t feel like being social. I was wanting to stay home all the time, and there were a lot of friends and family events going on that I didn’t feel like going to because I didn’t have anything to wear and I didn’t feel good about myself. That was the biggest motivating factor for me. And when I don’t feel good about the way I look, I tend to be really grumpy without even realizing that that’s why.”

So how does she feel after losing 30lbs?!

“I felt a-mazing after I lost weight,” Danielle says. “You wake up and you feel so much healthier. That’s the biggest thing for me. Not even so much the physical appearance of it, it’s more the way you feel. That was the biggest upside for me.”

However, it's no easy task to keep it off, Dainelle works hard to maintain her body.

“Once you have the weight off and you feel great about yourself, it’s easy to look at something that you’re going to eat or look at the gym, and say ‘I’m really happy right now with the way I look, so it’s not worth it to me to have this cookie or have this cake or skip out on my gym appointment.’”

Danielle shares some secrets to looking thinner?

“No matter what size the tag says, get the size that actually fits you,” she says.

“Nobody else sees the tag after you’ve put it on. But dressing in clothes that fit you and that are more fitted – if you feel like you’re carrying extra weight, the only thing that makes you look even heavier is wearing bigger, baggier clothes.”

She adds, “Having a good tailor will make you look thinner, and dressing appropriately for your age and in a clothing size that actually fits you.”