Health-and-Fitness online information.

Welcome to The Lean Plate Club, hosted by Washington Post health and nutrition writer Sally Squires . Share your tips on healthy recipes, meal plans, sugar alternatives and resisting overeating with other readers.

On Tuesdays at 1 p.m. ET , Sally, who has a master's degree in nutrition from Columbia University, leads a lively discussion for readers looking for new ways to eat smarter and move around more throughout the day. The Lean Plate Club is dedicated to healthy living -- whether you're trying to whittle your waistline or simply maintain it.

We want to hear your tips, strategies, meal plans, successes, setbacks and more. Of course Sally will be happy to answer questions and turn others over to the Club. None of this, however, is a substitute for medical advice.

Sign up for the free Lean Plate Club e-mail newsletter . The Lean Plate Club column appears weekly in the Washington Post Health section and is nationally syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group .

Sally Squires's Recent Columns

Discussion Transcripts

A transcript follows .

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Sally Squires: Welcome to the Lean Plate Club!We've got a lot on the Plate to discuss, starting with the free e-mail newsletter which should be in your electronic in boxes right now. If you'd like to subscribe to this weekly service, just log onto www.leanplateclub.com. Look for newsletter box and click on it. (For those who have tried this in the last two weeks or so, there have been a couple of glitches with it, but it's now fixed.)

If you've subscribed to the LPC newsletter and don't receive your copy or have any trouble signing up, please e-mail me at leanplateclub@washpost.com and for a faster response, please put "trouble subscribing" in the subject line. By the way, we're approaching 200,000 subscribers to this newsletter which features links to lots of healthy recipes, physical activity, nutrition news and more.

I've just come from a U.S. Department of Agriculture briefing on the new food pyramid If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it and its sister site: mypyramidtracker.gov in today's chat.

In today's newsletter, you'll also discover a two finds I made this week. Share some of your healthy food finds with us today, tell us about your efforts to achieve a healthier weight, assist a Lean Plate Club member on this web chat and one of the following prizes could be yours today. (In making this offering, we are not endorsing any weight loss program, exercise regimen, book or tape. It's merely a way to show you the many resources available as you work to instill a healthier weight.)

# posted by Medical Information : 2:31 AM