Stink Yourself Slim

Ready for another round of weight loss madness? But this time it’s not a diet. Or a pill. Or some herbs. It’s a room deodorant that’s supposed to keep you from eating.

Eau de Cow

Did I  say “room deodorant”? Actually it’s a “malodorant.” Just spray “Stink Yourself Slim” into the air, take a whiff of what smells like a mixture of skunk, rotting old trainers and cow dung and you’ll reduce your appetite.

The idea to this comes from one Alex Fontaine, a London businesswoman. She attended a dinner, came upon a food that gave off “a very disgusting smell” and was turned off from eating.

As she herself was a bit better equipped in the pound department than she cared for, she started searching for evidence to support her theory that what people smell can affect their appetite:

“I’m proud to say it’s ‘Made in Britain.'” I wonder if Britain feels the same.

But Can It Work?

Yes, in the beginning it can, because there really is a connection between smell and appetite. We, after all, don’t feel like having dinner in a public restroom.  So when you try it for the first couple of times, “Smell Yourself Slim” may indeed work as advertised: when you are close to puking, you don’t feel like having a bit of chocolate. But it will soon wear off, because our noses get used to bad smells pretty quick.

I still remember a school field trip where our class visited the city’s sewer system. When the workers opened the manhole and I leaned over, already there and then a cloud of stench greeted me. When we ventured down, it became so intense that I had to take shallow breaths or add to whatever made up the grey soup we waded through. However, after about twenty minutes, it had already pretty much faded to the background.

And now is very successful as a weight loss coach.

What I experienced was the same principle at work that allows medical examiners have their lunch among partly dissected corpses: our brains classify olfactory information that is constant, unpleasant but not harmful as not important and it goes to the background of our attention.

Get It For Free

Miss Fontaine should have put some thought into why you never see any pig farmers starved to death before gushing about the “science” she put into her product.

If you are hellbent to try this, I have a cheaper alternative to spending £29.99 on her “malodorant”: when you feel like eating, open your garbage can and take a deep breath.

Picture courtesy of Bejamin J. DeLong and “Tracy O“.