Eat outside McDonald’s.
Seriously.
Bring your healthy meal and eat it outside of McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut. Taco Bell. KFC. Whatever your guilty pleasure.
This thought came to me yesterday as I had to do a quick dash across the street to the mall for something fast to eat before my next client session. I grabbed a booster juice and was drinking it as I walked back through the parking lot, behind the McDonald’s. Specifically, I seemed to have walked right past a vent from their kitchen. So as I was drinking the smoothie, I was also smelling Big Macs and McDonald’s fries. It kind of felt like I was actually eating McDonald’s. That got me thinking back to someone I used to work with who had lost his sense of smell from an accident as a child. He said that he has no trouble keeping a normal weight because the loss of his sense of smell meant that he had no sense of taste either. So food was not a pleasure for him. I thought of this deep connection between our senses of smell and taste.
There have been attempts to use this connection in weight loss practices in the past. In fact I found an MSNBC article from 2006 about a nasal spray product designed to fight obesity by blocking the body’s sense of smell which was theorized would reduce triggers to eat (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16287766/ ).
Since that was 4 years ago and the creators have not won a Nobel prize for it, I can only assume that it has been less than successful. But maybe it failed because suppressing ones sense of smell is not the way to go. There are so many great pleasures in life that are tied to scent, that it would be a tough sell for someone to give that up. No more stopping to smell the roses…(I know, cheesy, but ask my mom – it’s in my genes to throw out cheesy lines)…The smell of coffee is quite a treat. The beach. Spring rain. Babies. That is just too much to give up in favour of trying to get lean.
So my crazy new idea is to work with it instead of trying to suppress it. Eat healthy food while smelling that unhealthy food you’ve been craving. My hypothesis is that it will feel and taste like you are eating the unhealthy food. You get to “enjoy” the food you know you shouldn’t eat, while eating the food you you should.
What do you think? Too crazy? Moronic? Brilliant? Let me know. I dare say I think I might be onto something here. Or I’m off my rocker. Or it’s been done before. Probably one of those three.
Maybe time to call in my chemist brother and get some guidance on how to make sweet fat and salty-fat scent. Or maybe there already exists a Glade Plug-in for that!
Tags: health, Nutrition, smell and taste, weight loss
October 30th, 2010 at 5:17 am
Why would you want to go on a uncomfortable diet ,anyone?. Eat whenever you want to, just dont forget to work for it
October 30th, 2010 at 11:39 am
The trouble is just eating whatever people want had lead to an obesity epidemic.
November 2nd, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Interesting thought Elsbeth. For what its worth I ate a Burger from Burger King a few months back and the smell clung to me for a lot longer than I wanted. Made me feel a bit sick. Haven’t eaten a burger since. I find Mickey D’s food only slightly more appealing smelling. Now if you were to put a homemade pie of almost any kind in there I might chow down on anything around. My eating habits are pretty horrible though.