A reader of mine has heard that the smell of grapefruit would make you lose weight , and she asks me for an explanation. In reality, the whole matter of aromatherapy for weight loss is a sort of minefield: surely, each of us reacts to odors, in some cases with a sense of hunger (the smell of hot bread), in other cases with a sense of nausea (pregnant women who cannot bear certain smells or exposure in general to strong and unpleasant odors, for example the smell of rotten eggs certainly does not make you hungry), but the speech is often so subjective that the only way to know if aromatherapy works for us is to try.

According to  Eugeny Couture, an English aromatherapist, the scent of some essential oils really manages to block the sense of hunger, making those who smell them lose weight several times a day. This would be the case of grapefruit essential oil , which according to the expert should be smelled 3 to 5 consecutive times, up to six times a day, to lose weight by blocking the stimulus of hunger. It was already known that grapefruit had fat-burning properties , thanks to a study published in the journal Plos One: but that the smell of grapefruit pushes you to lose weight by reducing nervous hunger is a hypothesis not yet validated by scientific studies. Indeed,the only study that spoke of a reduction in appetite thanks to the smell of grapefruit is from a few years ago, and concerned laboratory guinea pigs : but humans and animals react differently to many smells, so it is not absolutely certain that if mice lose weight with the smell of grapefruit the same thing happens to us.

According to the experts who followed the rats, the slimming properties of grapefruit essential oil are explained not only by its calming virtues, but also by the activation of certain liver enzymes that would reduce hunger pangs.

Will it be the same for humans? As I said at the beginning of the article, you can always try the aromatherapy way. A bottle of grapefruit essential oil has a fairly low cost, you need to know where to look. On this site , for example, it costs less than five euros.