Use Peppermint to Lose Weight Without Hunger

This time of year — more so than any other — it can be tough to stay away from sweets. They’re everywhere.

But if you’re going for slim as a candy cane in 2016 versus the more round look of a peppermint patty, you might want to keep any candy away from your mouth and wave the scent under your nose.

Peppermint, researchers have found, helps prevent weight gain in a few different ways. It has been shown to improve energy, focus and diminish feelings of hunger.

Bryan Raudenbush has earned something of a reputation as the Kris Kringle of peppermint research, though he looks far younger than his decades of research in the field would suggest. At West Virginia’s Wheeling Jesuit University, he’s conducted dozens of studies on peppermint’s effect on alertness, appetite and performance.

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In an interview with LifeZette, he described how he and his colleagues gave volunteers peppermint inhalers and instructed them to breathe in the scent whenever they felt hungry.

“Over the course of a week, we found that people ate about one pound less of food — or enough calories to equate to that — and that can be a big help during holiday season,” Raudenbush said.

Dr. Alan Hirsch of Chicago’s Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation has found similar results in his experiments.

“We studied volunteers on exercise bikes and we gave them masks with smells including peppermint, and discovered that that scent (among others) increased the number of calories people burned in those time periods because it could increase motivation for exercise,” Hirsch said.

In other words, if you’re paying penance for a night out partying, peppermint “could wake you up or make you distracted” so you experience less fatigue, Hirsch said.

Raudenbush keeps the scent in his own home gym.

“Before working out it’s great. It sort of primes the body and gets you a little more ready to engage in physical activity,” he said.

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He has also demonstrated that college basketball players were able to breathe easier after getting a whiff of peppermint, allowing them to pump more oxygen-rich blood to their muscles. Subjects reported increased energy, alertness and strength. The magic mint did not improve their basketball skills, however, suggesting the benefit might be as much in the mind as in the muscles.

“You don’t need any expensive gimmicky products,” he said. “You can get blank plug ins, kind of like the Glade PlugIns, and then put peppermint oil on the cotton that’s in there, and that will scent the room for you.”

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How does peppermint perform its magic?

“The irritant component of peppermint stimulates the RAS — reticular activating system — part of the brain that makes you more awake and more alert,” Hirsch said.

Raudenbush has also shown how peppermint scent can increase heart rate.

So if peppermint is best for extra pep pre-workout, what’s best for a post-exercise cool down?

“We did an experiment to see what scent would be best to get the physiology back to baseline most quickly,” Raudenbush said. “It was jasmine. Peppermint after working out doesn’t make any sense.”