It sounds preposterous right" How can the sweet smell of doughnuts and the savoury and flavourful scent of pizza be the reason behind the numbers creeping up on the weighing scale" The next time someone places a plate of creamy pasta before you, run away as fast as you can before the rich flavour of the cheese hits your olfactory senses and triggers weight gain because certain studies have pointed towards olfactory senses playing an important role in influencing the brain to either store or burn fat. We already know that visual triggers as well as olfactory stimulations of food can increase the appetite and make food more appealing; however, it has been reported through research on lab mice that the sense of smell can actually influence brain to either burn or store extra calories as fat. When a group mice with super sense of smell were fed a high-fat diet, they gained weight, but when researchers blocked the sense of smell in obese mice and fed them high-fat diet, they still managed to drop their weight! New research done in this area points that food that you can’t actually smell gets burnt off instead of getting stored, while food that stimulates your senses (smell to be specific), will likely get stored as fat and add to existing weight. So, weight loss or weight gain is not actually solely dependant on maintaining a calorie deficit (though it’s the most important factor), there are a whole lot of factors (adequate sleep, stress for example) that ...