As Seen On TV Blog | News | New | Products | Infomercial

I have a cake baking in the oven (unfortunately, not a Big Top Cupcake), and it smells amazing.  There’s just nothing like the smell of freshly baked cakes, cookies, or bread.  In fact, just smelling the cake--which I’m not even going to get to eat--is making me hungry.  If I had this week’s Way Back Wednesday product handy, though, I’d be all set.

AromaTrim is weight loss product designed to help prevent its users from eating, literally stopping them mid-chew, before they could eat too much.  As the infomercial shows, all these people had to do to prevent overeating was just sniff the AromaTrim, a little piece of plastic with an undefined “herbal” odor:

Finish the brownie?  No way.  Eat three or four giant cookies? Uh-uh.  Gobble down a vat-sized cone of french fries?  Puh-lease.  Apparently, AromaTrim “changes the taste” of food through its “herbal” odor.  I’d be curious to know what kind of herb these people were inhaling . . . er, sniffing.  Stinkweed perhaps?

Regardless, I’m going to assume that it must smell pretty awful to keep Biggie there from his fries.

Strangely, AromaTrim came in two different scents--one designed to control cravings and the other designed to suppress hunger.  If it makes your food taste like swamp water, does it really matter which scent you choose?  For that matter, couldn’t you just sniff the gym sock of an overweight 7th grader?  Actually, according to AromaTrim, the special “herbal” blend scrambles your brain’s hunger signals (that’s what I’ve heard about certain “herbs”), and doesn’t merely mask the taste of the food with a truly horrendous stench.

The television airwaves are filled with infomercial weight loss products.  From “diet foods” such as Smart for Life Diet Cookies to supplements like Formula 9, SBL, and Emagrece Sim, there are a number of products designed to help you lose weight without having to resort to sniffing some unimaginable funk, replacing your hunger with nausea and repulsion.  Wouldn’t you rather take a diet supplement or eat a cookie?

Speaking of cookies, there’s the timer on my cake.  There’s no way I’d do anything to kill that smell.  Mmmmm . . .

Virtually everyone I know is looking for an easy way to lose weight and burn fat--without diet, without exercise, and without effort.  For years, gimmicks have been around trying to convince people of the next weight loss breakthrough.  In 1984, that “miracle pill” was Grapefruit 45, a supposed weight-loss pill with the fat-burning power of grapefruit.  Get a load of this wooden acting:

Now, the seen on tv marketers of Grapefruit 45 at least try to inject some honesty into their inflated claims.  For example, after crushing a grapefruit in his fist, the mustachioed spokesman says, “I know a lot of you believe grapefruit burns fat.”  Notice he doesn’t tell the viewers that grapefruit does burn fat; he just says some suckers believe it.   Also note the disclaimer:  “‘Fat Burn’ perception scientifically unsubstantiated.”

I guess these disclaimers give the marketers license to make wild claims like, “I lost 9 pounds the first week,” and, “I already lost 24 pounds, and I never get hungry.”  And of course there’s the lady who used to eat a grapefruit for lunch but now just pops a Grapefruit 45 and eats “delicious foods” and still loses weight.

Today, buyers are much more savvy.  While millions of people are looking for an easy, rapid weight loss approach, most of them know better than to look at a product whose claims of effectiveness are based solely on people’s perceptions.  People are looking for weight loss supplement with ingredients clinically proven to help one lose weight.  Modern seen on TV products such as SBL Lean, Formula 9, and Emagrece Sim combine ingredients designed to boost metabolism and curb appetite.  These new products appeal to our desire for rapid results as well as our knowledge that claims of effectiveness need to be based on scientific fact, not just on the beliefs of the masses.

All that typing made me hungry.  I wonder if there’s a grapefruit around here anywhere . . .