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Does Smoking Increase Your Metabolism?

The chances are we all know someone who quit smoking and then gained lots of weight.  This is not
uncommon and, in fact, smoking itself actually increases your metabolism so when you stop smoking your metabolic rate is decreased.  However, blaming the weight gain on quitting smoking may just be a convenient excuse.

Does Smoking Cut Down Your Appetite?

One of the things that smoking does is increase your heart rate which enforces your metabolic rate to go up.  All this may sound appealing when you’re focused on losing weight but it is extremely bad for your heart as well as the rest of your body.  Another thing that smoking does is curb your hunger.  When you smoke, you’re less inclined to eat as much. Plus the food doesn’t really taste as good so you’re less tempted to want to eat in the first place.

Smoking, of course, can send you to an early grave and is not a recommended way of raising your metabolism.  If you already smoke however, quitting, whilst being essential to your health, may cause you to gain extra pounds.  But, unlike a lot of former smokers may claim, the slowdown of your metabolism from quitting smoking really isn’t that significant in that we gain is probably more from the additional food you are eating to placate yourself instead of reaching for that cigarette.

Smoking is an addiction and when many people kick the habit they tend to replace lighting up with something else.  In many cases this is food.  So instead of reaching for that morning cigarette, you’re now eating a doughnut or a muffin. You can imagine, if you do this every time the urge for a cigarette came upon you, how many extra calories you would eat.

The other bad thing about smoking is that it is a habit.  You become accustomed to having a
cigarette after you eat, having cigarette with your coffee, having cigarette after your boss reprimands you, having a cigarette on the way home.  Now when you take that away, you feel deprived and what do you do to make yourself feel better?  You eat, you comfort eat.

Should You Stop Smoking & Gain Weight Or Not Stop Smoking?

But you shouldn’t use the fear of gaining weight to stop you from quitting smoking.  What you need to do, instead, is have a good plan for replacing your bad habit with some good ones.

One thing you might want to consider is beefing up your exercise programme.  Just adding a little
bit of exercise each day will more than offset the slowdown of your metabolism and, since you will probably be able to actually breathe better without cigarettes, it could actually be quite enjoyable.  Not only that but adding exercise to your daily regimen will help offset any extra calories you eat in place of that cigarette.

Speaking of which, you also want to have some low-calorie, nutritious food set aside as a cigarette substitute or plenty of healthy snacks. Think about carrot sticks, apples even gum as a way to satisfy that urge.  Additionally, you could consider non-food things such as meditation, going for a walk, having a massage, treating yourself to a new outfit or simply consult your doctor and get some of the patches or ‘pretend cigarettes’ that are available on the market these days.  I once heard a doctor on the radio saying that ‘these days there really is no reason whatsoever to go cold turkey when giving up smoking with all the things that are available to help, you would be foolish not to try them’!  Anything you can do to stop smoking a cigarette without resorting to eating unhealthy food is well worth a try!

While smoking does speed up your metabolism, quitting doesn’t have to be a sentence for weight gain nor one that you should use as an excuse and hide behind.  Smoking is probably one of the worst things you can do for your health, so quitting should be done at all costs even if you do gain a few pounds, after all you can easily lose the extra weight once you’ve quit. But the smart ones amongst us realise that stopping smoking means that they have nothing to gain but improved health!