Many women who have a harmful addiction are afraid to part with it. This raises a very serious concern. Representatives of the fair sex simply do not want to gain excess weight. For some, this is much worse than the likely consequences of smoking. For this reason, it is especially important to find out how to quit smoking and not gain weight. To do this, you should follow simple recommendations.
Effect of smoking on weight
Before we talk about how to quit smoking without gaining weight, you should understand what relationship exists between cigarettes and changes in body weight.
Everything is quite simple. Nicotine, entering the stomach and intestines, interferes with the absorption of nutrients. Therefore, the tobacco user begins to lose weight sharply. However, there is also a reverse reaction, when the chemical composition of a cigarette affects hormones and a person gains weight by leaps and bounds.
Reasons for weight gain when quitting smoking
The psychological factor comes first. A smoker gets used to constantly having something in his mouth. It becomes a habit to smoke a cigarette when you want to eat, but don’t have the time. Losing a cigarette, a person looks for a substitute. Often nuts, seeds, and candies become alternatives. All these are high-calorie foods. By consuming them, you can gain a lot of weight.
Thanks to tobacco, the smoker eats little - he just doesn’t feel like it. But already 3 days after giving up cigarettes, the appetite returns. A hungry body requires an increase in portions. The feeling of hunger is present all the time. A person may be craving sweet or salty foods, which also has an adverse effect on weight.
Under the influence of nicotine, metabolism accelerates. The absence of the usual dose of this element will slow down the metabolic process in the body, and as a result, the arrow on the scale shifts upward.
General medical advice
A doctor can best tell you how to quit smoking without gaining weight. Therefore, consulting a doctor is simply necessary. Doctors give separate recommendations to ladies, since the female body is more prone to gaining excess weight, especially in stressful situations, and quitting smoking is a huge stress for a person.
Nutritionists warn that you need to give up a bad habit at a certain period of the menstrual cycle. It's best to do this after it's finished. Otherwise, an unpleasant consequence is inevitable - water retention in the body and the occurrence of severe edema. The process of cleaning the uterus can also be very painful.
Self-discipline will help you avoid adding extra pounds. In order to prevent overeating, you need to determine in the evening what you can eat tomorrow. Products are placed in a separate basket. If you can’t collect food in one place, you can write a note and then cross off the consumed dishes from the list. You need to plan your diet this way for at least a month.
Important!
The risk of gaining weight after quitting smoking for women remains for five months. It is advisable that the grocery basket does not contain a lot of sweets, baked goods and unhealthy products like chips and hamburgers. It is believed that if a woman consumes no more than 2000 kilocalories per day, then she loses 200-300 grams of weight per day.
But even if you follow all the recommendations, you cannot do without sedatives. The doctor will prescribe the appropriate medications. These remedies will help you cope with stress. Psychologists also recommend finding a new hobby. Hobby will distract you from thoughts about smoking.
How to eat so as not to gain weight
Smoking burns 100 kilocalories daily. That's how much is contained in a packet of chips or a sandwich. For this reason, nutritionists advise planning your menu carefully. In order not to gain weight, you need to exclude 100 kilocalories from your diet. It's best to forget about fast food and fried potatoes for a while.
Products to help you quit smoking
If you are interested in the question of how not to gain excess weight if you quit smoking, then you are already halfway to solving the problem.
Products that can easily be found in the store will come to the rescue:
- Milk – smoking after it will be unpleasant.
- Products with vitamin C – due to smoking, the body loses this vitamin, and it must be replenished.
- Celery, asparagus, cucumbers, beans - help not to gain excess weight and worsen the taste of cigarettes.
- Tomatoes, green peppers, and eggplants contain some nicotine and will help get rid of nicotine hunger.
- Broccoli protects the lungs from toxins.
Tip: Soak cigarettes in milk, dry them, and then smoke. Quitting a bad habit will come faster than you could imagine!
There are many ways to give up a bad habit, but almost all experts agree that without a conscious desire to quit smoking nothing will happen. A person must realize the harm he causes to his health by smoking. And only after this can you begin to rebuild your daily routine and think through your diet. Having decided to get rid of nicotine addiction, you need to prepare yourself for a difficult struggle and do everything to restore your lost health.
Phytotherapy
Herbs can do many things, including helping control body weight. If a person begins to gain weight after quitting smoking, it means that his metabolism has been disrupted. Some doctors believe that ginger can cope with the problem.
A common way to force the body to start burning fat is ginger tea. In stores you can buy both whole and already crushed roots into powder. Pour boiling water over a pinch of grated ginger. The drink is infused for five minutes and drunk in one gulp. The amount of use per day is not limited.
The plant not only breaks down fats, but also cures pancreatitis. Ginger is added to tea and many other products. For example, there are many recipes for making sauces with chopped root. The powder goes well with meat, fish and would be appropriate in baking.
Another food that causes weight loss is cinnamon. Delicious teas, mixtures for scrubs and wraps are prepared from grated sticks.
Place a teaspoon of cinnamon into a mug of boiling water. The drink will be ready in 10 minutes. The effectiveness of the tea will increase if you add ginger and lemon zest to it. This drink warms you up, has a beneficial effect on the digestive system and nerves, and the unique aroma lifts your spirits and creates a festive atmosphere.
Lemon gives a good effect. Herbalists advise women who quit smoking to start with a glass of lemon juice every morning. All the juice is squeezed out of the ripe fruit and mixed with 250 ml of boiling water. If desired, you can add a teaspoon of honey. Drink the drink half an hour before meals. The recipe will help activate the fat burning mechanism, improve the condition of the skin and partially solve the problem of cellulite. Unfortunately, people with stomach problems, especially gastritis, should not drink this fruit drink.
A list of herbs that help normalize weight is presented in the table below.
| Name of herbs | Action |
| Angelica, flaxseed, marshmallow, fucus, spirulina | Suppressing hunger |
| Parsley, dill, anise, celery, fennel, buckthorn bark | Cleansing the intestines and normalizing the gastrointestinal tract |
| Dandelion, milk thistle, corn silk, bear's ear, knotweed, horsetail, immortelle, tansy, strawberry | Diuretic and biliary |
| Anise, buckthorn, senna, yarrow, dill, chamomile, cherry stalks | Laxative |
| Mother and stepmother, elderberry, nettle, birch | Normalization of metabolism |
| Turmeric, ginger, red hot pepper, rosemary | Burn energy |
Another “food approach” to the problem
This method goes well with the previous and subsequent ones. Its essence is simple - change your eating style. Not quality and quantity, but style. This method has practical significance. Calculate how many calories you should be getting per day. It's not difficult; there are plenty of sites on the Internet with such information.
Now take a bag - a regular one, made of food-grade polyethylene. In the morning or in the evening, as it suits you, put in a bag (of course, individually packaged) those foods that you can eat in a day for the required number of calories (the calorie value of foods can also be easily found on culinary or “lady’s” websites).
Replace those foods that cannot be put in this bag (cooked chicken, salad, etc.) with notes, for example, “a piece of chicken the size of two matchboxes.” But put fruits, peeled and chopped vegetables, bread, a bag of sugar and much more in this bag.
They ate the chicken and threw the note away. If you wanted to chew something, you took out a piece of, say, carrots and ate it. This way you can “kill two birds with one stone”: you receive fractional meals (very approved by nutritionists) and at the same time have the opportunity to control “income and expenditure”. Under no circumstances add other products to the package in excess of the standard.
Doctors' advice regarding physical therapy
Quitting smoking, a person can gain weight in the absence of the necessary physical activity. If there is no exercise, then a former smoker will gain weight very quickly.
But doctors do not recommend running to the gym immediately on the first day of quitting cigarettes. It should take at least 2 months, preferably three.
Important!
During the first six months of quitting nicotine, cardio exercise and running are strictly prohibited. The body is not yet ready for such stress. Vessels clogged with nicotine may not be able to withstand it, and a stroke will occur.
You can walk, and the more, the better. To maintain good physical shape, a woman should take at least 9,000 steps a day. Sports walking with poles will help you lose belly fat. Half an hour of exercise burns 46% more calories than regular walking. Race walking uses 90% of the muscles at once.
You should start from a small distance, constantly lengthening the path. Speed is important. You need to walk quickly, as this wastes more energy.
At home, the bar is effective. The exercise trains all areas of the body.
I want something sweet
Nicotine disrupts the synthesis of serotonin and endorphins and causes addiction. The ex-smoker is haunted by constant withdrawal symptoms.
Irritability, absent-mindedness, loss of concentration, depression, decreased performance, constant unmotivated anxiety. What is the best antidepressant? That's right, treats.
It is sweets that help your body survive the absence of nicotine. Be prepared, you will definitely have a craving for something sweet. And in order not to gain too much weight, it is better to enjoy low-fat sweets (marshmallow or marmalade), as well as dried fruits and fruits.
They contain many fewer calories than buns and cakes.
Reviews
Arthur Vernadsky, nutritionist.
I always recommend to patients who are quitting smoking not to rush things. It often happens that the kilograms gained at first go away on their own. There are many explanations for this phenomenon. This includes water retention and fecal accumulation, since quitting cigarettes is often accompanied by constipation. Of course, you need to pay attention to nutrition.
It is important not to overeat and limit your intake of fatty and sweet foods. If a woman does not follow these rules, she will begin to gain weight. There is one more point - nicotine inhibits weight gain, so it may be that after quitting smoking, a person returns to his real weight, to the one he should have according to medical criteria. Therefore, the fear of gaining weight should not stop those who intend to give up tobacco.
Anna, 38 years old.
I heard from many friends that it is impossible to quit smoking without gaining weight. That’s why I was afraid to start a bad habit. I smoked since I was 16 years old. The weight was normal, even below the required weight. With a height of 180 cm, she weighed 55 kilograms. I ate little, didn’t have breakfast at all in the morning, just drank tea. During lunch I also didn't have much of an appetite. When I quit smoking, I felt a constant feeling of hunger; my mouth literally wouldn’t close.
I began to gain a lot of weight - I reached 65 kilograms, my stomach began to grow. I made an appointment with a nutritionist. The doctor advised me to eat smaller meals, exclude seeds and nuts, and not mix various nutritional supplements into my food. I started eating right and stopped gaining weight. Now I weigh 60 kilograms, as the doctor explained, this is the norm. So I’m not going to remove the 5 kilograms I’ve gained yet.
Angelina, 44 years old.
I always knew that when you quit smoking, you gain weight. I gained quickly, 6 kg in 2 weeks. I realized that something needs to be done. I found a review from one doctor, the doctor said that the cigarette contains a substance that speeds up metabolism and suppresses hunger. Therefore, many smokers specifically use tobacco in order not to gain weight, and when a person gives up cigarettes, he quickly gains weight.
A fitness trainer helped me cope with the problem. The instructor advised not to engage in active sports for the first time, as restructuring occurs in the body. The coach recommended taking up walking. At first it was hard, I got tired quickly, and suffered from shortness of breath, but over time everything returned to normal. Later I decided to get a dog, and now we walk together. We walk 4 hours a day. In a month of walking I managed to lose 4 kilograms.
Stress and insomnia
Most people eat to relieve stress. Food in the oral cavity irritates receptors that reduce anxiety and normalize mood. A cigarette is also an antidepressant, only nicotine, tar and smoke act as irritants.
Any heavy smoker knows that when there is strong anxiety or a stressful situation, the need to smoke a cigarette increases sharply. Although nicotine itself is not a cure for anxiety.
This substance does not relieve stress and does not improve your mood. A cigarette calms only the smokers themselves. This property of a cigarette is the result of a very complex process that doctors call psychological and chemical dependence.
What to do?
To avoid stress, treat yourself to a massage, exercise, and walk more. And be sure to communicate with non-smoking friends! They will help you forget about the cigarette.
Why quit smoking?
