Manage Your Weight While Quitting Smoking
Most people will put on weight after they finally manage to quit smoking. Shortly after you kick the habit, you will experience significant cravings and will be dealing with the side effects of finally freeing your body from nicotine. Even if you do not increase the amount of food you are eating, your body will gain weight from the change in its metabolism realized from stopping smoking.
Avoid Adding too Much Stress to Your Life at Once
A mistake that many smokers make is to attempt to change their dietary habits too quickly after they kick the habit. This adds a significant amount of stress to your daily life that may make your efforts at giving up cigarettes fail. Your highest priority needs to be staying off nicotine. You can help mitigate the added stress that weight gain adds to these efforts by focusing on taking smaller steps to avoid gaining more weight vice trying to lose weight at the start.
Steps to Take to Mitigate Weight Gain While Stopping Smoking
Some steps that you can take to help mitigate your weight gain while kicking the habit are:
1 – Increasing your overall physical activity. If you are able to do this prior to kicking the habit even better. This can be as little as going from no exercise a week to taking a nightly walk 3-5 nights a week after dinner. Just by this simple act, you can maintain your current diet and start to see positive dividends in your battle to keep the pounds off while trying to break your addiction to nicotine.
2 – Reduce the fat in your daily diet. You can do this easiest by reducing or eliminating the total number of trips you take to a fast food restaurant per week. If you have been in the habit of going to get fast food at lunch two to three times a week, make this once or none at all. Then, start looking to making low-fat substitutions in your daily diet. If this gets to be too hard, simply sticking to the no or minimized fast-food plan may be all you want to do until you have quit smoking for a substantive period.
3 – Monitor and Reduce Carbohydrates. This may be required to stop the weight gain if increasing your exercise and watching the fat content of your meals has not worked. You don’t need to adopt the Adkins diet, but simply tracking the amount of carbs you are in-taking per day and week and finding small things to reduce or cut-out of your diet may pay dividends in battling weight gain during your effort to stop smoking.
4 - Consider using a nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). If you’re not using one already, you may want to discuss with your physician the use of a NRT in your smoking cessation efforts. A NRT will help keep your weight down while it is helping gyou to kick the habit.
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