Stop smoking without putting on weight ? Difficult to avoid weight gain the first months, assure Franco-British researchers who even go there with their prognosis. Their study, published in the British Medical Journal, reports a weight gain of 1.1 kilograms on average 1 month after stopping smoking. Two months after the last cigarette, we could gain about 2.3 kilos then 2.9 kilos at three months to reach 4.7 kilos after one year.
French and British researchers have compiled the results of 62 studies on the subject to be able to give these quantitative estimates.
How to explain this weight gain? Smoking cessation no longer allows you to burn a few calories that we “lost” by smoking, explained to us in a previous article Didier Rubio, sports doctor. And in addition, we eat to compensate for the lack of tobacco. “Nicotine deprivation increases the attraction to sweetness. And the return of taste sensations encourages eating more”. People who quit smoking eat more calories, are higher in cholesterol and salt, and drink more alcohol than others. On the other hand, they ignore the good fats, fibers and vitamins!
Therefore, if you want to quit smoking, nothing says that you will gain weight as long as you take good eating habits. “It is impossible to predict what we will take or not after a year,” confirms Henri-Jean Aubin, professor of psychiatry and addictology in Paris and author of the new study, quoted by AFP.
The weight gain observed at the start of weaning is not automatic. The researchers noted that 16% of people who quit smoking lost weight after a year while 13% gained more than 10kg.
Quitting smoking at 40, it’s nine years gained
If stopping smoking weighs more or less on the scale, we can console ourselves by saying that smoking cessation brings many health benefits. “If you stop smoking at age 40, your gain in healthy life expectancy is nine years.”
>> Read also: 10 tips to quit smoking without gaining weight
