Cigarette smoking for weight loss

Smoking for weight loss is a rather old practice which traces back to the early understanding of nicotine as a suppressant of appetite. Old world Europeans and pre-Columbian Native Americans associated tobacco smoking with appetite suppression. And in our modern society nicotine has already been proven to have the appetite suppressing effect - it can reduce appetite and influences eating habits of a person.

The fact that smoking affects weight and smokers often gain weight after giving up their habit has long been known, but medical community only recently has got to the bottom of this phenomenon mechanisms. Till now it was thought that the slowdown of metabolism, of fats and carbohydrates utilization takes place in any ex-smoker's organism. But it turned out that it is a horse of another color.

Researchers found out that cigarette smoking arouses chemical processes that increase the activity of a particular gene called AZGP1 which promotes the breakdown of fats in the smokers' bodies. So as a result having given up smoking a person weakens the activity of the "fat-burning gene", metabolism balance of the body starts changing in favor of fat which leads to gain in fat mass and it does not matter whether this ex-smoker smoked cheap cigarettes or expensive ones. Besides, researchers admit that people who quitted smoking begin to eat more which gives an extra load to other fat-burning subsystems which are just not able to utilize all the incoming fat.

It has been noticed that the more cigarettes person smoked per one day, the more weight he will probably gain after giving up. The one who gave up smoking two packs of cigarettes per day can expect to gain more than that person who gave up smoking one pack of cigarettes per day.