It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen to many, to most of those who quit smoking. Among the many health benefits, quitting smoking makes you fat, and this is the only unwanted “side effect” for those who quit smoking.

Many think that this weight gain is due to a compensatory psychological effect of quitting smoking, such as putting something in the mouth to compensate for the absence of the cigarette. Or, another psychological theory, that the stress caused by wanting to quit smoking leads to uncontrollable food cravings.

In reality, although there are certainly psychological implications, quitting smoking makes you fat, even if not all, for two main reasons, one of which has been recently discovered.

WHY STOP SMOKING MAKES YOU FAT?

As I said, this thing about getting fat after quitting smoking isn’t an unwritten law – it happens frequently, but not always. There are even those who, abandoning the cigarette, lose body fat around the abdomen.
This is because there is a correlation between smoking and increased visceral fat. And on the other hand, it would be stupid and extremely harmful to your health to continue smoking just because you fear you might gain weight.

But let’s get to the two reasons why this can happen.

The first is that nicotine, like caffeine and other stimulants, stimulates the metabolism.

Especially heavy smokers, thanks to the consumption of nicotine, have a greater energy expenditure of around 10% of daily calories, therefore more or less 200. So the first thing you can do to avoid gaining weight is to reduce daily consumption by 10% of calories or doing a healthy activity that allows us to burn them. For example an hour of walking.
Walking for an hour a day if you quit smoking is the best way to avoid the risk of gaining weight. It also helps the nicotine detox process.

The second reason quitting smoking makes you fat, recently discovered, is intestinal.

Comparing the microbiota, therefore the intestinal bacterial flora, between smokers and non-smokers, but also between mice exposed to smoke and normal mice, it was seen that both nicotine and other components of tobacco altered the composition of the bacteria, allowing food to be more efficiently converted into energy.
By quitting smoking, bacteria tend to return to their original state, which leads to overweight.
A possible “antidote” would be to do an antibiotic therapy in agreement with your doctor, and then take probiotics to allow the good intestinal bacteria to repopulate the microbiota. This, along with the walk trick, would greatly reduce the side effect of excess weight.