How did you gain weight in the first place

I quit smoking. I put on 30 lbs in only 4 months! The weird thing is that I didn't change ANYTHING about my eating habits. Not a single thing. In fact, I tried to work out more because people warned me that I would probably gain weight when I quit smoking. The extra walking and working out 3 times a week didn't help. The lbs just kept coming.

I read that smoking increases your heart rate and your metabolism. The average smoker will gain around 15 lbs when they quit smoking. Apparently this is weight you WOULD have had if you were not a smoker.

I guess that means I would have been naturally overweight. This makes sense because I was the only member in my family that didn't have a problem with my weight. I had been smoking for 16 years.

For the first time in my life, I'm overweight. Now I'm struggling to lose these extra lbs I packed on. It's a slow battle and very frustrating. I'm just taking it day by day. I think the most frustrating part about this weight gain is that everyone assumes I substituted smoking with eating larger portions of food. My friends joked about how I'm a secret cupcake eater and that I'm not keeping good track of those "little snacks". I haven't had any "little snacks" in a long time. It's just so frustrating to be so careful with your diet and to gain anyway!

Yaaa, no. You're eating more.

See what I mean?! :frown:

Nobody believe me.

Because you don't magically gain 30 pounds without eating more calories than you burn

Actually, you don’t have to eat more calories in order to gain weight after quitting smoking. They’ve done studies on this and have evidence that supports the fact that you WILL gain weight after quitting even if your diet remains exactly the same. 80% of smokers that quit will experience this weight gain.

“Most smokers put on a couple of kilos when they quit smoking. This is not due to an increased calorie intake, but to a change in the composition of the intestinal flora after quitting smoking, as a study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) suggests.When smokers wave goodbye to their cigarettes, eighty per cent of them put on seven kilos on average. Their weight increases even if their calorie intake remains the same or even falls compared to the level before quitting smoking. What is the reason for this weight gain?

Researchers working with Gerhard Rogler of Zurich University Hospital attribute the cause to a changed composition of the bacterial diversity in the intestine. As they recently showed in a study in PLoS One, the bacterial strains that also prevail in the intestinal flora of obese persons take the upper hand in people giving up smoking.”

You can read the rest of the article here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130829093032.htm

While it’s true that smoking inhibits your appetite and when you quit you’re prone to eat more. This exacerbates the situation, but even if you don’t eat more you will still most likely gain at least 10-15 lbs. The only way you can avoid this is to decrease your caloric intake when you quit.

The other way to avoid weight gain is to use nicotine replacement therapy (the patch, e-cig, gum) I didn’t use that. I quit cold turkey and I gained weight. I didn’t change my diet. This is the honest to god truth. I’m not saying I ate healthy every day while I was a smoker, I most certainly did not.

I just didn’t change anything about my diet when I quit. The only change I made was that I stopped drinking beers when I went out for happy hour with friends after work, I switched to Vodka/Club soda.

I've struggled for months trying to lose the weight with a 1,300 calorie diet. Now I'm very very closely watching my calorie intake (900-1,200 a day) and cutting down on my carbs.(50 g on average) I've lost 4 lbs.