Does smoking really speed up your metabolism and help you lose weight? Smoking is very dangerous to your body and as such is not a desirable habit to take up. However, there are limited advantages that come with the smoking habit. One such benefit is that smoking ‘can’ help you lose weight.
There are a variety of reasons why smoking helps you lose weight, as detailed below;

Smoking Damages Your Taste Buds; the more you smoke, the more damage you do to your taste buds. Over the course of time, the chemicals and tar in cigarettes coat the inside of your mouth and cover your taste buds, making them less and less functional. As your taste buds become progressively damaged, the food you consume becomes increasingly tasteless. For that reason, you do not enjoy the food as much as you would were you not a smoker and thus there is less desire to keep eating as normal. You begin eating until your hunger is satisfied and not for the fun of it, meaning you will eat less. As, you are eating less, the logical outcome is that you lose weight. But it is not worth damaging your taste buds just so that you eat a little less each day, considering you are harming yourself in the process.

In addition to that, nicotine is an appetite suppressant; studies conclude that nicotine operates as an appetite suppressant. For that reason, as you smoke more and more, the less hungry you feel and the less you will probably eat. It is however no secret that nicotine is a very harmful substance. Some reports suggest that there may be a connection between nicotine and kidney disease, that nicotine damages the inside of your arteries and that nicotine can elevate your chances of heart disease. To add to that, withdrawal from nicotine can cause irritability, headaches, poor concentration, insomnia, constipation and it can even increase your appetite. Therefore, while you may feel less hungry when you regularly use nicotine, you fast become dependent on this substance to suppress your appetite, all the while increasingly harming your body.

Furthermore, smoking increases your metabolic rate; smoking cigarettes causes your heart to beat more rapidly, meaning your body uses up extra energy and burns additional calories. For that reason, when you smoke, you will burn additional calories than when you do not smoke. Heavy smokers are thought to burn up to two hundred extra calories every day because of this. However, the additional pressure exerted on your heart by smoking does a lot more than just burn calories. It also elevates your risk of heart disease, which is one of the most typical causes behind smoking connected deaths. Hence, it is not really worth placing your heart in this much danger just to get a slight daily jolt in metabolism.

As previously detailed, smoking is a dangerous habit and hence is something that you ought to avoid. Nevertheless, one of the few advantages of smoking is that it helps in weight loss by increasing your metabolism and curbing your appetite. However, when you weigh this against the negatives, including harm to your lungs, arteries, veins and heart, bad breath, wrinkled skin and poor health, smoking is then seen as not such a desirable weight loss aid.

Related posts:

1. Effects of lung cancer Over the years lung cancer has developed into the number...
2. What are the health effects of smoking? Cigarette smoking causes more deaths each year than suicides, murders,...
3. smoking-effects     Are the smoking health effects exaggerated? The risks...
4. smoking-effects     Are the smoking health effects exaggerated? The risks...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am and is filed under Smoking Effects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.