Smoking is highly damaging to your body and it is not an activity I recommend you participate in. However, there are limited advantages associated with this habit. One such advantage is that smoking can help you lose weight. In this article I discuss how it helps you lose weight and compare this with the damage it can cause.

There are a number of reasons that smoking helps you drop the pounds and I have listed these below:

1) Smoking Damages Your Taste Buds:- The more you smoke the more damage you do to your taste buds. Over time the chemicals and tar in cigarettes coat the inside of your mouth and cover your taste buds meaning that they become less and less effective. As your taste buds become progressively hampered the food you eat becomes increasingly bland. Therefore, you do not enjoy your food as much as you once did and there is less temptation to carry on eating. You start to eat until your hunger is satisfied and not for enjoyment which means you eat less. Since you are eating less the logical result is for you to lose weight.

But is it worth damaging your taste buds just so that you eat a little less each day? In my opinion definitely not. I really enjoy tasting all the different flavours that food has to offer and would not like to have that taken away from me. I would much rather discipline myself to moderate my eating than damage my taste buds so much that I do not enjoy my food anymore.

2) Nicotine is an Appetite Suppressant:- Studies suggest that nicotine acts as an appetite suppressant. Therefore, the more you smoke the less hungry you feel and the less you are likely to eat.

However, nicotine is a very dangerous substance. Certain reports suggest that there may be a link between nicotine and kidney disease, that nicotine damages the inside of your arteries and that nicotine can increase your risk of heart disease. Furthermore, withdrawal from nicotine can lead to irritability, headaches, poor concentration, insomnia, constipation and it can even increase your appetite. Therefore, whilst you may feel less hungry when you have a steady supply of nicotine you quickly become reliant on this substance to suppress your appetite, all the time doing increased damage to your body.

3) Smoking Increases your Metabolic Rate:- Smoking cigarettes makes your heart beat faster, meaning your body expends more energy and burns more calories. Therefore, when you smoke you will burn more calories than when you do not smoke. Heavy smokers are believed to burn up to 200 additional calories each day as a result of this.

However, the extra pressure placed on your heart by smoking does not just burn calories. It also increases your risk of heart disease which is one of the most common causes of smoking related deaths. Is it really worth putting your heart in this much danger just to get a slight daily boost in metabolism?

As I have already mentioned smoking is not a good habit and is something that I suggest you avoid. Nevertheless, I am prepared to offer a balanced argument and I admit that one of the few benefits of smoking is that it assists weight loss by boosting your metabolism and suppressing your appetite. However, when you balance this against the negatives which include damage to your lungs, arteries, veins & heart, bad breath, wrinkled skin and poor health smoking is not such an attractive weight loss solution.