You learn what causes weight gain after quitting smoking and 5 ways to avoid it on day 12 video 2 of the program:
https://cbqmembers.com/lessons/2-how-to-avoid-weight-gain/
By following the steps in the video above, you will not gain any weight.
If you really believe you have to gain weight after quitting smoking or that you need to eat so that you won’t smoke (because of past experiences or things you witnessed in other people), please consider that you may have a limiting belief. This is something we discuss on day 6 of the program.
It will help you to re-watch day 6 and re-do the day 6 worksheet while focusing on discovering the exact limiting beliefs you may have about smoking/vaping and weight gain.
Tips
Here are some tips to avoid weight gain.
1) Plan your daily meals.
This will help you stay on track and avoid choosing random unhealthy food. (Drink fruit juice as it will also prevent your blood sugar from dropping)
Some ideas:
2) Get a new after-meal behavior.
Finishing a meal is followed by a cigarette, right?
So you have trained your mind to expect a cigarette in order to say ‘I’m done eating”.
And without this anchor, you can extend your meal and eat more.
That’s why we need to find a NEW after-meal behavior. A new anchor. Something actionable and easy to do.
For example, when you finish your meal, stand up and say “the end,” or stretch, do deep breathing or play a game on your phone.
Any behavior will work as long as you do it consistently. Because then you will train your brain to break the associations between the trigger of finishing a meal and smoking.
What can be your new after-meal behavior?
3) Drink 8 glasses of water a day.
This will keep your thirst “hunger” satisfied and flush out the toxins from your system faster.
You can learn more about the 4 hungers here:
4) Keep your blood sugar levels steady.
Smoking increases the sugar levels in your blood, so when you quit, you may experience low blood sugar levels, especially during the first nicotine-free days.
When your sugar levels drop, you experience headaches, dizziness, time perception distortions, and you feel hungry and irritated: You get angry.
Planning and having regular healthy meals will help you avoid the side effects of low blood sugar. Even if you quit months ago.
When you smoke, you may go for hours without food, but if you do the same when you quit, your sugar levels will drop, and you will feel hungry and irritated.
So having regular meals will help you keep your blood sugar steady, feel full for longer, and fine-tune your metabolism!
5) Get a healthy dopamine boost.
When you eat, your brain releases dopamine. Our brain evolved to reward us when we eat so we can keep doing it. Otherwise, our species would go extinct.
Nicotine hijacks the dopamine pathways in the brain and makes it release its dopamine when nicotine is present. This depletes your brain’s natural dopamine reservoirs. When you quit smoking, your brain will take 3 months to heal its dopamine resources.
During that period, you may try to get a dopamine buzz through food. This can lead to overeating.
The best thing to do is increase your dopamine in other ways. The brain doesn’t have separate reward pathways for different activities. Pleasure and feeling good all depend on the release of dopamine.
Some other great ways to release dopamine are:
- exercise
- journaling
- the practice of gratitude
- massage- It increases dopamine levels by about 30% and it decreases stress
- listening to music
- meditation
- yoga
- mindfulness
- setting tasks and finishing them – any kind of tasks, work related, self-care related, or fun related can help you get a dopamine boost.
Your dopamine levels are also affected by what you eat.
Foods like turkey, fish, eggs, soy, bananas almonds, and probiotics can help your body make dopamine. While drinking too much coffee may give you a quick energy boost, but then your dopamine levels will decrease.
And eating sugar gives you a quick “high” but then your dopamine levels drop, and then you’re likely to want more sugar, (just as you wanted another puff of a cigarette)
You can learn how to reward yourself/ get a dopamine boost in this video:
What if I need more help or want to lose weight?
In that case, keep a food log. It may be better to do this after you quit smoking.
How to keep a food log:
Record every single thing you eat right after eating it (the same way you recorded every cigarette you smoked)
So as soon as you finish a meal, snack, or drink (except water), no matter how big or small, write down:
1) what you ate
2) what triggered you to eat (emotion, habit, hunger, fear, boredom, etc.)
3) why you ate it (What do you think would have happened if you hadn’t eaten/drunk this?)
Keep a food log even if you’re certain you’re not eating more.
Keeping a food log helps you notice things you weren’t aware of before.
Also, the process of keeping the log (Regardless of what food you eat and record) helps you be more mindful and break unhelpful patterns.
You can also join the Detox Nutrition Plan: It’s a 4-week nutrition plan designed for smokers and ex-smokers. It will help reduce food cravings because you eat foods that make you full, keep your blood sugar levels steady, and shut off the hunger hormone ghrelin.
The Detox Nutrition Plan was created by myself and licensed nutritionists that specialize in detox, body recovery, and health through nutrition.
And you can use any lesson from the CBQ Method quit smoking program and apply it to your weight loss journey. (the lessons of days 1, 2,3,4, and 7 are a perfect fit)