The Deadly Appetite Suppressant

Despite the several health claims against smoking, people continue to light up to suppress their appetites. by Jeff Laboon

Evan Gannon lights his cigarette. The Syracuse University senior quit for more than year at the urging of his girlfriend, who refused to go anywhere near his face because the scent of smoke on his beard was so strong.

Once the couple broke-up, though, he restarted the habit. “In her absence,” he says with a laugh, “I’m obviously not doing too well with quitting.”

Gannon is part of the 20 percent of Americans that regularly smoke cigarettes, according to a 2008 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Despite the health risks of tobacco, many continue to smoke as a means of venting stress and weight control. The nicotine in cigarettes can serve as an appetite suppressant for some, meaning that instead of eating lunch, a dieter can smoke a cigarette. Though cigarettes account for more than 440,000 deaths in the United States each year, the difficulties of stopping make it a challenging habit to shake.

Gannon started to smoke cigarettes the summer following his freshman year at SU. He was never drawn to it or pressured into taking a cigarette, but instead chose to smoke out of curiosity. What began as occasionally bumming cigarettes from friends grew to smoking a pack a day to vent stress. For him, cigarettes are a type of security, like a childhood blanket. “You can almost say that people let go of their blankets from when they were little kids and pick up cigarettes,” he says, “because it becomes this tangible thing beyond just being a way to relieve stress and take a break.”

Gannon never smoked with a concern for his body image because even before he started he would gain and lose weight irregularly. But cigarettes have changed his diet.

"Until you’ve done it, you just don’t realize how hard it really is," says Gannon.

Without money to buy groceries or time to grab dinner, cigarettes are a way to shake his hunger out of necessity. “Smoking a cigarette is a pretty good way to curb my appetite and get me to stop thinking about how damn hungry I am,” he says. Shortly after he stopped, he realized how difficult it was to walk away from tobacco after smoking for a year and a half.

Cigarettes become a part of your routine when you smoke daily, he says. It’s as instinctive as going to the bathroom or brushing your teeth. “Until you’ve done it, you just don’t realize how hard it really is,” he says of quitting. “People don’t realize how kind of biologically hardwired smoking cigarettes makes you become when you’ve smoked on a regular basis for long enough.”

Despite an increase in the cost of tobacco, Gannon thinks most people will continue to light up regardless of the price because of the hold it has on daily life.

“It gets into your lungs and destroys them; no air to your muscles or any part of your body,” says Dr. Short.

Allison Shumway quit for this reason, though. Cigarettes became too expensive for her after smoking between three to eight times a day for a year and a half.

Shumway has lasted two weeks without a cigarette, but this is not her first time trying to stop. The most difficult part of stopping, she says, is the foreignness of daily actions. “It felt awkward doing certain things without smoking,” she says. “Having a beer with a friend, or even just waiting for a bus, just hanging out at the bus stop without a cigarette felt weird, just little things like that.”

Stress pushed Shumway to tobacco. While Shumway studied abroad in Germany, her sister in New York City feared she had cancer and a couple of her friends died in a car accident. Smoking relieved Shumway’s stress and helped her escape.

She thinks most people underestimate the difficulty in quitting because there are constant reminders. It’s not something you can just leave. “The routine habit of smoking is always there,” she says, “and you will be in certain situations and you’ll just want to smoke because the situation is so familiar and I think that is one thing that people don’t realize about quitting.”

Shumway noticed that she ate less when she smoked because her appetite would fade when she lit a cigarette. Occasionally, she would smoke to replace a meal, but did not use it as a method of dieting.

Nicotine is a stimulant that alters the nerve transmissions that control one’s appetite, according to registered dietitian Juliette Kellow for Weightlossresources.co.uk. The stimulant also increases one’s metabolism, allowing smokers to digest food at a quicker rate. Unless quitters eat fewer calories, they will experience slight weight gain between 4 and 10 pounds on average, depending on how often they smoked, according to the Tobacco Research and Intervention Program at the University of South Florida.

For Sarah Short, professor of nutrition at Syracuse University, smoking is a subject she does not like to talk about because her husband died after years of smoking. It is such an addictive and deadly habit, she says, that she hopes no one tries it. “It’s so bad,” Short says. “It gets into your lungs and destroys them; no air to your muscles or any part of your body.”

Despite the risks of tobacco, some still fear the small weight gain that may come with quitting.

Whether it’s slight or grand weight loss, the first step in starting a diet plan is noting what you eat on a regular basis to determine unhealthy eating habits, says Judy Fulton, a registered dietitian at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Dieters need to learn how to eat healthy and only when they are hungry because what they chose to eat will affect them their whole life.

Weight gain can be controlled in ex-smokers by cutting down on daily calories and increasing the metabolism by exercising more frequently, according to the University of South Florida. Frequent snacking may also be needed to fight the urge to light up.

The urge is still there for Evan Gannon.

He could not handle trying to stop while the rest of his friends continued to

smoke. He missed what he calls the “unspoken camaraderie” that smokers share, the willingness to offer a cigarette or a light to a fellow smoker. But Gannon still tries to fight it.

“It’s a real bad habit,” he says. “There were times where habitually I would smoke a cigarette where I had to say, ‘No, I don’t want to smoke a cigarette now.’”