Stop Smoking Without Weight Gain    

There are a lot of good reasons to quit smoking—your health, your family, your car upholstery. So you do it. You go cold turkey.

Problem is that the next thing you do is eat the turkey. And the ice cream. And anything else you can lay your suddenly idle hands on. Hell, if you could get ahold of that monkey on your back, you'd eat him, too.

It's one of those cosmic jokes. You stop smoking, and then, just when you start feeling better, you start looking worse.

Well, we're not laughing. We're giving you a plan for keeping your gut in check while you rehab your lungs. Of course, most self-help programs use 12 steps, but that seemed like a lot of work, so we made this one five.

Step 1: Buy a Bottle of Olive Oil
If it weren't for that whole lung-cancer business, cigarettes would be the perfect diet aid. According to Marshall Goldberg, M.D., a professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University, the smoke slows stomach contractions, keeping you feeling full longer. But once you're smoke-free, your gut picks up speed and you get hungry more often.

The remedy: Take 2 teaspoons of olive oil before meals. "Olive oil not only has a similar slowing effect on stomach contractions, but also triggers your body's release of CCK, a hormone with appetite-reducing properties," explains Dr. Goldberg. The catch? You need a concentrated hit of the stuff for it to work. If you don't want to take your 2 teaspoons straight, pour the oil on a plate and mop it all up with a piece of Italian bread.

Step 2: Take Fewer Coffee Breaks
Which came first? The coffee or the cigarettes? Who knows. What matters is what happens when the cigarettes leave first. "Nicotine accelerates the body's processing of caffeine. So when you quit, caffeine will stick around in your blood system longer," says Robert Klesges, Ph.D., head of the University of Memphis Community Center for Public Health. That means 1 cup of joe will hit you like Joe Lewis—and a previously manageable 4-cup-a-day habit can produce significant jitters and nervousness that you may be tempted to get rid of by eating.

The remedy: Drink half your usual number of cups of coffee. "Cutting back on caffeine is one of the many things we advise quitters to do," says Klesges. You'll feel calmer and less eager to binge. Taking fewer coffee breaks may also increase your odds of staying smoke-free. According to Klesges, if a butt and a cup was your usual M.O., you may have developed something called a "learned aspect" to your habit that makes you crave a cigarette whenever you sit down to sip. Less coffee, less chance you'll light up.

Step 3: Get Huge, Ripping Muscles

There's a simple reason the people in cigarette ads look so damn happy: They're all on drugs. Nicotine acts a lot like speed; it boosts your metabolism, the rate at which your body burns calories. In a recent study published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, when subjects smoked, they increased the number of calories they burned by 3.6 percent at rest and 6.3 percent during exercise.

And yes, you guessed it: When you quit smoking, your metabolism slows down, causing you to burn fewer calories.

The remedy: Lift weights more often. Research shows that building muscle actually resets your metabolism to almost the same level it was at when you were smoking. In one classic study, men who lifted three times a week for 12 weeks upped their resting metabolic rates by 7 percent. When the men weighed in at the end of the study, each had lost 4 pounds of fat.

Step 4: Chew Gum
You're probably considering going on the patch. Not a bad idea. But it won't help you control your appetite unless you put it over your mouth. Research has shown that while nicotine-replacement therapies are effective at preventing relapses, most don't do much to prevent weight gain.

The remedy: Nicotine-replacement gum. When Massachusetts General Hospital researchers compared different nicotine-replacement methods, they found that only the gum helped prevent weight gain in ex-smokers. "It may be more effective than other replacement methods because it provides a closer oral substitute for food," says Nancy Rigotti, M.D., the lead researcher.

Step 5: See a Doctor

On the surface, food and cigarettes don't have a lot in common (unless of course you like to coat your lunch with tar, light it on fire, and then throw the leftovers on the sidewalk). But they are alike in one way: Both Marlboros and macaroni and cheese boost your levels of dopamine, a pleasure-producing chemical. Take away the cigs and you'll crave more food to keep your levels up.

The remedy: Bupropion (a.k.a. Zyban), an antidepressant/antismoking drug that's believed to help boost dopamine levels. In one study, researchers compared the weights of 432 former butt-heads over a period of 1 year and found that those who took bupropion gained an average of 9 pounds less than people who took a placebo.

Rather be fat than medicated? No problem. Go play some Madden NFL. Or Mortal Kombat. Or anything else you can pop in Junior's PlayStation 2. Research published in the journal Nature showed spikes of dopamine in the brains of men when they played video games.

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