Does Vaping Make You Gain Weight?

Are you someone who wants to start vaping to help you stop smoking? 

You know that smoking is bad for your health, but you’re afraid you’ll start putting on the pounds when you quit.  

Be assured, making the switch to vaping won’t make you gain weight.

Whether for your health or aesthetic reasons, being overweight is typically undesirable. 

When choosing to try vaping, you can successfully quit smoking without weight concerns.

How Smoking Helps Control Weight?

If you do an Internet search for cigarettes and weight loss, you’ll find plenty of examples of how they were marketed as an alternative to eating sweet and fattening foods and as a way to control weight. 

Many adolescent females begin smoking because of weight concerns. Here are some of the ways that smoking helps with weight loss:

  • We know that nicotine works as an appetite suppressant. It communicates with nerve cells, called POMC cells, in your brain, making these cells more active and suppressing your appetite.
  • Nicotine intake also increases the body’s resting metabolic rate, which is how many calories your body uses in its processes to keep you alive.
  • Nicotine causes a delay in gastric motility, which is the way food moves through the digestive system. This delay leaves the smoker feeling fuller longer.
  • Reaching for a cigarette instead of food soon becomes a habit.

How Vaping Helps You Quit Smoking?

To understand how vaping may help you with decreased nicotine consumption, it’s important to have some basic knowledge on e-cigarettes and how they work.

What is Vape Juice?

Flavoured e-liquids (vape juice) combine nicotine, water, flavoring, and propylene glycol or vegetable glycerine base. Users inhale the nicotine as a vapor instead of smoke.

Why Use E-liquids?

Vaping has many advantages in helping people who want to give up smoking.

  • Vaping doesn’t produce tar and carbon monoxide like traditional cigarettes that pollute the air
  • E-liquid typically has less nicotine
  • Flavored e-liquids usually have a sweet and enjoyable taste
  • There are nicotine-free e-liquids that can help with the transition from cigarette smoking

Will Vaping Make You Fat?

Calorie values are the energy released from an item in controlled, laboratory conditions. Each ml of vape juice contains between 4-5 calories, the same calorie content as two Tic Tac mints. 

People who smoke about a pack a day will typically vape about 5-6 ml during the same period, which equals an additional 25 to 30 calories. 

You can easily offset this added calorie intake by adding a 15-minute walk to your day.

Now, for the bad news. There is a good chance that you will gain weight when you stop smoking. But, vaping does not make you fat.

Do you remember when we talked earlier about how nicotine product acts as an appetite suppressant and also increase your resting metabolic rate? 

E-liquids don’t have as much nicotine as traditional tobacco products. That’s where the weight gain comes from.

So, let’s see what we can do to help you successfully keep from gaining weight.

Key Factors for Success

If you try to combine smoking cessation with weight loss, you will set yourself up for failure. 

It has nothing to do with poor impulse control. You are trying to break an addiction.

Vaping lets you focus on breaking that addiction while allowing you to keep the habit. You still go through what James Clear refers to as “The Four Stages of Habit”: Cue, Craving, Response, Reward. 

For example, you have just finished eating dinner, which is your cue. That sets off your craving for a cigarette. 

Your response is to light a cigarette, and your reward is the feeling of relaxation and release that comes from inhaling.

Lifting weights or doing some muscle-building exercise can help offset the drop in your resting metabolic rate that comes from reducing nicotine. 

Lean muscle burns more calories, so your body will enjoy an increased metabolism more healthily.

Making some slight adjustments to your eating habits will also help minimize weight gain. 

Having plenty of high-fiber foods will help you feel full without adding a lot of calories that make you gain weight.

Don’t Start Vaping to Lose Weight

Just because vaping won’t make you gain weight doesn’t mean you should start vaping as a weight-loss method. Vaping has its own health risks, such as:

  1. The nicotine in e-liquid will increase your blood pressure.
  2. Nicotine affects your insulin levels and can lead to insulin resistance, a potential precursor to Type 2 diabetes.
  3. Vaping can be especially harmful to younger smokers as even a reduced amount of nicotine can adversely affect brain development.

A Better Method for Combatting Weight Gain

If you have a weight concern, there are many alternatives to the “vaping and weight loss” method. 

  1. Drink lots of water. If you don’t like plain water, try mineral water or flavor-infused waters.
  2. Avoid sugary foods. Sugar addiction can be just as harmful as nicotine addiction in its own way.
  3. Move your body. You don’t need to spend hours exercising but just a short walk each day can have significant health benefits.

Conclusion

So, you wanted to know if vaping causes weight gain and now, you know it doesn’t. 

E-liquid has very few calories and it won’t lead to weight gain if you plan to start vaping to help you stop smoking.

However, vaping should not be used as a weight-loss method. There are better ways to lose weight and enjoy better overall health.