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Can you smoke cigarettes?

Hi! I'm thinking about trying intermittent fasting as a way to tone up my body. I smoke cigarettes and I've seen mixed reviews in whether or not that affects fasting. Does anyone here have success/failure stories related to smoking during intermittent fasting? TIA

Answer

when i was in my 20’s, I lost 112 pounds doing OMAD and smoking cigarettes and weed.

I absolutely wrecked my lung health for the latter half of my 20’s, smelled awful the whole time, and eventually when I wanted to quit smoking, I put nearly all that weight back in during the course of several years of trying smoking cessation.

I ended up getting oral cancer because of the smoking and have had five separate operations removing cancerous lesions from my tongue.

Quit smoking. It’s killing you way worse than the weight. And it makes you actively stink.

Answer

Here’s a success story for you. I smoked for ten years, quit, and will die twenty years sooner due to heart damage caused by smoking than I would have if I hadn’t smoked in the first place. (Your mileage may vary) Good luck!

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How cigarettes impact your fasting should be the least of your worries. I smoked a lot through my 20s and it wreaked my lungs.

Some people take nicotine as a supplement. You could try that to help with focus and appetite suppression. It’s popular in the “optimization” circles. I don’t know what they call themselves. Smoking is the absolute worst way to get your nicotine.

Answer

Nicotine itself is a potent appetite suppressor and is furthermore commonly said to intrinsically slightly favor energy expenditure. I have no idea how the thousands of other chemicals in tobacco smoke interact with energy balance though.

Anecdotally, as a chronic heavy smoker who has been practicing OMAD for the past year and a half, I wouldn’t say that I noticed any issues in particular, other than it feeling almost unfairly easy. Now that I’m in the process of quitting, I expect to regain a few kilos over the coming year or so, a prospect which I’m welcoming of as, given that I’m needle-thin already, it will render OMAD even more sustainable for me. Of course each of us is wired slightly differently and there are no hard guarantees – for instance a close relative who quit ages ago, also a former chronic case, remained completely unaffected, naturally thin before and after.