Where there's smoke, there's fear (of fat). And, where there's smoking cessation, there's one more opportunity for the medical and fitness communities to work together.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) recently reconfirmed what we already know: that people do tend to gain weight when they quit smoking. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) studied 5,247 Americans 35 years of age and older, it found that people who had stopped smoking within the previous 10 years tended to weigh more than other people. The men had gained 9.7 pounds, and the women had gained 11 pounds. This was the average increase in weight that was not accounted for by factors other than smoking cessation. This weight was in addition to the fatness that was creeping up on Americans at large during the same time.

People who had given up smoking more than 10 years previously were not more likely to be overweight than people who had never smoked. And, current smokers were found to be less likely than the other groups to be overweight.

The bad message that one can draw from this is that if you want to stay slim, keep smoking (not to mention, you'll fit stylishly in a narrower coffin, and you may get to try it on earlier). The danger of this message was not lost on the editors of NEJM: they commissioned an editorial in the same (Nov. 2, 1995) issue on "The Wrong Way to Stay Slim." The author, none other than Joseph A. Califano, Jr., who was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare when the Surgeon General's report Smoking and Health was released in 1979, pointed to the success that the tobacco marketers have had in pitching to young people (and especially white, female teenagers) an imagined link between cigarette smoking and "glamorous, successful lifestyles." He cited several studies to support his statement that, "Even if concern about weight is not central to why girls start smoking, such concern is certainly a key reason why they do and why so many do not even try to quit."