"Well, Like Smoking Keeps the Weight Off", and Years off Your Life. Idiot.

Pretty much accepted by everyone in the known world, smoking is bad for you and if not the immediate cause of your death, long term smoking will have ensured years taken off your life. Another know fact in the known world are the existence of annoying chain smokers who love the claim of "when I quit smoking I gained weight and being overweight isn't healthy." As annoying as their logic is they are right but fat or black lunged they're still going to croak early.

After years of research and experimenting on mice, scientists at Yale found nicotine directly effects the receptors responsible for  controlling a persons fight or flight response. NPR ran the story and interviewed  Marina Picciotto, one of the authors of the study who said "The fight or flight response is one where you actually want to preserve energy to do something very important," she says "So maybe you don't want to be out there eating while you're supposed to be running away from a tiger."

So smoking does keep weight off but according to a recent study done by the National Institutes of Health the health benefit of keeping off that excess weight (5-10lbs) is negligible compared to the net benefit of quitting smoking. The study was conducted between 1985 and 2011, using data gathered from 3,251 participants.

Now if a person is choosing to continue to smoke in order to keep the weight off not for health reasons but to look good well that's an entirely different story. Mostly a story about a shallow idiot who probably spends to much time underneath tanning beds.