Is Smoking Pot Likely to Become Next New Fad Diet?

Smoking marijuana removes inhibitions that prevent eating. It makes eating more pleasurable. How could smoking pot three times a week or more possibly be related to weighing less?
 

The answer is that marijuana does not just contain one psychoactive or immune-modulating chemical. It contains dozens of cannabinoids in addition to THC. One of these compounds, cannabigerol, doesn't make smokers high but does regulate the digestive tract, circulation, and male sexual function.

Cannabigerol "kicks in" after THC makes smokers high and gives them the munchies. One of its functions is to slow down passage of food through the digestive tract. After THC makes smokers hungry, cannabigerol keeps them full. Also, after THC wears off, cannabigerol increases the force of ejaculation in males who have sex, and antagonizes, or cancels out the force of another group of neuroceptors known as the 5-HT1A receptors.

When these receptors are antagonized:

• People become less sociable.
• They are less likely to act impulsively, whether the impulse is to eat yet more Cheetos or to get out and find a job.
• They are less likely to suffer compulsive avoidance of food, such as anorexia, but they are also less likely to suffer compulsive eating.
• They are more likely to engage addictive behaviors, such as the ritual surrounding the smoking of marijuana.
• And, probably most importantly for weight control, they have increased body temperature.

About 70 percent of all the food we eat goes to stoke the body's metabolic furnace. If body temperature is increased, literally thousands of metabolic processes in the cells go faster. Increased body weight leads to increased calorie expenditure, and regular smoking of pot seems to have a net effect of burning off even more calories than munchies take in.

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Researchers did not have data regarding exercise and weight gain comparing pot smokers with those who abstain. An increase in body temperature, and corresponding increase in metabolic rate, burns off calories the same way exercise does, and there are no weight-loss plateaus or training effects as the brain learns how to direct the muscles to do exercises more easily.

Is it a good idea to start smoking marijuana to take off the pounds? After all, a diet that lets you stuff yourself with crunchy snacks while keeping weight down seems like a dream come true for most dieters.

It is important to understand that this study did not find that smoking marijuana helps people lose weight. It more likely helps prevent them from putting weight on. While marijuana is not addictive in the sense of causing violent withdrawal reactions when it is stopped, chemicals in pot encourage further smoking of pot, shutting out people and activities that discourage smoking pot, and getting on with other life activities. In much of Europe and Canada and a few places in the United States, smoking pot is a personal choice, but years of not gaining weight are only possible by years of social inhibition. The cost of this kind of herbal weight control may be too high for long-term use.