A week or two after quitting, a strange thing tends to happen: cigarettes stop being the craving, and sugar takes their place. Candy, soda, desserts you would not normally think twice about suddenly feel necessary. It can feel like trading one bad habit for another, but there are real reasons this happens, and it is not a sign that you are simply replacing one weakness with another.
Nicotine affects blood sugar and dopamine release in ways that quietly blunt appetite and smooth out mood swings. Take it away and both of those systems wobble for a while: blood sugar dips a little more sharply between meals, and the brain goes looking for a fast, reliable source of the reward it lost. Sugar delivers exactly that, quickly and cheaply, which is why it becomes the understudy for a craving that used to be met with a cigarette.
There is also a simpler, more physical reason. Smoking gave your hands and mouth something to do many times a day. Unwrapping a piece of candy, holding a snack, chewing gum - all of it fills the same physical gap that a cigarette used to occupy, completely separate from any biochemical craving. The habit of "hands and mouth need an activity" does not disappear just because the substance did.
The intensity of this does fade. For most people, the sharpest sugar cravings show up in the first two to four weeks and settle down noticeably after that, in step with the rest of early withdrawal. It is not a permanent trade of one habit for another; it is a temporary overlap while your body recalibrates.
None of this means sugar is off-limits during a quit. Trying to white-knuckle both nicotine and sugar cravings at the same time in the first hard weeks often backfires and can make relapse to cigarettes more likely. It is reasonable to let yourself have some sweetness in the early weeks and tighten that back up later, once the harder craving - the one for nicotine - has actually settled.