Quit Smoking Guide: Facts, Answers, A Step By Step Plan

By Jenny Smith From Olwomen

So, you are a habitual smoker but want to quit and cannot make yourself to quit smoking? There are many resources available these days to help you quit smoking but, you always need a motivation to do any work. Like salary is the motivation for people in a job. Likewise, you need a motivation, or a reason, that you can think of whenever you feel like smoking.

19. Breathe Easier
BREATHE EASIER

The first and the most obvious advantage of quitting smoking is that it will make your breathing much easier. This is actually because of lung capacity. Smoking reduces the lung capacity as carbon deposits on the walls of the lungs, reducing area for blood to get oxygen from air.

At younger ages (around 20-30), it might not be that noticeable, until you have to go for a run or have to do some very active work. But when you age, the effect of lung capacity can become as significant as being able to walk and climb stairs easily or having to stop after every few steps to catch your breath. So stop smoking right now before it’s too late.

18. Lesser Stress
LESSER STRESS

Yes the first thing that you will say after this heading is that, “But, I smoke because it reduces my stress!”

Well although you might think this is true, actually what is happening, is that your stress levels become addicted to smoking as well. As a result, during the time that you are not smoking, your stress levels rise to a much higher level than usual to make you smoke again. After you quit smoking, this abnormal stress peaks stop, making your overall stress levels much lower. So, you will stop feeling so stressed that you need to smoke.

17. More Energy
MORE ENERGY

This is another one of the obvious advantages of quitting smoking. When you smoke, carbon gets deposited to the inside of your lung’s walls, resulting in a lesser absorption of oxygen by the blood. Oxygen is the source of energy just like food, which is why we breathe more heavily when we are doing some high energy consumption work like running.

When you stop smoking, the deposited carbon in the lung’s walls are slowly cleaned up by time, resulting in the recovery of your energy levels. So, stop smoking so that you can do more.

16. Protect Your Love Ones
PROTECT YOUR LOVED ONES

As you know, smoking is not just injurious to your own health, but it is also injurious to the people around you while you smoke – passive smokers. As a matter of fact it is more harmful to them as you are smoking through a filter while they are inhaling it directly. These passive smokers are not just people who you don’t any concern with (although they are also humans so you should care about them too), but these passive smokers are also your family members and even your children for whom it is even more injurious.

By quitting smoking, you are not only protecting yourself, but you are also protecting your loved ones and everyone around you.

15. Improved Smell And Taste
IMPROVED SMELL AND TASTE

Another one of the major issues caused by smoking, although goes unnoticed by smokers, is that smoking degrades the senses of smell and taste. Although you might think that, “I am smelling and tasting everything just fine”, but actually your senses have diminished by hundreds of toxins and chemical that are found in cigarettes.

The only way to feel the change in your senses is to quit smoking. The effects on the senses of taste and smell start to wear off just 2 days after you have stopped smoking. In just 2 days, when you will better appreciate every smell and taste, you will start to feel that you were wrong and your senses were actually not working correctly.

14. Lungs Repair
LUNGS REPAIR

If you have been a smoker for a long time, you, most probably, have had a lot of people tell you or show you about those pictures comparing a normal person’s lung to a smoker’s lung. Those pictures are not fake. A smoker’s lung does actually become black and loses its sponginess. It becomes so fragile that it can be torn apart by a small kid. While a normal lung will keep stretching but will not tear apart even under very high forces.

But well, our body is designed to repair. When you quit smoking, depending on your rate of smoking, in about 1-9 months, your lungs will have fully repaired them to their original form.

13. Lesser Cancer Risk
Quit smoking

Of course, when you read about the damage to the lungs that smoking does, you subconsciously become aware of the fact that you are more prone to cancer than a normal person. Let us tell you that smoking increases your risk of lung cancer to double that of a normal person. Also, lung cancer is one of the cancers that has absolutely no cure and no way of slowing it down and no medicines or treatments for it.

So, although it takes about 10 years to bring your chances for developing cancer back to that of a normal person if you are a chain smoker, but it is worth the wait if you don’t want to die an early and one of the most painful deaths.

12. Lesser Heart Risk
Helps to Reduce the Heart diseases

With lesser supply of oxygen by lungs and lesser energy production by the body, comes the problem of heart. Heart pumps blood that supplies oxygen to all parts of the body. As the blood has lesser amount of oxygen in it, it needs to circulate more quickly to supply oxygen properly to all parts of the body. This puts the pressure on the heart. The organ that starts working on the day it is made and stops working years and years and later after you die, now has to work even more hard to pump blood quickly. This causes risks of heart failure, just as you would fail if you have to work past your limits.

Quitting smoking, obviously, restores the amount of oxygen in the blood and hence reduces the work load on the heart. So, quit smoking before your heart quits on you.

11. Live Longer
LIVE LONGER

It is obvious that when you are smoking and are prone to so many heart and lung related problems, your life becomes short compared to a normal person as chances of early death due to these problems are extremely high. Quitting smoking, hence, not only improves health, but ultimately increases your life span.

It has been researched that smokers that successfully quit smoking by the age of 30 can add as much as 10 more years to their life span. Even people who quit smoking by the age of 60 can add 3-5 more years to their life. So, quitting smoking will let you live an active old age life and a longer life too.

10. Younger Skin
YOUNGER SKIN

Smoking can ruin your looks too. This is particularly more important for women than men. As it has been told earlier that smoking reduces the amount of oxygen that blood absorbs, the body adopts to this change by changing the amount of oxygen that each part receives. The top priority for oxygen supply is for the brain. For the body, oxygen supply for skin regeneration etc. can be reduced to have more supply available for important parts. Hence, wrinkles in the skin and skin ageing rates increases.

Quitting smoking returns the oxygen supply back to normal and hence restores the skin regeneration rate back to normal. So quitting smoking will give you a younger looking skin as well.

9. Whiter Teeth
Teeth

If you are a smoker, you will most probably have seen how the white filter at the end of a cigarette turns to yellow by the time you have finished your cigarette. That is tobacco’s color that is being sucked in to your mouth and lungs. Although the filter filters out most of it, still appreciable amount of it passes through the filter. This yellow color deposits in your teeth and gums, completely ruining the whiteness of teeth and the health of the gums, no matter how regularly you brush.

Quitting smoking restores the whiteness of the teeth as brushing your teeth is removing little amounts of deposits every day and there is no more source of more deposits coming to replace it.

8. Sweeter Breath
SWEETER BREATH

Bad breath is another obvious side effect of smoking. As there is carbon deposited inside the lungs and tobacco deposited inside mouth and lungs, ultimately your breath starts to smell like tobacco and carbon as the air carries the deposits out with it when it leaves the lungs. Most smokers not only have to spend money on their cigarettes, but also have to spend on breath sweeteners as well.

Quitting smoking restores the normal smell of the breath as your lungs and teeth are restored to their original state, saving you the costs of those breath fresheners as well.

7. Decreased Risk Of Alzehimer’s
DECREASED RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S

Now on to the lesser known advantages of quitting smoking. Alzheimer’s disease is one of the dreaded diseases as it also has no cure. It is the disease in which people start to forget things. In the start it can be just regular forgetfulness but by time it can go to as much as people even refuse to identify their own family. It is caused by mental decline – declination of capabilities of the brain. Mental decline in smokers is up to 5 times faster compared to normal people.

Quitting smoking ultimately leads to more oxygen being sent to the brain as discussed earlier and hence increases the health of the brain, reducing the risk of the incurable Alzheimer’s.

6. Reduced Risk Of Blindness
Reduced Risk Of Blindness

You might have noticed that people who have been smoking a lot for a long time now, develop a strange yellow color in their eyes. According to a study, smokers are 4 times more likely to become blind than regular people. This is again due to the fact that there is lesser supply of oxygen to the eyes which causes a faster than regular degeneration of vision capabilities of the eyes.

Quit smoking right now because the risks of blindness reduce only slightly if you quit smoking at a very old age, as the damage has already been done by then.

5. Reduced Risk Of Arthtitis
Arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis is the name of the disease in which the bones become very soft and prone to breaking (even by very small impacts in some cases). Although this disease is usually genetic, smoking increases the chances of developing arthritis for people with both genetic history of disease and people without genetic history.

In people who have a genetic history of disease, quitting smoking reduces the chances for arthritis by about 16 times compared to smokers. Whereas in people without the history, quitting smoking reduces the risk 2.5 times compared to smokers.

4. Reduced Snoring
Snoring

One of the oddest effects of smoking is snoring. Although snoring is related to breathing which is affected by smoking, but snoring actually has a lot of other medical reasons. According to a study performed, smoking has a direct effect on the frequency of snoring of people. The more a person smokes, the frequently he will be snoring.

From another study performed, 24% of smokers are affected by snoring compared to only 14% of people who never smoked. Quitting smoking, or ex-smokers, show that only 20% of them were affected by snoring. For people who know how annoying snoring can be, 4% decrease is a chance that you must take.

3. Reduced Heartburn
REDUCE HEART DISEASE

Ah! One of the most annoying issues is heartburn. It is the burning sensation inside around the place where a heart is. It is most commonly linked to digestive problems, but smoking also has an impact on heartburn.

It has been seen that people who have been smoking for more than 20 years show 70% more chances of having regular heartburn issues. Luckily, quitting smoking reduces this issue back to normal where you could control your diet to reduce heartburn issues.

2. Lesser Contact Lenses Issues
Avoid Smoking

People who wear contact lenses and are habitual smokers might already know about this issue. Contact lenses tend to become dry very quickly and start becoming sticky for people who smoke. This is due to constant contact of contact lenses with smoke from the cigarette. Even full day lenses become dry while wearing them for only a couple of hours.

To save yourself from these issues, all you need to do is quit smoking instead of going to the shop to get more expensive lenses, and your contact lens problems will magically disappear.

1. Save Money
Save Money

Every smoker knows that the money they spend on cigarettes is not a negligible amount. When you calculate the amount of money that you have spent on cigarettes in one year, you realize the number of other much more important things you could have done with that money. Calculate the money that you have spent on cigarettes in your whole lifetime and you will be surprised by the results. It can be enough to buy you a new house!

Calculating these amounts alone give you the best reason for quitting smoking. It is better to leave your family a property instead of smoking and dying early.

OLWOMEN Tip
These are just a few reasons that should get you up and motivate you for quitting smoking. Whenever, after quitting smoking, you can’t resist to smoke, just open this article and read through it and try to imagine the pain of these issues compared to the pain of not smoking and that should help you get motivated for keeping away from that ‘just one’ cigarette.

For more on this story go to: http://olwomen.com/benefits-of-quitting-smoking/