Guest Post--New Reasons to Quit Smoking from the Surgeon General

Bad news for smokers: your habit might cause even more health problems than you previously believed.

According to a new report released by the Surgeon General, smoking increases the risk for diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, erectile dysfunction, impaired fertility, colorectal and liver cancer, and immune system weakness.

The news isn’t great for people who spend a lot of time around smokers either: according to the report, second-hand smoke increases the risk for strokes in non-smokers.

It’s been 50 years since the U.S. Surgeon General released a report officially linking smoking to lung cancer, and the knowledge of just how much damage smoking can do to your health has helped a lot of people kick the habit. We’ve come a long way, but smoking is still a popular habit in our country, and roughly 20.8 million people have died of smoking-related diseases since that original report in 1964.

For many of those people who smoke today, knowing the additional risk for the diseases outlined in the Surgeon General’s report won’t be a strong enough motivation to quit. After all, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes that smoking is actually good for them. People don’t smoke for their health; they smoke because it’s an addictive habit they get into, and trying to quit can lead to unpleasant withdrawal symptoms.

In addition to knowing the health risks, many people need a stronger motivation to quit smoking. Here are just a few that have worked for some former smokers:

Parents sometimes find motivation by telling themselves they don’t want their children to pick up the habit, and that they don’t want to die before their time of a smoking-related disease and miss seeing their children (or grandchildren!) grow up.

Recent studies have proved that exercise temporarily reduces cigarette cravings, and getting into a regular exercise routine has helped many people quit smoking. It also motivates people to stay smoke-free so that they can get in better shape and enjoy an active lifestyle.

One company now produces smoking cessation software that shows smokers what they would look when they’re older if they continue to smoke regularly. Since smoking a pack a day causes a person to take on the wrinkles of someone 1.4 times their age, some people are successfully able to scare themselves into quitting after seeing how their habit will impact their appearance.

A researcher from the University of Georgia recently found that smokers who use social media as a motivational tool during their quitting attempt are more likely to stay smoke-free than those who don’t use social media. Many people update their progress on Facebook, Twitter, or health-specific social media sites to give themselves a support network and greater accountability.

When it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter whether people give up smoking because of health concerns or because of another motivational factor. What matters is that people find a tool that empowers them to kick the habit and live a healthier lifestyle.

 

Juliana Weiss-Roessler is a freelance writer and co-owner of Weiss-Roessler Writing with her husband Josh. She writes about a wide range of topics, including health, fitness, and running a small business. She currently lives in Austin, TX with Josh, her 20-month-old son, and two rescue dogs.

Guest Post--The Benefits of Smoking Cessation

If you are a smoker it is likely that you have heard that your body starts to heal itself permanently within twenty minutes of your very last cigarette. Is that true? If permanent and long-term smoking cessation is your goal, then yes, your body is going to respond to the absence of poisons within a short while after you take that last puff.

Poison? Absolutely! You didn't think that an article about smoking cessation would be gentle about the things contained in a cigarette did you? If you don't believe that a single puff on a cigarette is poisonous, just do the following experiment:

Take a cigarette, light it, but don't inhale into your lungs. Instead, inhale only into your mouth and then hold a clean handkerchief across your mouth and blow out the smoke. What do you see on that once white cloth...yes, yuck! That is what goes into your lungs many times over with each cigarette. Naturally, this means that smoking cessation is going to help clean up the lungs, but it takes time.

In order to understand this a bit better, let's look at the different parts of the body impacted by your smoking cessation effort. We'll start with the most obvious...

Lungs and Smoking Cessation

During your years of smoking on a regular basis it is your lungs that have taken a huge amount of the abuse. For example, with the very first inhalation of cigarette smoke you actually inhibited your lungs' ability to self-regulate and cleanse themselves fully. Over time this has caused your lungs to work harder and harder to do the same amount of work.

Your lungs respond to toxins by creating mucus. This is why you have morning cough - it is your lungs waking up relatively clean because you haven't smoked for a while. The lungs get to work right away trying to empty that junk out, but you cough up some phlegm and then light up that first cigarette with your morning coffee, and all of their work is undone.

Did you know that the mucus your lungs create in response to smoking also make you prone to infection easier? When someone in your household or circle of friends has a respiratory infection you are probably one of the first to catch it because your cigarettes have actually made your lungs far more sensitive to infection.

Your lungs are also not just coated with a layer of disgusting mucus. They also have a layer of tar (the stuff that stained the hanky in the experiment). This makes the lungs work harder, less flexible, and prone to emphysema and cancer.

When you follow a smoking cessation your lungs start to clear up right away, but it will literally take years before you have healthy pink lungs again.

Smoking Cessation and the Throat

Of course, you feed smoke and air into the lungs through your mouth, nose, and throat, and when you seek to stop smoking you are also doing these vital organs a favor too.

Just stop to consider what happened the first time you inhaled a cigarette...your eyes watered up, you coughed and gagged, your throat burned like crazy, and your nose felt swollen for a few hours afterward. This is all of the nerve endings reacting to the toxins in cigarettes. Over only a short period of time the mucous membranes in these delicate areas are forced to thicken as a response to the irritants. This means that cellular changes have occurred, and that means that you are now open to nose, throat, and other forms of cancer.

After the Lungs

Smoking hits the throat, eyes, nose, and lungs first, but it also affects other organs too. For instance, your heart has to work harder each time you smoke, but it also has to work harder on a continual basis too. This is because cigarettes contain compounds that quicken the heart rate, but they also make the bronchi in the lungs thicken. So even when there is no smoking going on, the heart has to just work harder in general.

Want to know why so many smokers have heart attacks? You just discovered the answer- smoking increases the heart rate while making it harder for the heart to work. Little wonder that so many smokers have heart attacks each year.

Of course, the increase in blood pressure is not that helpful either. When someone smokes they bump up their blood pressure by 15%. This means the heart is even more challenged, and that blood vessels are at tremendous risk too.

One of the main reasons that people in smoking cessation programs suddenly "look better" is because they are actually getting blood and oxygen to the skin. Cigarette smoke constricts the vessels in the skin and chokes off the supplies. This is why a heavy smoker may actually appear grey - they are not getting enough blood and oxygen!

We also know that the blood suffers when someone smokes too. Those who are chronic smokers have carbon monoxide levels that can be ten times higher than the non-smoker. This level can hold for almost six hours after the last cigarette is smoked, and this means that few people get regular blood levels before they are smoking again.

Deciding on Smoking Cessation

 

Now, we have just itemized for you the things that happen when you smoke. These are the absolutes, the "givens" in terms of what happens to smokers. There are also the "might happen" issues too. For example, smokers can develop life threatening lung and respiratory conditions, they can get all kinds of cancer, they can give cancer to family members thanks to second hand smoke, and they can even cause reproductive problems too.

This is why smoking cessation is always going to be worth the effort. It has its many challenges, and it does require a lengthy detoxification process, but if you review the issues we just mentioned you will see that it is well worth it. Within 20 minutes your body is on the road to healing, and after three days you will already be able to smell and taste things, and breathe easier!

Valerie Johnston is a health and fitness writer located in East Texas. With ambitions of one day running a marathon and writing for Healthline.com ensures she keeps up-to-date on all of the latest health and fitness news.