Quit Smoking before Your Health Quits

Quit smoking campaigns, slogans, warnings, posters etc., go back as far as one cares to remember. Have they had the desired effects? Perhaps a little but certainly not significant enough. Many are still smoking their way to an early death if not ruining their health in the process. The number of smokers is on the rise and the tragic part of the statistics is that it includes a large number of young smokers.Though smoking is broadly defined as the inhaling of tobacco smoke, cigarette smoking takes center stage because of its popularity. Why quit? It is because it wrecks havoc on your health and more so the health of others not to mention the unbearable odour that stays on smokers and other associated effects.

Why Must You Quit Smoking?

Just inhale and dwell on the following for a moment:

• When you smoke a cigarette, it burns at 700°C at the tip and in the region of 60°C in the middle producing all manner of toxins. Added to this is the fact that cigarettes contain more than 4000 chemical compounds and 400 toxic substances.
• The most damaging products are tar, nicotine and carbon monoxide. Tar is known to cause cancer,nicotine increases cholesterol levels and carbon monoxide starves your body of oxygen.
• Smoking reduces life expectancy by seven to eight years. The number of people below the age of 70 who die from smoking-related diseases exceeds the total figure for deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, traffic accidents and drug addiction.
• Cardiovascular diseases in the form of coronary thrombosis, cerebral thrombosis and high blood pressure in addition to lung cancer are common in smokers. In terms of cancer, smokers are usually found to suffer from cancers of the balder, oesophagus, kidney and pancreas. In women smokers, cervical cancer is becoming increasingly common.

How To Quit Smoking?

Starting is easy. Stopping is, to say the least, very difficult. The common advice is to start by cutting down on the number of cigarettes smoked daily and substituting cigarettes with less harmful substances like chewing gum. These and simply putting their minds on quitting and sheer determination seems to have worked for some. For others, nicotine replacement treatment through the use gum, skin patches or nasal spray has been the answer. Yet others have found a remedy with medicines, behaviour modification programs and in alternative therapies including acupuncture and hypnosis.

The remedy depends on the profile of the smoker including age, how long the person has been smoking and the number of cigarettes smoked daily. Generally, certain medicines have been found to be an effective smoking cessation aid for smokers dependent on nicotine. Alternatively, you may prefer an all natural quit smoking system.