New breakthroughs in quitting smoking....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-26-2012

1. The good news is that it’s now known that EVERY exposure to tobacco or its smoke is harmful. This is known in some detail too.

This means that second hand smoke is almost as bad as smoking yourself.

And, it hacks away the most common rationalization most smokers now use like Alexander’s sword cutting apart the Gordian knot.

That goes like this: “Some smokers don’t get cancer. So I have a shot at continuing to smoke and not get cancer. I’ll just presume I’ll be one of the lucky ones who don’t and keep smoking.”

We now know the reality is far different.

All tobacco smoke exposure EVERY time with no exceptions -- begins to add a brick to the wall of creating disease in your blood vessels that will cause heart attacks, strokes, ED (impotence), PAD or peripheral artery disease, and does the same to your lungs aging them very rapidly and impairing your breathing. It also gradually causes high blood pressure. And tobacco smoke exposure also causes blood pressure to rise within a few seconds and stays high for some time after the exposure stops.

The build up in plaque in the arteries to your brain from smoking can cause mental decline and does. And the medical procedure to remove it has a death rate. Again, this effect is sure and happens to ALL smokers.

Smoking not only causes all these disease effects, it speeds up aging too!

We also know that all tobacco smoke exposure triggers heart attacks in people who would otherwise have escaped them for years or who never would have gotten them. (That immediate rise in blood pressure is one likely reason.)

This is true of brand new teen smokers, babies in smoking homes, and smokers who only have 5 cigarettes a day.

In fact, they showed teen smokers that tests of their breathing ability were similar to what much older and even older middle aged people usually had.

Twice as many of the teens were able to quit smoking. That is very important to know!

Each of these effects is certain and happens every time!

No smoker or person exposed to second hand smoke escapes them!

Being lucky doesn’t prevent them. EVERY smoker is harmed and none escape.
The only effective escape is avoiding tobacco and its smoke.

Worse, the cancer risk from tobacco is MUCH worse than we once knew.
Tobacco and tobacco smoke causes 30 % or more of all cancers! It doesn’t just cause lung cancer.

And, we now know why. All commercially grown tobacco is fertilized with a fertilizer that contains small amounts of the radioactive element polonium. If this element gets into your blood stream, it tends to cause cancer everywhere your blood goes. So breathing tobacco smoke or putting tobacco in your nose or mouth puts radioactity into your blood.

That means that it can cause any cancer in the body -- from brain and colon cancer to breast and prostate cancer!

And the statistics show it does. This is NOT guesswork.

So, if smokers who might quit or succeed in doing so, knew all this information, the quit rate would be higher than it is now!

Just part of this information doubled the quit rate for teens for example.

Meanwhile most smokers have never heard of this other information. Most still believe that because not all smokers get cancer, they can escape harm even if they keep smoking.

So the first breakthrough that can at least double the quit rate and double the success rate of people working to quit is to make sure all smokers find out!

That goes double for people trying to quit.

2. Smoking actually does things for the people who smoke. Yet few programs to help people quit provide much to get ALL these benefits to smokers in other ways.

The other major breakthrough is that this is fixable. Some of those fixes are reasonably effective now. Better, each of those fixes is improving.

a) Smoking is a well anchored, conditioned stress reliever.

People who take long and slow drags when they are full right after dinner or enjoying the company of people they like have low stress. Then if they get over-stressed, they can connect to that unstressed feeling by smoking the same way.

And they do just that!

I once ran a stop smoking group for a company that thought people could just smoke a bit less each week starting with giving up the cigarettes people didn’t want that much any way and going from there.

It was strikingly ineffective, unfortunately.

With only the exception of an unusually determined man and a woman who had to quit to get married to a man in a religion that didn’t allow smoking, this problem de-railed ALL the other 50 or 60 people in my classes.

The majority of them were able to get to the point where only the cigarettes that connected relaxation to smoking such as right after dinner and the cigarettes they smoked when most stressed were left.

Did they give up those two kinds of smoking? Nope. When it came time to do so, they almost all dropped out and continued to be smokers.

But we now know a couple of effective and extremely fast stress relievers that have not yet been taught to smokers trying to quit.

Yawning and brief but vigorous exercise.

A few deep breaths is suggested now but doesn’t do much. Yawning with a related stretch of your arms and shoulders however is surprisingly effective. It’s even a bit faster and can be done immediately when you first realize you are stressed.

For people who know such exercises and can do them safely, doing a few seconds of an exercise vigorous enough to command their full attention and cause fast breathing – and then the recovery from it is close to as effective.

And, there are several ways to teach people how to get long term stress relief.

The best is to help people learn to take actions that prevent, escape, or turn off the stress.

That can’t always be done nor can these skills be instantly taught. But most smokers can quickly improve their skills in doing this.

Any regular exercise tends to increase the capacity of the person who does it to overcome stress without physical effects from the stress.

I read a study that found twice as many smokers trying to quit who also began exercising quit successfully than the smokers who didn’t add the exercise.

(That’s from other causes too. Smokers who quit also need relief from depression and a way to avoid gaining fat once they quit. Exercise helps do all three, stress relief, depression prevention or improvement, and helping avoid or remove excess fat.)

The other stress protectors are doing exercises that in themselves are relaxing.

Tai Chi is the best. People who practice it almost every day get very good stress relief. In people with high blood pressure, people who learned to do Tai Chi and who then practiced it almost every day, dropped their high blood pressure by 17 over
11. (It also burns about as many calories as walking during that time and is effective even in 10 minute sessions.)

This means that Tai Chi gives better stress relief in far less time each day than the other alternatives.

A recent study found that sessions of 30 to 45 minutes of swimming worked. (People with high blood pressure who took up swimming dropped their blood pressure by 9 points a recent study found.)

Some people who do yoga get this effect. But that varies a good bit.

Meditation works for some people but takes the most time to do. Not everyone can learn to do it or has the patience to do it. Few people have the time needed. And the average person gets the least stress relief and the least lowering of high blood pressure from meditation according to the studies I saw.

b) Depression cure or relief.

Nicotine acts as a kind of antidepressant though it does this more for some smokers than others.

The safer drug to help people quit is the antidepressant Wellbutrin, also known as Zyban for helping smokers quit. It’s the same kind of antidepressant as nicotine. So it does work to help some people quit.

The problem is that this drug has a very high rate of side effects which I once did not know. And, like nicotine, it works better for some smokers than others.

Nicotine replacements like patches and inhalers and “gum” have helped many smokers quit. But it too is not effective for everyone. And some people who do stop smoking stay addicted to the nicotine replacements.

Wouldn’t a more far more effective way to reduce depression without drugs be better?

How about one with other benefits instead of side effects and with a 75% or better proven success rate?

Few know it yet, but there is one:

The program creator has a book on it. And exercise is one of these 6 methods. People who do all 6 of his steps to the best of their ability do stop being depressed unless they have brain damage.

His book is available on Amazon in paperback. The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs by Stephen S. Ilardi .

c) Fat gain prevention or permanent fat loss.

Smokers who quit often wind up getting fatter.

My next door neighbor quit and then went back to smoking when he saw that he got more of a pot belly.

So know how to prevent that and doing it before or as you quit can really help!

When people quit their food tastes better. And some quitting smokers turn to comfort food to replace smoking as a stress reliever.

So another way to relieve stress and eating only nonfattening foods are both keys to avoiding this problem.

Our posts here often cover what to eat MORE of AND far less of to avoid this and that exercise helps a lot and which kinds of exercises people have time for that works best.

Also, Weight Watchers works for some people.

The basics are to stop drinking soft drinks. (Both regular AND diet make you fat.)

Stop eating foods that contain refined grains or harmful ingredients like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup.

Eat a DASH diet or a Mediterranean diet or a combination emphasizing eating lots of nonstarchy vegetables and less refined grains.

Cut your intake of sugar or sweet foods at least in half. Cutting it in half a second or third time is even better.

Build up to it gradually from what you can easily do at first. But do strength training and interval cardio or other vigorous exercise for a few minutes to half an hour almost every day. Do a good bit of extra walking too if you can fit in the time for it. Keep brief log every time you exercise. Try to do most of it first thing in the morning at home. People who do are more likely to be able to keep doing it.

Cut back a bit extra on calories only some days of the week. And only eat right all 7 days of the week with only a few exceptions each year. Do NOT overdo cutting back eating less too much or too often. If you do your body’s failsafe famine response will make you get fat again. If you find you have more than a bit extra hunger, eat more protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables. And cut back your overall calories a bit less.

Weigh and measure yourself a least each month on the same day and time each time. Take action if you gain to stop it. Keep doing what is working for you.

Fat gain prevention or permanent fat loss is doable. But it requires permanent lifestyle upgrades. Temporary starvation always fails and is not good for you either.

5) Health protection and damage recovery.

People who value their health who want to keep it or have it be better AND who take action to do so find it FAR easier to quit smoking.

Second, people who have been smoking have harmed their health and are more likely than most people to get the resulting diseases.

Mercifully, just quitting and staying away from second hand smoke turns down those effects. And that begins almost immediately. Much of the damage is reversed in two months and much of the remaining damage is reversed in a year or so.

But if you want to stay healthy, taking action to speed that up and to prevent heart disease and cancers is definitely a good idea!

But doing this, learning how, and doing it consistently also multiplies your chances at quitting smoking permanently!

If you spend several hours cleaning and polishing something, you might be upset with someone who messed that up soon afterwards.

Similarly, if you are working to protect your health every day and turn off the damage from smoking faster, what happens if someone offers you “just one cigarette?”

Before, you might have messed up before and just restarted smoking. Once you’ve invested your own effort in protecting your health and reversing the damage and begun to think of yourself as someone who takes action to protect your health, part of your reaction will be, “If I do that, it will mess up all my hard work!” And, “I used to not know any better. I’m not like that any more.”

So a major way to quit smoking successfully is to begin to take action to protect your heart health and to prevent getting cancers.

Our posts regularly cover ways to do each of these.

For example, one of the ways that smoking causes heart disease so effectively and every time you are exposed is that it causes your protective HDL to go down and even make what’s left ineffective at protecting you.

So begin to do things that boost your HDL. Use extra virgin olive oil instead of margarine or butter or cheap oils high in omega 6 like corn and soy oil. If you can drink safely, drink a glass of red wine with dinner most days. Try taking 300 mg of niacin after your largest meal each day. Be SURE to get regular vigorous exercise. Eat some egg yolks or wheat germ or take a choline supplement or all 3. Eat berries most days or several days a week. Eat raw unsalted raw nuts most days if you aren’t allergic. Stop eating anything with trans fats or hydrogenated oils in it. (See our post last Friday, 1-20-2012.)

Begin to do things that lower your LDL. Doing so with foods you do eat and stop eating is effective as statin drugs. It gives you more heart protection. And it’s dramatically safer. Last, you get other health benefits. Eat beans and lentils and lots of nonstarchy vegetables. For a grain food, eat oatmeal that is NOT the quick kind such as rolled or steel cut oats. Eat organic apples or applesauce with no sugar added. (Most of those foods also help keep off excess fat or help remove it.) Stop eating anything with trans fats or hydrogenated oils in it. (See our post last Friday, 1-20-2012. This not only lowers LDL, it stops adding the kind that causes heart disease into your blood.

Use ginger and curries with turmeric in your food on several days each week.
Both lower LDL and curries with turmeric eaten with black pepper also help prevent Alzheimer’s disease and cancer!

Stop drinking soft drinks. (Both regular AND diet make you fat.)

Stop eating foods that contain refined grains or harmful ingredients like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup.

Eat a DASH diet or a Mediterranean diet or a combination emphasizing eating lots of nonstarchy vegetables and less refined grains.

The foods and drinks in this list to stop ingesting, tend to increase LDL and lower HDL – the reverse of what protects your heart. And they increase heart harmful triglycerides. Add in that they make you fat by adding calories that make you hungrier and avoiding them begins to make a lot of sense!

So, if you know how dreadfully harmful tobacco and its smoke really are,

Have ways to turn down stress that work without smoking;

Have ways to make you not or less depressed that work without smoking;

Have ways to keep from getting fatter when you quit;

And, you begin to reverse the damage by doing things that reverse the damage from smoking,

It becomes dramatically easier to quit!