Strategies for quitting smoking successfully....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 11-15-2012

Most of our healthcare costs -- both for you as an individual and for all of us over our lifetimes -- now goes for almost completely preventable diseases!

So, today is the Great American Smoke Out because some people do quit which helps cut our overall health care costs and saves those people a lot of grief.

1.  If you’ve quit cold turkey before without too much initial hassle, you could do that too!

Just print or save this post, toss any cigarettes you have with you and at home and do it. 

This post has information that will help protect you from health harms from the smoking you already did and make it easier to stay a nonsmoker.

2.  Or, if you have had any kind of trouble right away the last time you tried to quit, the groups and doctors are correct, do this:

Decide to quit now and give it a strong & focused extra effort for the next few weeks.  Set a future date for the cold turkey part.

(You can cut back just a bit on how much you smoke and only use matches and take some extra vitamin C while you still smoke.  The small cut back with help a bit and avoiding the hot flame of a lighter is a proven cancer reducer.  And, vitamin C helps protect your heart and health generally.)

And start the strategies in this post now and do them for a few weeks first.

Basically, what you are setting up are ways to get the useful things smoking has given you in other ways instead and to protect you from health harms from the smoking you already did and make it easier to stay a nonsmoker.

A.  Here’s the solution to one problem that keeps many people from even trying to quit. 

They really don’t know yet why they should try that hard to quit!

Most people have no kind of beginning clue how horribly dangerous smoking is to the smoker and the people nearby!

Some smokers don’t even believe it does ANY harm.  But those people are not likely to read this post because most people who read do know smoking is bad for you.

But here’s the deal.  Most doctors know a good bit about how horribly harmful smoking is. But they don’t know how to explain it to you. So most of them don’t.

Here’s what the mismatch is between what most smokers know and how bad smoking really is.:

(The way this helps you quit is this.  If someone tells me there is an armed man in our neighborhood who may be dangerous and though the police are searching for him he is still loose, we will be careful and watch out for the guy.  But we won’t move to a motel until they catch the rascal!

However, if the police come to our door and say to vacate because this man is systematically breaking into houses and killing everyone inside, we WOULD move to a motel until he is caught.)

So, in case you didn’t know it is CERTAIN in YOUR case that smoking is that dangerous and knowing why it is will help you quit, here’s why smoking is really that horribly dangerous!

Most smokers know that some people who smoke get lung cancer.  But they don’t quit because they just assume they will be one of the people who doesn’t. (Even in heavy smokers, 75% avoid lung cancer.)

But even if they ARE that lucky on lung cancer, the conclusion they draw, that it’s safe otherwise to keep smoking is scary wrong!

Just on the little problem with smoking, cancer, smoking is about five times that dangerous! 

Because of the fertilizer used in growing tobacco, tobacco and its smoke are RADIOACTIVE. 

That’s OK if you never breathe tobacco smoke or put tobacco in your mouth or nose because this kind of radioactivity can only harm you if it gets into your bloodstream.

But if you do get it into your blood, your blood goes everywhere in your body!

That’s why tobacco use and smoking cause 30% of ALL cancers or more. 

One oncology doctor who treated patients with cancer told me half his patients were smokers.  So the 30% estimate may even be a bit low!

The aggressive kinds of skin cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, and brain cancer just to name a few, will all kill you just as certainly as lung cancer.

So if dying of cancer is not your preference, it makes sense to quit smoking and stay quit!

Worse, that’s the little problem with smoking.

Yikes!  If that’s the little problem with smoking, what is the BIG problem with it?

Every single puff of tobacco smoke causes your body to add a bit of plaque, stuck on gunk, on the insides of your blood vessel and increase your rate of aging and makes your lungs work less well and function like lungs in MUCH older people.

This is just as true for a brand new teenaged smokers as it is for people who have smoked 40 years.

Here is a fact to get a good hold on and never forget.  That happens with great certainty every single time!

If you miss cancer, will you miss this one?  NOPE.  And that is what most smokers have never heard of.

It’s also why it’s almost as harmful to smoke 4 or 5 cigarettes a day as it is to smoke that many packs..

It means that if getting old fast and breathing badly and getting set up for heart attacks, strokes, ED, and more is not your idea of fun, YOU will go there anyway if you keep smoking.

No smoker escapes that!

Oh, and it gets worse!  Smoking and second hand smoke each triggers heart attacks in people who would have escaped them or had them much later without it.

(In towns and cities that adopt strong limits on where people can smoke, the drop in Emergency Room visits is almost immediate because of this.  And those towns and cities and their people save tens of thousands of dollars within just the first few weeks!)

So, my hope is that just like in my motel example, now you know smoking is really that bad, you’ll take action to protect yourself and quit!

B.  So what people do who succeed in smoking is to start immediately to do two things, take action to protect their hearts and prevent cancer in other ways AND begin to do things that deliver the useful things they were getting from smoking.

Then , whether you quit immediately or start these things a month before quitting, you are doing things to protect your health and do those jobs in other ways.

That means that when you are tempted to quit, you realize it would undo all the work you’ve done and are doing.

If you work on something and someone else follows behind you and undoes it all, you will NOT be happy with them!  So when you are tempted to restart smoking, you’ll have just that reaction to the idea.  Why do all this work and then undo it?  That would be a bit dumb.

Of course for many smoking is addictive but knowing the facts and knowing it will undo work you’ve done will help you.

Does it actually test out that doing things like exercising and eating vegetables that help prevent cancer, actually improves people’s chances to succeed?

YES!  If you do both, your chances of success more than double.  And most of the people tested did not know what you just read  -- so their motivation was likely less than yours will be!

1.  What exercises should you do? 

If you like to go to the gym and lift weights some evenings, do that.  Of course just take it easy until a month to 6 weeks after you quit.  Or if you find walking easy to do on your lunch hour do that.  What do you like?  What can you do right away?  Do one of those!

The second key is exercises you can get to that you are OK with or like – AND -- find exercises you can do at home first thing in the morning before the rest of your day happens to you.

It can be an exercise video or using dumbbells or doing push up and squats with no weights.  At first make sure you do at least 10 minutes most days.  If you find you can do more on some days that helps.  But if you are a bit behind schedule some days make a very strong effort to do at least 5 minutes.

It also helps to keep a log of the exercises you do.  Develop abbreviations or set up a form on your home computer you just type it in with a few key strokes.

This literally does all of the above! 

It helps you feel like you are someone in control of your life.  Exercise also helps prevent cancer AND heart disease AND begins to reverse your rapid aging!  (I’m NOT making this stuff up! Each of these effects are well researched.)

And, exercise helps you feel less stressed, anxious, and depressed.  Guess what?  Those are some of reasons people smoke or go back to smoking.

That’s a big reason why doing it helps you stay quit and away from smoking!

2.  It was also proven that people who eat even one or two servings of a real vegetable each day are twice as likely to succeed in quitting.  (Baked potatoes, French fries, and ketchup don’t count!  And, they aren’t that good for you either!)

You can do this too.  Why not eat one of the vegetables that helps you turn down your risk of getting cancer from the smoking you already did?

a) Raw cruciferous vegetables not only cut your risk of cancers, it gets better.  Some studies have found eating them cuts your risk of getting the aggressive kind of cancers that will actually kill you in half if you eat some every week!

Yes raw broccoli works.  But you don’t have to eat it if you don’t like it.  Raw cauliflower florets and coleslaw also work! So does tossing water cress into a salad or eating raw radishes.

b)  Dark green, orange, and yellow vegetables are high in something called carotenes which help prevent all cancers!

And, unlike the raw cruciferous vegetables, this works BETTER if they are cooked and eaten with extra virgin olive oil.

Baked acorn squash works. So does eating pumpkin or sweet potato pie!

Do you like pasta sauce?  Have some with some extra virgin olive oil and a meat or bean or combo of other vegetables.

(The carotene in the tomatoes in pasta sauce helps prevent prostate cancer and likely breast and ovarian cancers too.)

And, yes carrots work too.  In fact, besides beta carotene, carrots are high in alpha carotene which was recently found to create good health so well, you can predict how healthy someone is by how much is in their blood.

Interestingly, people who eat a lot of these vegetables even LOOK healthier because their skin has a kind of glow from the colors in the carotenes!

And, guess what?  People who exercise AND build up to eating several servings a day of vegetables also tend to avoid the weight gain some people get from smoking.

There are a lot of other things that help prevent heart disease and cancer and ways to have hunger free and permanent fat loss that we post about here.

So reading our posts regularly can also help.

This post is to get you started on the basics.

3.  Some people have serious issues with nicotine dependence or the kind of depression protection some people get from tobacco.

If you’ve tried to quit and found that happened to you, there is a solution.

You can get low dose nicotine patches in advance over the counter and begin them immediately if you just quit or two weeks before your quit date if you are working up to it.

Or, you can get nicotine inhalers if you tend to need the nicotine only sometimes AND a drug, Zyban – aka – Welbutrin from your doctor that gives you the same kind of depression relief as smoking.

Those sources of nicotine and the drug also help double your changes of success if you are someone who needs them.

They are a bit of a hassle but are only temporary.  The things you avoid by not smoking are often permanent.  So the hassles is worth it if you need to use it.

My sincere best wishes it all works for you!