New info on quitting smoking successfully....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 11-21-2013

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!

Today is the Great American Smoke Out!

It’s held once as a year because some people do quit which helps cut our overall health care costs and saves those people a LOT of grief.

1.  Many smokers do want to quit now and would try if they thought they had a shot at success.

2.  Some smokers might try to quit if they thought they would be harmed by smoking but don’t now believe they are.

3.  And, other smokers, often women, would try to quit or even succeed if they knew how to quit without gaining a lot of fat weight.

So, what’s this new information?

The new information is:

1. There ARE three things that people can do to more than double their chances of quitting smoking successfully.  We even now know how to make it easy to start them!

We list that below.

2.  Some people have heard that smoking causes lung cancer.  But many smokers don’t know any others who have lung cancer.  Some even know that not every smoker ever gets lung cancer.  THAT part is true.  (Even among heavy smokers only one out of four gets lung cancer.)

So, they simply expect to be one of the lucky smokers who escape lung cancer and keep smoking.

Even if they DO escape lung cancer they are thinking they are unharmed by their smoking.

The new information TO YOU is that if you are such a smoker, you are horribly mistaken if you think that! 

That mistake could cost you your life AND 20 or thirty years of healthy life first on top of that.

The truth is that every smoker or person exposed to second hand smoke is harmed every single time at each exposure.  No smoker escapes at all!

How can that be?  Why is that true? 

Most smokers don’t know and keep smoking.

Some smokers keep smoking but do cut back to 5 or 6 a day and then think they are safe because they don’t know that they still have most of this harm because they failed to stop entirely.

Most doctors do know but don’t explain it well.

What happens is that tobacco smoke exposure damages the insides of your blood vessels every single time you are exposed to tobacco smoke.  Your body then tries to repair this damage with a small patch and puts plaque over it.  This happens every time. 

(This damage also speeds up aging of every part of you each time you breathe tobacco smoke.)

If you keep smoking or being around smokers, this plaque builds up.  If you eat too much heart attack starters in your food also this plaque build-up happens MUCH faster.  If you are a heavy smoker it happens even faster yet.

Then your body tends to calcify the plaque and you will then have atherosclerosis, hardening of the arteries, get high blood pressure, & likely will have to take the drugs for it.

You are then a heart attack waiting to happen.

You may not need to wait long.  Tobacco smoke, we now know, is also a trigger and causes heart attacks in people who would otherwise have escaped them or not had them until years later.

This damage happens a bit to every single smoker every single time.  This damage happens to light smokers.  It happens to brand new teenaged smokers.  And if you smoke it has already been happening to you for longer than is good for you!

3.  Since it is true that quitting smoking tends to cause weight gain, it would be easier for many to try to quit and to succeed if they could quit smoking without that weight gain. 

Even if they could gain 5 pounds and take it off instead of gaining 10 or 15 pounds that stay on, many more people would try to quit and succeed if they knew how to do that and did it.

Here’s the wonderful good news for those people AND for everyone who wants to quit smoking and stop being harmed by smoking.

There are two practices that are easy to start that more than double your chances of quitting smoking!

These two changes also empower you to easily make even more changes that protect your health that you literally would not have been able to do before.

Best of all these two changes are also the essential building blocks of permanent fat loss!

Every single bit of that has been tested and found true.

a)  The most effective of these two changes is to begin regular exercise you do every week.  It even works in the early stages if you only do it once or twice a week. 

Even better, you can do slow motion strength training -- 10 to 15 seconds up and 10 to 15 seconds down  or cardio where you go a bit fast until you begin to be out of breath and then stop or slow way down until you are mostly recovered before you speed up again.

You can do some version of these at home.  You can and should start with a weight or cardio exercise at only a moderately hard level and build up slowly week by week.

Again, best of all, you can start getting benefits with sessions of 4 to 6 minutes each.

How to start? 

Decide which morning works best for you to block out the slightly less than ten minutes to set up and do your session and write or enter a brief note with that day’s date and what you did.

Then when that morning comes, try it out.  Plan to do a bit more next time -- or if it is a bit too hard do less next time or the next part that day.

Give yourself a big cheer of encouragement for starting and write down your exercise session on your calendar for next week.

b)  For some people who already exercise or have an active job, the second main method may be what you want to do first.

Decide what fits you best and which one you will do first.

If it’s not exercise for any reason, the second one has been just as empowering for some people.

The second one is even easier to begin.  The second part of it is a harder for some people so the key for most people is to do the first part first.

People who have been eating foods and drinking drinks that harm their health and fatten them and who switch to foods and drinks that do not, get benefits close to as good and sometimes better than beginning to do the right exercises every week.

Pick one real vegetable that isn’t starchy that you are willing to eat or at least try out.

Go to the store and buy from one to enough to have some once a day for a week.

Then decide where you will eat it in your day.  I take my lunch, so in my own case I added it to my lunch.  But some people add mushrooms and onions to their scrambled eggs at breakfast.  And some people add a small serving to eat at dinner.

Then go buy it and try it out for a week.

Give yourself a big cheer of encouragement for starting and decide whether you want to add a second vegetable to your day or if you want to try a different one next.

Broccoli florets work and are often available in grocery stores or restaurants at the deli section or the salad bar.  You can buy some and take them home.

If you prepare food at home or are willing to do it, you can buy broccoli at the grocery store and wash it and dry it and cut off the florets yourself.

(If you find you can eat broccoli florets or cauliflower florets the good news is that they begin to protect you from the cancer risk you were running up before.)

Or, you can do something even easier that almost everyone can do and eat OK.

Buy one can of green beans at the store and eat a third of the can on three days at lunch or dinner during the week.

To get started it doesn’t have to be hard to do.  In fact if you pick something you are pretty sure you can do or would find easy to do, that’s a GOOD thing!  The essential part is to get started.

People who just begin to do these two things do double their chances of quitting smoking and even without eating ANY less, most people will lose weight too.

And, they begin to get substantial protection from the health harms they had before.

Hope that works for you too.

(I have more to lose yet, but I’ve lost 30 pounds I’ve kept off and did this method myself. It does work!)