NEWS on how to quit smoking successfully AND even MORE harms of smoking found recently!....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 11-20-2014

A.  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.

 (See our recent news on how much worse smoking is than we knew even a year ago!

It’s in this post.)

And, those who stop smoking today or at least stop smoking around other people today do achieve two things even if they aren’t quite ready to quit.  They then know they do have some control over when they smoke and how much by doing so. 

AND, since the harms of second hand smoke are dose related, the people around you will be less harmed because of your effort.

B.  Whether or not you are already not smoking today or even reading this after today, this post has some information you can use if you smoke now or help people to quit.

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

Now they do!  As of a year ago we knew how to multiply people’s ability to quit by at least four times beyond what most people have heard of and we discovered things that may make it even more likely by last year.

Recently we got information that about triples that! It’s here in this post, next in part 1.

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

If you are online reading this, you likely are informed enough you don’t think smoking is harmless as the poorest least educated people sometimes still do.

However, you MAY still believe that:  

Lung cancer is the big or even only health risk from smoking; (OMG it’s the smallest one!)

and some smokers never get it (true by the way) and you feel lucky or don’t want to bother with making the effort to quit to avoid something that you may not get even if you keep smoking.

Since the people who do get lung cancer are so slammed and harmed and it IS a risk of smoking, this is even reflected by other stop smoking messages at times.

But the BIG risk of smoking that kills far more than lung cancer AND WHICH NO SMOKER ESCAPES you may not yet know about. 

It’s worse than that we just found out!  Smoking has three dreadful ADDITIONAL harms we just discovered recently.

How does making it much more likely you’ll die of TB or get Alzheimer’s you could have escaped or being in bad pain all the time sound to you?  If you keep smoking ALL of these are much more likely.

If you don’t think making an effort to quit is justified, but you would if you thought you had that much to lose if you didn’t and it was likely or already happening to you, you should read the first part of this post.

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

Now they do!  As of a year ago we knew how to multiply people’s ability to quit by at least four times beyond what most people have heard of and we discovered things that may make it even more likely then.

Recently we got information that about triples that! It’s here in this post.

If you need that information and want to use it to quit yourself -- or help smokers find it and use it, it’s next:

We now know enough about how people quit successfully you can use the information here to make it LIKELY you can quit now. 

The real success rate for quitting after a year has been less than 10 %.  The information we had last year we think boosted that to over 40%.  And, the information we recently got didn’t use what we had last year and 27% succeeded.

We believe that combining these methods now makes it over 80% likely people who use both sets of information will quit on their first attempt.

Even better, if you don’t quite get there this time, but you do put these things in place, next time you try it will be so much easier you are likely to succeed!  It’s like building a building.  You may not finish it in one pass.  But if you finish the foundation, finishing the rest in one pass becomes quite doable.

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

Now they can!

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.

New this year Adding two practices to those two before, during and after may as much as triple your chances of success!

The methods we describe below work in part because they are doable ways you can trust that show you that you are effective when you decide to be and that you are able to do things that protect your health. 

The new method starts with helping you see yourself that way right up front!

Researchers in a college in Ontario Canada systematically asked smokers to detail why they had been smoking.  That way two things happened, the smokers had some idea of what new solutions or practices they might need instead of smoking.  But the far more important one was the change in self image going though this exercise that systematically and completely gave them.  Instead of thinking something like:  “I’m a smoker and can’t quit.” this enables them to think “I’ve been smoking because of specific things.  So it’s possible I can get those things in other ways with far less harmful side effects.”

This is a huge difference!  And, their results showed it!  Instead of the less than 9% had quit after a year, in THIS program 27% did.

Best of all, by also doing the methods we had last year that help upgrade their self image as being able to take effective action and as someone who wants good health and will act to get and keep it, we think a success rate on the first pass of well over 80 is now possible!

a)  The most effective of these two changes we listed last year 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. Even 10 to 20 minute sessions first thing in the morning at home a few days a week will do it.

And, it’s best to start at a level it’s slam dunk you can do and then build up gradually.  The key thing is to decide which day of the week is doable and then begin to do at least one set of that exercise every week once you start.  Oddly, that’s the hard part.  Once you experience doing that successfully adding more becomes easy.  And, for this even one or two days a week may be enough to enable you to quit smoking!

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.  It also helps if you make a brief note on a notebook or on your computer or mobile device each time you exercise.  Studies show that doubles your chances of keeping it up!

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!)  

The other thing you must add to keep fat off is to stop your intake of most sugars, all refined grains, and most whole grains. 

Recent research found that smoking causes insulin resistance but cuts appetite and boosts metabolism, so smokers can get away with eating those high glycemic foods without fat gain.  But once the smoking is gone, you MUST stop the fattening foods and ingredients you were eating to avoid fat gain.

Grain Brain and Wheat Belly are two books to read on why everyone should do this.  They also give you sound ideas of what to eat instead.  In addition to the vegetables and fruit that are most protective, there are even now good tasting recipes for breads and desserts that avoid these harmful and fattening ingredients completely!

The third method is to add to the vegetables and exercise or do more of them to begin to protect yourself and regain the protection from cancer and heart disease risks you were giving yourself and undo the damage.

Out of time today to cover that in more detail.  But over every month of the year we cover ways to do that in our posts here.  Scan down the list for information on protecting yourself from things you are at risk for or want to prevent happening to you.

I’ve cut my heart risk by about 15 to one for example with these methods.  Just doing part of that will cut yours at least in half I’d be willing to bet.  And, cutting the risks of cancer and mental decline are also quite doable!

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

If you are online reading this, you likely are informed enough you don’t think smoking is harmless as the poorest least educated people sometimes still do.

However, you MAY still believe that:  

Lung cancer is the big or even only health risk from smoking; (OMG it’s the smallest one!)

and some smokers never get it (true by the way) and you feel lucky or don’t want to bother with making the effort to quit to avoid something that you may not get even if you keep smoking.

Since the people who do get lung cancer are so slammed and harmed and it IS a risk of smoking, this is even reflected by other stop smoking messages at times.

But the BIG risk of smoking that kills far more than lung cancer AND WHICH NO SMOKER ESCAPES you may not yet know about. 

It’s worse than that we just found out!  Smoking has three dreadful ADDITIONAL harms we just discovered recently.

How does making it much more likely you’ll die of TB or get Alzheimer’s you could have escaped or being in bad pain all the time sound to you?  If you keep smoking ALL of these are much more likely.

If you don’t think making an effort to quit is justified, but you would if you thought you had that much to lose if you didn’t and it was likely or already happening to you, you should read the second part of this post

That information is in part two just after part one on how it’s now possible to quit and even likely if you know the things that work and do them

2.  The real and more complete dangers of smoking!

 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 think 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 far longer than is good for you!

It’s worse than that we just found out!  Smoking has three dreadful ADDITIONAL harms we just discovered recently.

How does making it much more likely you’ll die of TB or get Alzheimer’s you could have escaped or being in bad pain all the time sound to you?  If you keep smoking ALL of these are much more likely.

Recent research found that smoking cuts your immune system so much that you are no longer likely to be able to resist TB chances are.  So if you are exposed to it, it will likely kill you; and dying of TB is a horrible way to go.

The cadmium in tobacco is so harmful to your brain smoking boosts your chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease by over 50% recent research found.

And two recent studies found that smokers tend to get daily pain or severe pain nonsmokers don’t because smoking causes brain changes that more than double how much pain you feel!

This means that people who get back pain won’t get better as long as they keep smoking.

And the most recent study found that smoking women tended to get more painful menstrual cramps and feel more pain when they do.

So, if you smoke and want to avoid these things, do the list of things here that have a real chance of enabling you to quit AND do it without fat gain!