Big news for the Great American Smokeout 2016

Today's post:  Thursday, 11-17-2016

Every year, on the third Thursday of November, smokers across the nation take part in the American Cancer Society Great American Smokeout event.

There are 3 pieces of BIG, GOOD news this year.

1.  Last year we posted on “You can quit smoking without gaining weight.” 

(And that whole post including how incredibly harmful tobacco smoke and tobacco products really are is included below.  The great thing is that beginning the things that prevent fat gain or even begin to remove it ALSO double and redouble the chances that people who do them will succeed in quitting smoking.)

What if you already have fat to lose or gain some anyway? 

The big news is that we now know how to get rid of it without reducing your metabolism and gaining back!  (More details on that are below.) 

That means that it’s even more likely you can quit smoking without fat gain.  In fact, you can even get rid of fat you had before you quit!

Because half of all smokers who want to quit won’t try due to wanting to avoid fat gain, this is HUGE good news!

2.  Some people have quit smoking by beginning to “vape” or use e-cigarettes.  While this is a bit less harmful than smoking, research has shown that both for the people who use it and those exposed to it by people who do ARE harmed almost as much.

Continuous use of nicotine has been shown by research both to increase the risk of heart disease and to increase the risk of cancers.  Worse, the flavorings when heated release enough harmful chemicals other research has found to cause lung damage!  These chemicals include formaldehyde.

Fox news had this: "Aside from ALS risk or other nervous system consequences, formaldehyde is a respiratory irritant that causes chest pain, shortness of breath, coughing, and nose and throat irritation, according to the ATSDR. It can also cause cancer, and has been linked to an increased risk of asthma and allergies in kids."

Does that mean that vaping can cause ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, asthma, and cancer? It likely does.

In addition, many teens who would not start smoking otherwise begin using e-cigarettes as it is commonly thought safe. 

Now research has proven this also increases the number of young people who smoke because most of those kids start smoking.

So, because it’s the metabolism boost of nicotine that people who quit use that keeps off fat, quitting e-cigarettes without fat gain works the same way as it does for people who quit smoking.

Since e-cigarettes are this harmful and cause more young people to start smoking, wouldn’t it be nice if there were an incentive to quit or not start?

Yes.  And NOW there is!

3. Proposition 56 passed in California and is set to go into effect on April 1, 2017!

The $2 tax per pack on cigarettes will give some enough incentive to quit.  But the tax on the nicotine used in vaping will go up even more!

So the 3 pieces of good news this year are:

1.  We now know how to remove any fat you gain by quitting nicotine either by quitting smoking or e-cigarettes and even more fat than that if needed.

2.  There is enough evidence now that vaping IS also harmful that including e-cigarettes in areas where smoking is banned is clearly justified.

3.  And, in California, there will soon be a financial incentive to quit smoking and vaping or do much less.

But of these, the biggest one is the first one:

We now know how to remove any fat you gain by quitting nicotine either by quitting smoking or e-cigarettes and even more fat than that if needed.

We posted on that just one week ago:  “The importance of the new information on fasting.”  Thursday, 11-10-2016.

(You can see both of these two posts by just scrolling down from this one.)

I’m doing a 5 day fast this week because fasting takes off belly fat first and most; and that’s the part of me that’s fat and which I’ve had little success getting rid of.

Such fasts, Dr Fung has found, take off 2 to 5 pounds of fat.  (They also tend to remove belly fat first!!)

Plus, they do so without slowing your metabolism too!

To find out more, get and read Dr Fung’s book, The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jimmy Moore and Dr. Jason Fung.

It’s available on Amazon.  Just enter   Dr Jason Fung   on their books search field.

You can also read my post next Monday, 11-21, My Monthly Fatloss Report, which this time will be about my fast, how effective it was, and the tips I can pass on from my experience with it.

(I’m just a bit over three days into my five days and it’s already clear it’s been effective because my belly looks significantly smaller than it did last week!)

              Besides these 3 big news stories here is last year’s post:

You can quit smoking without gaining weight....Thursday, 11-19-2015

Today is the Great American Smokeout Day that happens every November a bit before Thanksgiving.

The hope is that some of the people who pledge to not smoke just for today will realize they can just not restart tomorrow and will quit successfully.

And, of course with thousands who get the message and quit just for today, a small percentage WILL quit smoking and never smoke again.

But that’s pretty weak.

Surprisingly we DO now know how to help people quit successfully.  But it hasn’t yet been packaged and sold to the people who need it and want it.

There are three reasons people fail at quitting smoking.

1.  Some people want to quit smoking but won’t even mess with trying because they absolutely do NOT want to get fatter!  This goes double for women smokers. But it’s true for men also.

And except for very light smokers and very heavy smokers who quit, people who quit smoking routinely gain as much as 5% of their previous weight as added new fat.

Not only can you quit and NOT get fatter, the things you do to not get fatter make it more than twice as likely you’ll quit smoking successfully!  (We cover that last.)

2.  People either see no reason to quit at all or only try 5% hard enough if they do try to quit because they have no clue how horribly harmful tobacco smoke and using tobacco products that touch your mucous membranes actually is!

3.  People who try to quit often cannot beat the addiction to nicotine.

This post will cover those in reverse order.

3.  Recent research has found that of the two main uses of smoking, boosting your ability to concentrate and relax when too stressed, the addictive part of nicotine is the boosting it does to your ability to boost your mental energy when you want or need to do so.

Then when people quit smoking, they not only lose that tool, they have their ability to focus and concentrate go down and stay down enough it slashes their quality of life enough it’s very challenging to put up with it.

You almost have to have sky high motivation or training in continuing in very unpleasant circumstances that would to credit to a Navy Seal to quit.

There are three pieces of good news on this one:

a)  If you really knew what was going to happen to you that is completely avoidable by quitting, your motivation WOULD be sky high!  (That’s coming up next right here!)

b)  Navy Seal, retired, Rorke Denver, wrote a book, Damn Few, that has the mental strategies and practices that you can use to get the skill of continuing in very unpleasant circumstances.

And, in his book and in a comment by another retired Seal is the basic strategy:

If you prepare by learning to make an extra effort when it counts by becoming unusually physically fit, you can do far more than you may realize.

Then, when you are tested with a difficult problem under harsh conditions, you may have to try so hard to succeed at it and hang in there that you are 100% exhausted after you do it.

The trick is what comes next:

You say to yourself as Rorke Denver did in his own style of course,

That was insanely hard; but I did do it.  Since this is important to me and that shows I can beat these challenges, I’ll keep beating the next ones too.

It may be tough; but I CAN do this.

The people who fail say something like this: 

That was insanely hard.  Maybe I’ll not be able to beat the next one.  Then they drop out.

But the underlying ability to beat the challenges is about the same!

So, if you are tempted to quit in that way, once you know this, the cure is this.

“I’ll not beat myself and give up. 

No matter what the next challenge is, I’ll assume I can do it and I’ll try just as hard or harder than I did on this one. 

They’ll actually have to give me an impossible task before I stop; and they may not be able to.

I refuse to quit before that actually happens!  Based on my beating this last one, they may not be able to!

c)  There looks to be a new way to do what nicotine does well enough to simply overcome the withdrawal and boost your concentration so well on demand that you’ll never need to waste your money doing it with nicotine again!

I’ve not tested it yet personally; so I’ll hold off on posting about it yet.  But if it does work that well, beating nicotine addiction will be a slam dunk!

(Hint:  Don’t buy tobacco company stock!)

2.  People either see no reason to quit at all or only try 5% hard enough if they do try to quit because they have no clue how horribly harmful tobacco smoke and using tobacco products that touch your mucous membranes actually is!

Lower class people don’t expect good health or long life. And, since smoking likely won’t kill them next week since it didn’t happen last week, they simply believe smoking isn’t harmful.  And, few of them have any interest in quitting.

But most people, and for sure those literate enough to be reading this post, have tended not to try hard to quit for a different reason.  They have heard and believe that the big risk of smoking is lung cancer.  Many smokers don’t get lung cancer.  (True: Even in very heavy smokers 3 of every 4 won’t get lung cancer.)  Then since they have other things to deal with, they just assume they’ll be in the lucky group of people.  Then they don’t try to quit.  Or, if they try, they don’t try very hard.

This will be brief.  But OMG this is SO wrong!

Would you get off the track if an express train was coming?

If yes and you smoke, are exposed to second hand smoke, or use nicotine or tobacco products in other ways, you are at enough risk you should try at least that hard to put a screeching halt to it.

a) Every single puff of tobacco smoke begins to build up heart disease by harming the inside of your blood vessels which your body patches in a way that will close them eventually. 

b)  Every single puff of tobacco smoke begins to age your lungs enough to make you functionally MUCH older.  This happens to new, teenaged smokers.  When some of them got their lung function tested and tested like they were decades older, they quit.

c)  Every single puff of tobacco smoke shortens your telomeres and dramatically speeds up your aging process.

d)  The excessive cadmium in tobacco smoke and tobacco products not only is one of many ways they cause cancer, it doubles your chances of getting Alzheimer’s disease!

Those mean that every single puff of tobacco smoke harms you. If you smoke even a few cigarettes a month, YOU are being seriously harmed.

NO ONE who is routinely exposed to cigarette smoke escapes!

If the exposure happens, so does the harm – every single time!

e) What about cancer?

OMG!  THAT is far worse than most people have a clue it is too!

Because tobacco and tobacco smoke cause cancer so many ways, it looks like fully half the people who have cancer would have escaped it had they not been exposed to tobacco smoke or tobacco products.

The cadmium in tobacco causes cancer; nicotine causes cancer; NKK is a nicotine metabolite in tobacco leaves and cause cancer; polonium is in tobacco today and is radioactive and causes cancer anywhere and everywhere in your body your blood goes once you breathe tobacco smoke or use tobacco products.

THEN, if you smoke and use a lighter with its very hot flame your risk of cancer AND of lung cancer skyrockets up.  (Almost all smokers today use lighters too!)

Here’s the much better news!

1.  Some people want to quit smoking but won’t even mess with trying because they absolutely do NOT want to get fatter!  This goes double for women smokers. But it’s true for men also.

And except for very light smokers and very heavy smokers who quit, people who quit smoking routinely gain as much as 5% of their previous weight as added new fat.

Not only can you quit and NOT get fatter, the things you do to not get fatter make it more than twice as likely you’ll quit smoking successfully! 

a) People who begin to exercise regularly each week, even if they start with just few minute walk or exercises for a few minute ONE day a week, begin to see themselves as health oriented and able to make other health changes.

In fact, 50 years ago, it was found this effect was so strong people found it so much easier to eat better and smoke less they simply began to do so!

Then of course most of them add more days a week and learn to exercise better and in more ways.

Here’s the best news:  Research shows that people trying to quit smoking double their chances of success if they do this.

b) That same research found that if people added ONE serving of a non-starchy vegetable ONE day a week to do every week, people trying to quit smoking also doubled their chances of success if they did this.

c)  Maybe people who do both – and starting at that easily doable level that’s quite easy to

do – won’t be four times as successful in quitting; but they will be more than twice as likely to succeed.

d) What about stopping smoking without permanent fat gain?

If you start regular exercise and eating vegetables alone and keep getting a bit better, you will dodge gaining any permanent fat.  And your chances of quitting go up that much too!

e)  What if you want to be sure to not gain fat?  Is there anything I can add to do that?

YES. 

Some will find it easier than others.  But if you exercise and eat vegetables also stopping the foods and drinks that only fatten you, many people lose over 25 pounds from that alone!

Stop all soft drinks totally.  Both regular and diet soft drinks test as extremely fattening.  And research is beginning to find they are almost as harmful to your health as smoking!

Stop eating anything that contains the high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners that are in soft drinks.  They are just as fattening and harmful in other foods.  Read the labels because so many foods contain them!

Stop eating ANY food that contains wheat as an ingredient.  Both refined white wheat flour and real whole wheat flour we now know are as fattening and harmful as soft drinks.

Stop eating any food that contains any trans fats or any kind of hydrogenated oil.  Any regular intake builds up in your system to high levels that then become nearly as harmful as cigarettes.  AND, almost everything they are in contain the other things on this list too!

Conclusion:  It’s not only possible to quit smoking without fat gain the news is even better!

If you do these things – or even begin them all at that tiny a level – you will also more than double your chances of quitting smoking too! 

And, if you do ALL these things you are quite likely to wind up LESS fat than you are now!