What are the health benefits of quitting smoking?
One of the most hopeful and encouraging messages I get to give to smokers, when they are ready to set that quit date, is to say now that you have tapered down in your smoking less and your body is getting less toxins, when you come to that quit date, in the first twenty-four hours that you do not expose your body to cigarette smoke, your risk of a heart attack drops fifty percent. Over the next few weeks to months it drops even more. Past that first day, your carbon monoxide levels drop to levels that are of a non-smoker's. Your ability to exercise, the oxygen delivery to your muscles, sometimes your chronic pain syndromes improve, your likelihood of developing cancer begins to diminish at that point. In fact, lung cancer - the most serious and common cancer that a cigarette smoker is exposed to - continuously diminishes over years. It does take ten or fifteen years to get to the point where you are at a pre-smoking level because cigarette smoking risks for cancer take years to detect, so you can't be off that hook for cancer immediately. But with heart disease, within two years your likelihood of having a heart attack returns back to nearly a non-smoker's level. So every week, every month, every year that you quit smoking, your health begins to improve in ways that are demonstrable. The toxins come out of your lungs, the mucus production, the inflammation begins to resolve within just weeks. I would encourage you to not just look way down the road of all the negative consequences - you'll avoid in death. I would encourage you to focus on all the positive consequences you will get now, because the moment that you stop, your body starts to heal itself. It has been trying to heal itself all along.
