Benefits of Quitting

So my little sister sent me this link from Stumbleupon (awesome service by the way).It explains what happens to your body right away when you quit smoking. I found a few things about this interesting. First of all, I'm curious about his sources. This guy does not site a single thing. Not one! Come on, you could at least say, "I heard this from a buddy of mine at the bar. He was 12 drinks into the night and nearing comatose." At least then I'd have some kind of gauge as to it's accuracy. Ok, moving on. Let's pick this list apart.

* In 20 minutes your blood pressure will drop back down to normal.

As you might expect, I really don't have any way to verify this as I don't regularly check my blood pressure. However, I did notice while working out yesterday that my heart rate was noticeably lower than it had been in the preceding few months. That is definitely encouraging. This also brings up a rather interesting point about the state of your body while you are still smoking. Most people I know go at least 20 minutes between cigarettes while they are smoking, at least during weekdays anyways. Smokers are a little bit more likely to be chain smokers on the weekend but for most working people there are 2 hours between smoke breaks during the day. That means that if this point is true, a smoker’s blood pressure is on a roller coaster ride all day long. That can't be good for your heart (not like smoking was particularly nice for it in the first place.)

* In 48 hours your chance of having a heart attack will have decreased. All nicotine will have left your body. Your sense of taste and smell will return to a normal level.


I thought this was an interesting claim. 48 hours seems like a very short amount of time to be able to determine if a risk of heart attack has decreased. How in the world could anybody possibly study that. You would have to have an insanely large study group, filled with smokers, non smokers, and people who had just quit that day. Of course after that it's easy. Just monitor them all for 2 days and count how many of them have heart attacks. Say what?! Come on. No way. As far as nicotine leaving your body; I'm very curious to know what the actual facts behind that are. I've heard claims about that anywhere from a day and a half to a month after you quit. It seems like that could be dependent on how much you smoke. If anyone has any verified facts on that one, I would be very interested in seeing them. The taste thing is really hard to gauge as well. The night I quit I ate KFC, not exactly a flavor explosion, and the night after I made spicy Indian curry. I can definitely say that I tasted more of the curry than I did the KFC. That's probably not a very good comparison though...


* In 72 hours your bronchial tubes will relax, and your energy levels will increase.

I'm going to disagree with this one as well. My energy levels have already increased. Granted, I am now at the 72 hour mark but, I was feeling more energetic before now. I suppose that could have been in my head but does it really matter? If I feel like I have more energy, it amounts to the same thing as having more energy so who cares? I'm not entirely certain what is entailed by "your bronchial tubes will relax" but my throat is, again, feeling better this morning. I've also been coughing a lot of garbage out of my lungs. That's not really a new thing but it's nice to know that I'm no longer filling them up and once it all gets expelled they're going to STAY clean.

* In 2 weeks your circulation will increase, and it will continue to improve for the next 10 weeks.

I don't really have anything clever on this one. I wouldn't mind finding out about that one. Is there a way I can monitor my circulation?

* In three to nine months coughs, wheezing and breathing problems will dissipate as your lung capacity improves by 10%.

Well, the wheezing is gone already. The wheeze was only an occasional thing for me though; usually right after a cigarette or maybe the day after a particularly heavy night of smoking. In terms of coughing and other breathing problems I think that this is also a fairly conservative estimate. It may take that long if you've been a chain smoker for several years but I think most people in my situation who have been at a pack a day for maybe only a few years, you'll start to see these changes a lot sooner.

The remainder of these I'm not even going to touch. The ten years for normal cancer odds thing I've heard before. That's one of the really common ones that they tend to throw at smokers to scare them into quitting. My nit-picking aside, I think this is a really encouraging little list. A lot of these numbers may be based off of something closer to a "worst case scenario" and for most people they are going to be a pretty generous estimate. That's kind of a cool thought though. Take a look at the list, "Hey, this is as long as it's going to take for me to notice this benefit." I think it's pretty cool. And you have it from an ex-smoker that while the numbers may not be 100% accurate, you WILL notice these benefits and more.