Facts About Smoking

Here are some important facts about smoking. Hopefully, they'll encourage you to quit!

Benefits!

• After quitting for one year, your chances of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker. After fifteen years, it's the same as a non-smoker.

• 5 to 15 years after quitting, your risk of stroke returns to the levels of a non-smoker.
• If you're male and in your thirties, you'll add an average of 5 years to your life by quitting smoking.
• If you're female, you'll add an average of 3 years.

Four in five smokers want to quit. Each year, 1.3 million smokers do quit. Following your doctor's advice helps.

According to the American Heart Association, about 46 million American adults smoke. Most are trying to quit or want to quit. In general, more than 49% of smokers have quit since the 1960s.

That's great, but what about the other half.

More Facts About Smoking...Why You Should Quit!

In 2004, the Surgeon General issued a report, The Health Consequences of Smoking. In this report, it stated that quitting smoking can greatly reduce heart disease and other forms of cardiovascular disease. Smoking is a great contributor to heart attack! Quitting helps eliminate many of the contributors to heart attack, including atherosclerosis (buildups in the arteries), thrombosis (blood clots), coronary artery spasm, and heart arrhythmia.

The report says that tobacco smoking is the number 1 cause of preventable disease and death in the U. S.

In 1965, about 42% of adults smoked. Now, about 23% of men and 19% of women smoke. That's quit an improvement! Following this decrease in the number of Americans who smoke, is a fall in occurrences of cardiovascular deaths.

So What?

All these facts about smoking are of no use whatsoever unless they encourage you to really quit! Unless you quit and stay quit, reading about how smokers are more likely to get heart disease and cancer only serves to make you depressed and feel guilty.

What can you do?

Well, actually quit! Which is easier said than done.

Using the Internet, you can explore many ways to quit. There are support groups to help, really good websites run by the government, non-profits, and companies who have drugs and programs that really work. What's important is trying a method. Most smokers have to try to quit four or five times before they're successful. In other words, if the first one or two methods you try don't work, don't give up! Keep trying.

You might want to take a look at my book about quitting smoking. It's called The Harold Cole Method. My father, Harold Cole, invented a great method for quitting smoking. What's so great about it is it almost totally avoids those awful withdrawal symptoms and cravings you feel when you quit. Take a look at it! It might be just the method you're looking for.

Whatever you do, quit! Find something that works for you and do it. Don't give up until you are smoke-free.