10 Reasons to Quit Smoking Today
May 31, 2007 by Kristen King
Filed under Women's Health
May 31 is World No Tobacco Day, so what better day to talk about why you should quit smoking right now? Here are 10 compelling reasons to kick the habit today.
- Smoking causes 87% of all lung cancer cases (source), and lung cancer kills more women than breast and ovarian cancers combined. (source)
- Smoking causes wrinkles all over your body.
- Smoking dramatically increases women’s risk of developing coronary heart disease (source), and heart disease is the leading killer of American women. (source)
- Smoking turns your teeth yellow.
- Women who smoke risk having a heart attack 19 years earlier than women who don’t smoke. (source)
- Smokers are almost four times as likely to develop cervical cancer compared with nonsmokers. (source)
- Women who smoke and use hormonal birth control methods (such as the pill or the patch) are nearly 10 times more likely to have a heart attack than nonsmoking women on birth control. (source)
- Smoking causes baldness.
- Smoking causes snoring, which in addition to being totally unsexy, also has major health effects, namely poor sleep quality and reduced oxygen flow to the brain, both of which are potentially very dangerous.
- Compared with nonsmokers, smokers are more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease (source), and half of all women age 85 and older will eventually develop Alzheimer’s (that is, if the lung cancer doesn’t kill them first). (source)
And if those aren’t good enough reasons for you, check out these lists:
- Top 10 Reasons to Quit Smoking
- 10 Overlooked Reasons to Quit Smoking
- 50 Reasons to Quit Smoking
- 20 Reasons To Quit Smoking
Finally convinced? Here are some resources to help you quit for good!
- Independence from Smoking: Free quit resources just for women
- Quit Smoking: Free quit coach, quit plan, educational materials, and more
- Why Quit: Free motivation, education, and support for cold turkey nicotine cessation
- QuitNet: Free online quit-smoking community
Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King
I think smoking can make the person look wearily.My father is a good example .He is useed to smoking ,ang almost at any time ,I look my father so weary that his skins are so yellow,and he always have a cough.I have spoken to my father many times to ask him quit smoking ,but it didn’t work at all .I hate the smoking .
Now,in our college ,there many boys are smoking including one of my male friends.So,yesterday I quarreled with him.In a word,I hate smoking very much.
Penetrating the actively feeding nicotine addict’s thick, protective wall of denial is one of the greatest challenges we’ll ever face. Although hijacked by an external chemical, their brain’s dopamine pathways, their mind’s priorities teacher, has done an excellent job of totally convincing them that that next nicotine fix is their #1 priority in life. Sadly, in their mind it’s more important than family, eating, friends, romance, the developing fetus within the pregnant smoker’s womb, or life itself. When told they have lung cancer and that continued nicotine use will render chemotherapy ineffective nearly half fail to quit.
A key difference between nicotine and heroin addiction is that the nicotine addict’s dopamine high is alert while the heroin addict’s is numb, yet one goes to prison and the other the convenience store. Here in the U.S. death from all illegal drugs combined is less than 20,000 while addiction to smoking nicotine annually claims more than 400,000, each an average of 13 years early, with one-quarter dying during middle-age.
When it comes to chemical dependency recovery, knowledge truly is power. Thank you for sharing WhyQuit’s link. We hope smoking readers and their family and friends will visit and explore the site as we’ve assembled a wide array of tools that can substantially enhance their odds of freedom. It’s an all volunteer recovery forum that’s totaly free, there’s no commercials, we sell nothing and actually decline donations.
Breathe deep, hug hard, live long,
John R. Polito
Nicotine Cessation Educator
Editor WhyQuit
“Penetrating the actively feeding nicotine addict’s thick, protective wall of denial is one of the greatest challenges we’ll ever face.”
Very true.
I think I shall check out the sites to help smokers quit, nonetheless.
I found this post such a good starting point for those who have yet not decided to kick their smoking habit, that I have included you in the blog I just started about smoking cessation.
I have been nicotine free for over three years myself, thanks to a good quit smoking strategy I discovered.