Fitness Methods

Real Costs of Smoking

There are some real costs of smoking that you m ay not be aware of. Advertisers and tobacco companies would have us believe that smoking is not only cool, but that it will elevate your social standing and improve your relationships. This could not be further from the truth. The black and white days of mysterious men sparking up on street corners in long coats and Trilby hats, or rebellious teenagers playing pool with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of their mouth is long gone.

The innocence of those days has been replaced with a stark reality of the dreadful harm that the 4000 toxins in tobacco smoke can do. James Bond can be as casual as he likes with the villains he taunts, as the cigarette he lights with the stylish gold lighter is more likely to kill him than a bald man stroking a white cat.

There are some immediate real costs of smoking that everyone will experience. Firstly, you will become much poorer as the cost of smoking is enormous due to the “luxury” taxes with excise duty. Without a doubt, your breath, hair, clothes, skin and home will smell of stale tobacco smoke. Believe me when I tell you that it already does, it’s just that you don’t notice it because you smoke, but to those of us who do not smoke, it is both obvious and unpleasant. You may take a mint for your breath, but you cannot deodorise your clothes, skin and hair. The toxins and tar in cigarette smoke dull your taste buds and also taint the flavour of the food that you eat reducing your enjoyment of food.

There are many other damaging effects of tobacco smoking on your mouth, but those are not covered in this article. If you smoke, Life Insurance is more expensive. Insurance companies know that the likelihood of you dying young due to smoking related diseases is increased, therefore they need more money out of you sooner to cover the inevitable payout. If they do cover your life, it may be at the exclusion of death by smoking related illnesses.

You may struggle to find suitable employment if it is known that you smoke. If faced with a selection of candidates, some of whom smoke and some that don’t, the employer, armed with the knowledge that 34,000,000 working days are lost each year due to smoking related sickness, is more likely to choose the non-smoker. Don’t go thinking that this is discriminatory, because addicted or not, you have a choice as to whether you smoke or not.

If you have bad breath; your hair, skin and clothing regularly smell of stale tobacco, you have to go outside in social settings to smoke every half an hour, and you have less money to spend on leisure activities, this does not make you the social or relationship magnet that the advertisers would have you believe. Romance and friendship is not appealing to potential partners and friends given all of the above, if they are non-smokers.

You may appear physically less attractive if you smoke due to the decrease in blood supply that happens to the body. In the face, this can lead to pallor and increased incidence of premature wrinkles, not only due to decreased perfusion, but also the reduction in anti-oxidant vitamins A, C and E. Gentlemen be aware too. Of another of the real costs of smoking is the chances of Erectile Dysfunction, the inability to achieve or maintain and adequate erection for sexual intercourse, increases by 50% for those men that smoke. The BMA calculates that in the UK alone, there may be 120,000 men who suffer Erectile Dysfunction due solely to smoking.

So when you next feel tempted by the alluring imagery that is, or was, associated with smoking tobacco and cigarettes, think again. Who on Earth wants to be around a smelly, wrinkly, sickness prone, high-risk, social outcast that is prone to problems in the bedroom, and who has spent all their money on an addiction they can choose to stop?

Certainly not a non-smoker, and not one that would genuinely care for you if they did not want you to stop. This is really the most important of the real costs of smoking.

Martin Deakin is an ex-smoker. Like most ex-smokers he is passionate about the ill effects of smoking and how to help others to kick the habit. You could say that he is almost fanatical. He has a blog which includes articles, research and resources on how to quit smoking at Effects of Smoking Blog.

Thing is in reading this article you can really see that there is real costs of smoking that perhaps you had not thought of so look at the best way to stop smoking today.

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Quit Smoking Today

Quit smoking today? As much as I can’t stand to be around smoking today, I can’t believe that I ever started – I would guess that most people end up feeling that was after they quit.

I look back through the years and that question in amazement, because I quit smoking for good when I was 25, after smoking for 12 years. Yep, that means like a fool I started smoking when I was 13 – why, I guess because the older kids were doing it, and I wanted to be cool like them.

My dad smoked all his adult life – 3-4 packs of Pall Mall non-filters a day. He hacked and choked, and he huffed and puffed; he actually ended up getting adult asthma that was probably from it. And then the surgeon general’s warning came out and he quit overnight. But not me, I didn’t believe in that stuff – so as he quit I started.

I eventually stopped smoking overnight. I got a really bad case of the flue and couldn’t have smoked if I wanted to. I threw away my last pack with the conviction that I would never start again [yeah right], but this time I followed through.

Aids are available for all smokers, but nonetheless, stopping smoking is something that has proven impossible for many people. You know how important it is to quit, and you have tried many of these smoking aids. But regardless of your intentions, and regardless of how many times that you have tried – the craving comes back, and before you know it you are smoking again.

So what if it is really that easy? What if all your beliefs about how hard it is going to be to quit are completely false? What if, after just one session of hypnotherapy or NLP you find it incredibly easy to become and remain a happy, confident non-smoker for life?The reason why hypnotherapy & NLP are so successful is because both our beliefs about smoking and our habitual smoking behaviours reside within your unconscious mind. So whilst consciously we may wish to quit, all too often our all powerful unconscious mind simply would not let us.

No doubt that it is far better for your health and well-being if you would quit smoking, but with the inability to quit being related to what becomes an addiction to nicotine, this becomes about more than simply having the willpower to quit.

But what if you could stop smoking – what would it mean to you? Clearly there will be benefits for your health over the long term, but your body will be improve immediately as you start breathing clean air -vs- all the crap you are currently breathing every time you inhale cigarette smoke.

You will be amazed at the great changes in your health that have been shown to take place virtually immediately after you quit smoking. To begin with, your blood pressure and heart rate are going to fall to a level that is far healthier for you. And within as little as a day after you quit, your blood is going to have levels of carbon monoxide that are near normal.

Now keep it up for a couple of months and see how it feels as you get an increase in the function of your lungs. You might start feeling faint from surprise, but it won’t be because you can’t even walk up a flight of stairs without feeling like you are going to pass out from the effort. Also as a result of quitting smoking, you are going to find that you are going to have better blood circulation and blood flow from the heart – and with that you are decreasing your risk of having heart disease or a stroke.

Quit smoking today and make it for a couple of months, and hopefully you are on your way to quitting smoking for good – let’s project what you have to look forward to.

Stop smoking for nine months and you are really going to start noticing the benefits as you find you are choking and hacking as much, and you are even able to take deep breaths. Your lungs are now able to function effectively, as your smoker’s lungs and destroyed cilia have regenerated. And besides breathing better, the cilia can now work to keep debris out of your lungs and nasal cavities, and as result reduce the risk of infections.

Quitting smoking has a major impact on your lungs, but it has a similar effect on your heart – did you know that after you have quit smoking for a year that you have cut your risk of heart disease in half?

Stop smoking for a year is a massive accomplishment – now let’s push it to five years, to a decade, to the rest of your life. Death from lung cancer has been cut enormously, as has other types of related cancers like throat and mouth. You have also dramatically reduced your risk of heart disease and stroke.

Congratulations, you quit smoking today and it is going to last forever. And what is your prize – just your life, and a long and healthy one.

Quit smoking today is something that all smokers want to do and have even tried to do, but for so many it just doesn’t seem possible. Quit smoking today and wonderful things are going to happen – come to Quit Smoking Today to learn how http://www.quitsmokingtodayaids.com/

Quit smoking today, quit smoking for good and have a happier and healthier life because of it.

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Sudarshan Kriya is a breathing method that just may help you quit smoking. A smoker might have started smoking for different reasons, some of which are obvious and some not so obvious. The obvious ones could range from today’s favourite word ‘stress’ to the slightly more subtle ‘peer pressure’. The less obvious ones could range from a bad home situation like divorce or parents who have no time for their kids. But one of today’s best reasons to smoke is sheer intellectual pleasure that gives the smoker some time off from life- a break from reality and even the space to explore the less mundane questions of life.

So what if it is really that easy? What if all your beliefs about how hard it is going to be to quit are completely false? What if, after just one session of hypnotherapy or NLP you find it incredibly easy to become and remain a happy, confident non-smoker for life?The reason why hypnotherapy & NLP are so successful is because both our beliefs about smoking and our habitual smoking behaviours reside within your unconscious mind. So whilst consciously we may wish to quit, all too often our all powerful unconscious mind simply would not let us.

But soon it becomes an addiction like sex. Once anyone’s tasted the pleasure, it’s hard to come off it. Even if the smoker knows it’s ‘bad for health’, what with the mouth cancer pictures staring up from the pack, most smokers would rather debate for hours on end the various intellectual, emotional benefits of smoking. At the end of it, they might even agree to concede that smoking might be bad for health, but then again it’s one life and we’re going to die someday, how does it matter how! Oh come on! Didn’t it take the scientific world a decade to even slightly prove that tobacco is harmful to the lungs?

So quitting might be difficult if the smoker is in that frame of the mind. But it is quite possible if he has accepted that it is a bad idea and wants to quit. There are several resources to prevent smoking from making one kick the bucket fast and painfully, at that. What might be useful is to know that there are other avenues that provide an equal, if not much better high through other, way more wholesome options like the Sudarshan Kriya. It’s a rhythmic breathing technique that energises the body, rids it of the toxins, and more importantly keeps helps the breather reach the same high that smokers love about cigarettes, or anyone who smokes pot or gets high from alcohol attains. Call it smoking without smokes if you like.

The Sudarshan Kriya also drastically reduces the free radical levels in the body. Free radicals are negatively charged ions of certain elements that are always present in the body and the atmosphere… The free radicals are inevitably produced in the body as part of its metabolism, while junk food, pollution and the like increase the free radical levels in the body. These free radicals are also known to be responsible to cause lifestyle related diseases like cancer.

The first stage begins with the relaxation of the throat and sternum. Try to concentrate on the inhalation and exhalation of breath, through rhythmic slow breathing. Ensure that the time for inhalation and exhalation is about the same. A cycle is one inhalation, followed by one exhalation. After 20 cycles of stage one, you are ready for the next stage of the Kriya.

The second stage begins with normal inhalation followed by deep exhalation. Here, exhalation lasts for a longer time than inhalation. Be aware that the sternum and the rest of the body including the back have to remain as relaxed as possible. Complete 20 cycles of stage two, slowly and rhythmically.

As you move into the third stage, deep inhalation is followed by normal exhalation. Inhalation takes a longer time than exhalation, within a cycle. The same cautions as second stage apply. Complete 20 cycles of stage three, slowly and rhythmically. Go into the last stage with deep inhalation followed by deep exhalation. The time for inhalation and exhalation is about the same. This is done for 20 cycles also.

There’s always this doubt on whether it’s possible to stick to doing these techniques everyday. That’s why it’s a good idea to rope in some friends who want to quit smoking too. It keeps the motivation levels high and also it feels much easier to do these things in a group- the spirit of companionship always helps.

One very important word to delete from the daily dictionary during this time is ‘forever’. That is the whole point of quitting. But the presence of ‘forever’ will only be a constant burden at the back of the mind. This leaves a constant lingering doubt that might trigger another spate of smoking. It becomes much easier to take a sabbatical from smoking for a period of time that seems doable, starting out with small portions, say a week and gradually building up to a month or a few months. That keeps the confidence going. It’s also easier to abstain for smaller periods initially, until the body (and the mind), get used to the idea.

Also during this period, it turns out that it’s very essential to drink loads of water and fresh juice, maybe a dash of herbal tea or coconut water, if it works for you. The fluids help flush out the toxins released by the tobacco and related chemicals and completely throw out the toxins released by the breathing techniques. Staying away from coffee, tea and junk helps keep the weight down during this period. That’s because the decrease in nicotine slows down the metabolism, and caffeine and junk food will only add to the body weight at this time. Besides, fresh food feels lighter and fresher.

I suggest you visit http://www.artofliving.org and http://www.artofliving.org/art-living-part-i-course-art-breathing to more information.

Try the Sudarshan Kriya method of breathing and see if it helps you in your quitting smoking plans.

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