You Can Quit Smoking

This site is designed to show you how to quit smoking ... and to help make you a whole new person who is determined to live life to the fullest.

It requires a lot of courage and will power to accept that you have a habit that has to be changed. You ought to feel very good about yourself. It is no easy task to accept one's weaknesses.

Most of us know that smoking is a very unhealthy habit; but we are sometimes inclined to view the problem lightly. The World Health Organization has been studying smoking trends and statistical patterns across the globe, and has come up with the following statistics:

• Most smokers begin early in life, before they are 25 years old. According to World Health Organization studies, the majority of smokers in affluent countries begin in their teens. A decline in the age of starting smoking has been observed worldwide.
• As a would-be ex-smoker, you're in excellent company. People all over the world are trying to quit. There appears to be a correlation between a country's standard of living, level of education, and income on the one hand, and the number of people who have stopped smoking on the other. The more educated and better informed people are, the more likely they are to stop smoking.

Current estimates are that over 1 billion people in the world smoke. In other words, approximately one in three adults on the planet smokes. The total number of smokers worldwide is expected to keep increasing.

In the United States, an estimated 25.6 million men (25.2 percent) and 22.6 million women (20.7 percent) are smokers. These people are at higher risk of heart attack and stroke.

And These Figures Spell Death...

The figures of National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics show:

• One out of every five deaths is caused by tobacco.
• An average of 400,000 Americans die each year from tobacco.
• Tobacco is to blame for many serious pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases.
• Tobacco and nicotine are some of the most potent carcinogens, and are to blame for a majority of all cancers of the lung, trachea, bronchus, larynx, and oesophagus.
• Tobacco use also produces cancers in the pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix.
• Impotence is sometimes attributable to nicotine addiction (because of the propensity of nicotine to reduce blood flow).
• Smoking is an important risk factor for respiratory illnesses, causing 85,000 deaths per year from pulmonary diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and pneumonia.
• Children and adolescents who are active smokers will have increasingly severe respiratory illness as they grow older.
• Smoking during pregnancy causes about 5-6% of prenatal deaths, 17-26% of low-birth-weight births, and 7-10% of pre-term deliveries, and it increases the risk of miscarriage and foetal growth retardation.
• Cigarettes are responsible for about 25% of deaths from residential fires, causing nearly 1,000 fire-related deaths and 3,300 injuries each year

The next section is: Why We Smoke