Stop Smoking 101 - What Happens After You Quit Smoking

Most smokers who plan to quit smoking wish that they will get an immediate restoration of health when they shake off their tobacco dependence. However, this is not exactly what happens after you quit smoking.

Your body has been conditioned by years and years of smoking to literally depend on nicotine for sustenance. Naturally, it might take a while before it acclimatizes itself to a healthier you. Here are the real facts as to what happens after you quit smoking.

Within 24 Hours

The minute that you stop reaching for the cigarette, your body starts to repair itself, one cell at a time. In fact, your heart rate drops about twenty minutes after your last cigarette. About half a day later, the carbon monoxide level in your blood would return to normal.

Within 3 Months

If you continue such a treatment for the next few weeks, you will notice that you can actually smell things better. Smoking has a way of desensitizing your sense of smell, dulling it so that you yourself do not know how awful the stench of exhaled smoke is.

With that you can also breathe deeper, and can now distinguish between lung filling breath and diaphragm filling breath. This is something which you could not achieve during your smoking days. This is due to the fact that the cells of your lungs are knitting themselves up to pre-smoking conditions. Airways are becoming more open to non-nicotine laced breaths, capillaries become less constrained and the cilia or the hair-like fibres surrounding the respiratory organs begin to grow again.

Also, your blood pressure will show dramatic reduction as well as your body temperature. It is said that the moment you stop smoking, you decrease your chances of both a heart attack and stroke by almost 50%. Finally, after only a few months of not smoking, your taste buds would have fully recovered, and this will finally allow you to taste food as it is. When a person smokes, his taste buds become numbed with the nicotine. Losing your sense of smell during this time also contributes to the loss of your taste buds.

Within 1 Year

Your reward after a year without smoking is that your coughing and shortness of breath will be a thing of the past. At the same time, your risk of cancer and other smoking-related diseases will decrease and will continue as long as you keep your distance away from cigarettes.

Now The Bad News

Some people relapse into the habit again because of the seemingly negative consequences of quitting smoking. For one thing, there is always the withdrawal period where the body craves for nicotine. Some symptoms of nicotine withdrawal are dryness of the throat, excessive coughing, shaking (particularly of the hands), alternate periods of extreme chilling and sweating, and more.

Some quit smoking withdrawal symptoms are heavily dependent on your current state of health and for how long you have been addicted to smoking. There are some people who have even claimed to experience regular bouts of lethargy and compulsion to eat excessively. This is because nicotine has the tendency to excite some cells of the body into repressing the normal insulin and glucose production.

If you remove the nicotine from the equation, these cells go on hyper drive, producing both insulin and glucose to a level that is above normal. This makes you feel both deprived of energy at all times, but hungry at the same time. It will take a few weeks or months to get your body to produce normal levels of insulin and glucose.

Now that you know what happens after you quit smoking, you should be better prepared for the symptoms and as such, stand a better chance of quitting. After all, the benefits of not smoking far out weigh the cost of smoking.

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