What is the quitting smoking timeline?  What happens after you quit smoking and how fast does your body start to heal from the damage that was caused from smoking?

Within a few minutes to a few hours, your heart rate will straighten out, because smoking a single cigarette will cause your pulse to increase by up to 10 beats per minute.

After just a single day of not smoking, your risk of heart attack is already decreasing.

Within just 2 days, you can start to taste and smell things much better than when you were smoking.  Food will start tasting much better, and you will eat more of it.

Within just a few weeks to a few months, your ability to exercise effectively returns.  The shortness of breath that came from smoking will be gone.  This is amazing and it happens very quickly!

After a full year, your risk of heart attack and heart disease drop down to about half that of a non smoker.  You still have a ways to go but you are in much better shape at this point.

After 5 years, 10 years, and 15 years, your risk of lung cancer and death from smoking starts to significantly drop and it actually gets back to the level of a nonsmoker when you get to the 15 year mark.

So what does this mean for you? Well, if you are a smoker, then you should seriously think about quitting, because you can enjoy all of these health benefits and a lot more if you quit today.  The days will add up quickly and your health returns very fast.

One thing that is not on this quit smoking timeline is the idea of money or time spent smoking.  The average smoker will save around $1,500 dollars every single year after they quit smoking.  This is actually only a minor cost compared to the savings in medical costs that they will experience as well if they quit now.  Continue to smoke, and your total expenses for something like cancer or heart disease can total several hundred thousand dollars over your whole lifetime.

The other major factor is the time spent smoking cigarettes.  How much time do you spend actually puffing on cigarettes?  Most smokers who smoke a pack a day or more spend almost a full month out of each year actually smoking cigarettes.  This is an atrocious figure and if you can reclaim your health from quitting smoking then you will also reclaim this lost time and be happier and more productive for it.

So what happens when you stop smoking cigarettes?  One of the first things that happens is that your body starts to slowly cry out for more nicotine.  It is used to getting a fairly regular injection of fresh nicotine, about every hour, so after you go past that point your body will let you know about it.  Go too far past that point and your body will really get cranky with you and start letting you know for real that it is going into serious withdrawal.

And of course all sorts of health benefits start kicking in right away.  Your heart rate returns to normal very quickly, within a matter of hours, because smoking a single cigarette will cause it to jump by approximately ten beats per minute.  In other words, smoking makes your heart race a little, and after you quit, it returns to normal fairly fast.

You know those little hairs that line your throat and help to move the food along, called cilia?  Well, smoking kills those things completely.  When you quit smoking, the start to grow back a few days later.  Normally, if you are a smoker, the smoke just kills them again and prevents them from ever growing.

And of course, you know how, as a smoker, you always seem to be out of breath?  Like if you are walking a long way through the city, or you have to walk up a steep hill, and you get to the top and suddenly you realize that you are panting quite a bit?  Well, that goes away too after you quit smoking, usually after only a month or two.  In other words, you “get your wind back.”  The fancy term is “lung function returns to normal.”

Of course, the benefits of quitting go beyond your health systems.  For example, most people start accumulating extra savings the moment that they quit smoking, usually to the tune of around 100 bucks per month.  This all depends on how much they spend on cigarettes of course.  An extra $100 per month can make a real difference these days.

And here is another shocker that I can never pass up: those who smoke a little over a pack a day, they gain an entire month of extra time each year from quitting smoking.  Most people are like “what?”  What this means is that the average smoker spends an entire month out of each year actually puffing away on the cigarettes themselves.  That is a lot of extra time you will get back!

Everyone has probably seen the quit smoking timeline that shows how your health improves at various points after quitting smoking.  They say things like “At 24 hours after you quit, taste buds start to regrow and you cough less” or “at 1 to 3 months after quitting, you can walk easier and breathe easier during exercise,” and so on.  They go on to say that your chances of lung cancer and other diseases drops to that of a non smoker after a certain number of years, like 10 or 15 or something.

But even thought we all want the health benefits of quitting smoking to become real for us, we also need other things to help motivate us.  For example, let’s take a look at the financial timeline for quitting smoking.  If you smoke a pack a day, and you pay about 4 bucks per pack, then that is just under $1,500 saved in the first year alone!

Over ten years of having quit smoking, that equates to just under $15,000 dollars!  That is a quite a lot of money…it sure adds up, doesn’t it?

But let’s consider another factor on the quit smoking time line: hours spent actually puffing on cigarettes.  Most people do not consider this when they think about their smoking or when they think about quitting cigarettes.

Here is the mind blowing statistic: if you smoke just one pack of cigarettes per day, and you are an average smoker in terms of how fast you actually smoke an individual cigarette, then you spend just under an entire month out of every year engaged in the act of smoking.  Almost a full month.  This is just crazy.  Think of how much time you are wasting out of your life, when you could be doing other things every day and getting way more stuff done.  Instead, you have to take time out constantly in order to smoke.  Not only that, but it interrupts your work flow in some cases and costs you even more time, because you are penalized in some tasks when having to stop and then start back up again.  It is a huge inconvenience that is multiplied a thousand times over throughout your life.  Wasted time, wasted productivity, and a lower quality of life.  Less time spent doing the things that really matter, and more time spent smoking cigarettes.

So if you quit smoking, you will gain back almost an entire month out of every year in free time.  Talk about experiencing a whole new freedom….

So you want to know what some smoking side effects are?  Well let’s start with some interesting ones that you might not have heard of.

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you and nothing could really be more boring than going over the physiological changes that occur from smoking.  Yes, it messes up your blood pressure, it increases your heart rate in the short term, blah blah blah.  No one cares, and we all know that it is bad for you.

So let’s consider some side effects from smoking that you might not have considered:

1) The average smoker spends almost a full month out of every year actually engaged in the act of smoking.

Holy crap!  That should be a real eye opener for you.  Can you imagine how much time you are wasting out of your life?  Almost an entire month out of the year is spent in the physical act of puffing on a cigarette.  This is for a pack-a-day smoker who chiefs them down at an average rate.

This has got to make you stop and think.  What if you did something else with that 1 month out of every year…think you could be a bit more productive with your time if you gave up smoking?

This has got to be the most under realized side effect of smoking: wasted time.

2) Money

Everyone knows that smoking costs big money, right?  Of course it all adds up, but most are not figuring in the total cost to their pocketbook if they continue to smoke until they fall ill due to cigarettes.  If that is the case then the cost of smoking becomes astronomical, as you have to figure in your health expenses.

I have been quit now for 3 years and 11 months and at $3.50 per pack that is a savings of over 6 thousand dollars, just on the smokes alone.  But remember, the actual money for the cigarettes is just one piece of the puzzle, the extra sick days you have to take, the missed work, the cost of cancer treatment….it all adds up eventually.

3) Social stigma

You probably feel this every once in a while if you are a smoker, and it will probably only continue to get worse, as smoking becomes slowly less acceptable in our society.  It may not be fair and it may not be right, but it is the way things are heading.  If you are still smoking then you are the outcast, and everyone casts a strange look at you when you go out to get your fix.

What happens when you quit smoking is that your body starts to heal in a million different ways.  We have all seen the charts and the statistics about how after one hour without a cigarette, your heart rate returns to normal, and then after one day without a cigarette, your throat starts to heal and your lungs get a bit better in some small way, and so on.  There is a huge list that goes on and on and shows that all of these different symptoms of the body start to heal and improve over time when you quit smoking.

Even more remarkable are the stats on smoking related diseases in regards to those time lines.  After a certain number of years, your risk of developing the different forms of cancer keep decreasing until they reach the same level of a non-smoker.  Pretty cool stuff, and pretty motivating too.

You should use this information to help motivate you to quit.  Go find the chart and print it out and post it on your wall.  Then quit smoking.  When you get to each milestone on the chart, you should highlight it and read it to yourself and know that you are receiving those benefits.  So if the chart says “within one week, the tiny hairs in your throat that move mucous start to grow back,” then you can walk around that day and tell people “Hey guess what?  The tiny hairs in my throat that push mucous around are starting to grow back today!”  And they will say “Oh really?  That’s great!”  It is the little things like this that will get you excited about quitting smoking and help keep you motivated.

What really happens when you quit smoking cigarettes is that you start battling a mental war against a constant onslaught of triggers.  What happens is that you feel the need to smoke in situations where you used to always smoke.  So when you get in the car to drive to work, you will want to light up.  And when you finish a huge meal, you will want to smoke then too.  You have to deal with every trigger situation a couple of times before you retrain your brain to realize that you are no longer going to give it nicotine in these situations.  Until your brain figures that you, you will suffer from pretty severe urges to smoke in a lot of these different situations.

There are so many different smoking facts gathered about so many aspects of smoking that it could boggle the mind. Did you know that one cigarette takes 11 minutes off your life and that if you smoke 25 cigarettes a day you are about 25 times more apt to die from cancer? These two scary facts are not even a drop in the bucket of things that cigarettes can do to your health. There are thousands of toxic chemicals and carcinogens in the smoke from a cigarette. These toxins:

· Increase the chances of all kinds of cancer like leukemia, bladder cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, cervical cancer, stomach cancer, esophageal cancer, and more.
· Drastically increase the chances of a stroke
· Cause hardening of the arteries that is a direct link to heart disease.

From a health perspective there are dozens of frightening statistics about smoking. These are just a few.

· Diseases caused by smoking claim four million people every year.
· One-half of people who smoke for a long time will die from some smoking-related illness.
· Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer.
· Smoking kills more people every year that AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse, homicides, car accidents, and suicide combined.
· People who smoke generally die about 10 or 12 years younger than those who don’t.
· Approximately 35,000 non-smokers are killed each year from heart disease connected to second-hand smoke.
· Seventeen thousand children under the age of five are admitted to the hospital annually because of the effects of second-hand smoke.
· Over $160 billion is spent each year on medical costs for smoking conditions and lost productivity from smoke-related illnesses.

Here’s a big fact that cannot be ignored. Smoking is the most preventable cause of death in the world.

It may seem that over the last several years more and more people have been getting smart and quitting. But it also seems that for everyone that quits, another person starts smoking. Far too often these new smokers are teenagers. The tobacco industry is enormous:

· They pay about $5.7 million a year for advertising.
· Approximately 15 billion cigarettes are sold every day, which comes out to be 273.75 packs a year.

These facts listed above are only a short list of smoking statistics. Add in the effects of smoking on pregnant women, the fact that women are more adversely affected by smoking than men, and the list would never end.