What To Expect When You Quit Smoking: What You Must Know Before You Stop Smoking

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

Quitting a life long addiction like smoking can both be a boon and a bane, especially to the person who is trying to kick the nicotine habit. Most people will state the benefits when they tell you what to expect what you quit smoking.

However, I think this has been over-emphasized. You need to know that your body can go through some negative consequences too. This is because the same way that your body had to acclimatize to the sudden introduction and consequent use of tobacco in your everyday routine, it now has to acclimatize to its sudden or gradual removal as well.

Here are a few of the negative physiological changes that you can expect when you quit smoking.

The Physical Banes Of Nicotine Rehabilitation

Your body actually starts the healing process within 20 minutes after you put out your last cigarette. The self-healing process will be more noticeable to a person who has chain-smoked for a long time, especially if he or she has never gone for more than a few minutes without taking a puff.

Unfortunately, the healing process is hidden by the quit smoking withdrawal symptoms. The moment when the extreme craving sets in, and you do not give in to that pressure, your body shakes from the sudden dropping of the glucose levels in your blood. This also makes you either salivate a lot or feel unbearably hunger.

Increase of Appetite

In many cases, you may even experience both. Nicotine in your bloodstream usually affects the cells that help produce glucose in your body, actually suppressing them. This is the reason why some smokers would rather light up than eat, since nicotine (quite literally) robs the body of a healthy eating appetite. Once the nicotine is gone, the cells that produce glucose go on hyper speed production.

This is also precisely the reason why many people who has managed to kick the habit find themselves gaining weight a few months after being smoke-free. However, this is only a temporary phase. Given the right guidance, a person can finally achieve a glucose level plateau that can be managed.

Coughing

Fits of coughing and difficulty in breathing are also common signs of the withdrawal symptoms. We all know that smoking damages the lungs first and foremost. The moment you stop smoking though, the cells of your lungs start to perform the gargantuan task of knitting the damaged soft tissues.

Unlike a bridge under construction, you really cannot close off a section of your lungs while it repairs itself. So yes, the fits of coughing and the difficulty in breathing will continue all throughout the nicotine rehabilitation.

You see, nicotine actually deadens the cilia of the lungs. Cilia are the hair-like fibers surrounding the entire respiratory organ. These are actually the first internal line of defense that our lungs rely on to ward away the toxins in the air we breathe.

Unfortunately, smoking is a continuous and deadly process of actually breathing in the toxic substance called nicotine. The fits of coughing are one of the visible signs of the body expelling the toxins we breathe in.

Naturally, since our lungs are already damaged, we find ourselves having great difficulty in breathing. This becomes especially hard during rehab since now the lungs are performing 2 tasks all at once. Breathing for you through damaged “equipment” and healing that “equipment” at the same time.

However, given a few months, those breaths will become deeper and your smelling buds will have developed again, enabling you to take the first deep, untainted breaths possible. Within a year, your risk of having a heart attack will be halved. And if you stay away from cigarettes for fifteen years, you risk of having heart disease will be equivalent to that of a non-smoker.

Now that you know what to expect what you quit smoking, you can be better prepared to enjoy a smoother quit smoking journey. Visit my Tips To Quit Smoking blog at www.tipstoquitsmoking.net for tricks that you can use to make your smoking cessation process more painless and effortless. Also be sure to download your free report on The Truth About Smoking while you are there.

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