Commit to Quit and Stop Smoking

Quitting smoking is difficult, sometimes it seems impossible. Smoking causes so much pain in so many people's lives. It causes pain in the life of the smoker, as well as the people who love them and want so desperately to see them free from the nicotine addiction.

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An Introduction to Commit to Quit Smoking

Hi there!  My name is Mark Bankemper and I’d like to talk to you today and tell you more about my history of smoking cigarettes and my experiences with quitting.  I also want to tell you about my very personal reasons for developing our Commit to Quit Smoking program.  Please visit: http://www.committoquitsmoking.com to watch the video or read the transcript.

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How Do Nicotine Replacement Medications Work?

Nicotine is the highly addictive ingredient in cigarette smoke. It has some negative health effects due to its stimulating effect on the heart, but most of the bad effects of cigarette smoke comes from the chemicals released by burning tobacco.

Nicotine replacement therapy feeds your nicotine addiction without the other negative side effects of smoking.  After using these products for about a month, you slowly taper yourself off the nicotine, which minimizes the quit smoking withdrawal symptoms while detoxing the nicotine from your system.

Nicotine from these products is released into the bloodstream much more slowly than nicotine from cigarette smoke, making it less addictive than cigarettes and less difficult to stop using.

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Can Vitamin B6 Prevent Lung Cancer in Smokers?

Researchers at the International Agency for Research on Cancer compared the levels of vitamin B6 in the blood of people with and without lung cancer.

Those who had higher levels of vitamin B6 in the blood had lower rates of lung cancer. In fact, the risk of developing lung cancer in these people was about 60% lower!

Astoundingly, they found that smokers with high vitamin B6 levels also show a 60% reduction in risk for developing lung cancer!

Similar results were found for ex-smokers and non-smokers.

Note that smokers still have a much higher risk of developing lung cancer than non-smokers, whether or not they have higher vitamin B6 levels or not.

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Taking Chantix One Month Before Quitting Smoking Improves Quit Rate

A new study published in the April 2011 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that taking the prescription medication Chantix, or varenicline, for 4 weeks instead of 1 week before quitting smoking can more than double your chances of quitting.

Current dosing of Chantix includes a 1 week “preloading” period to build up the medication in the body before the actual quit date.

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Smoking Addiction - Take The Quiz

How many of these questions do you relate to?  

Have you ever felt the need to Cut down on your smoking?

Have people Annoyed you by criticizing your smoking?

Have you ever felt Guilty about your smoking?

Have you ever felt that you needed to smoke first thing in the morning (an Eye-opener) to face the day?

If you answered two or more of these questions with “yes,” then you may have a strong addiction to cigarettes.  The more questions that you answer “yes” to, the more difficult it will probably be to quit smoking.

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WHERE WOULD YOU MOST LIKE TO VISIT ON YOUR PLANET?

China

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Quit Smoking: Raises HDL Cholesterol

From the “Yet Another Reason To Quit Smoking” department, a recent study published in the American Heart Journal showed that smokers who quit experience on average a rise in HDL cholesterol of about 5%.  The effect was slightly stronger in women.

HDL cholesterol is the “good” cholesterol that helps to clear the heart-attack causing plaques from the coronary artery walls.  So raising the HDL should help to lower the risk of heart disease by reducing the plaque buildup in the heart.

LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, was unchanged upon quitting smoking.  Study participants who quit smoking did gain some weight on average.  This weight gain may have stunted the effect of quitting on cholesterol.

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The Cost of Cigarettes

Every smoker complains about the price of cigarettes and they are getting costlier. It's time to quit smoking.

They are taxed heavily, yet Big Tobacco still makes a boatload of money every day off of them.  Philip Morris alone posted over 6 BILLION dollars in profit in 2009.

You’d think it would be difficult to make so much money when your product helps kills so many of the people who use it, but I guess when your product is as addictive as nicotine, you can make it work to your advantage.