When can I expect to feel the benefits of quitting smoking?

Although it often takes several weeks to feel better, the benefits of not smoking start almost immediately. Within just twelve hours of quitting, the body begins to get younger. Carbon monoxide levels decrease, and the blood can carry more oxygen to the cells.

In only a few weeks, damaged nerve endings in the mouth and throat begin to regenerate, and the bronchial tubes begin to open. When the bronchial tubes start to open, coughing and clearing of secretions increases. You may feel as if you have a cold for as long as eight months after you stop, but it is really a sign that you are cleaning junk from your lungs.

Once you've gone two months without smoking, you can throw yourself a RealAge (physiologic age) year-younger party. Go ahead and have a real chocolate cake -- you'll see that it's already easier to blow out the candles. After five months, you reach the point where the nicotine cravings subside, and you start feeling substantially better overall.

(You no longer wonder if you are trying to fool yourself that you feel better; by five months, you are sure that you do feel -- and look -- younger.) The fact that your immune system is getting younger and more efficient will be evident in the fact that you'll probably be getting fewer colds and other kinds of respiratory tract infections. The RealAge gain: two years younger. Within eight months, your lungs will be clearer and your stamina greater.

After one year of not smoking, you will be three years younger. How's that for a wonderful gift to give yourself? In two years after you quit, your risk of having a heart attack and stroke will decrease considerably, and after five smoke-free years, your levels of arterial aging will return almost to the level of people who have never smoked.

The risk of developing cancer and other forms of immune system aging will equal the average risk of nonsmokers. Another way of saying it is this: If you give up a pack-a-day habit, you will become a year younger (and can celebrate year-younger parties) at two, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-two, thirty-two, and sixty months from the time you quit.

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