Most smokers wish that they would enjoy immediate restoration of their health when they shake off their tobacco dependence. Unfortunately, this is not exactly what happens after you quit smoking.
Your body has been conditioned by years and years of smoking and has literally depended on nicotine for sustenance. Naturally, it might take a while before it acclimatizes itself to the healthier you. Here are the real facts as to what happens after you quit smoking.
The Good
The minute that you stop reaching for the cigarette, your body starts to repair itself, one cell at a time. If you continue to refrain from smoking 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. That 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 fibers 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.
The Bad
Some people relapse into the habit again because of the seemingly bad consequences of quitting the cigarette. For one thing, there is always the withdrawal period where the body craves and craves for the 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 withdrawal symptoms are heavily dependent on the person’s current state of health and for how long he or she has 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 as heck. It will take a few weeks or months to get your body to produce normal levels of insulin and glucose.