Lung Detoxification

So many people think of quitting smoking as a negative experience: dealing with cravings, fighting the habitual smoking action, adjusting your life to a different way to cope with stress, and then there’s the Tar.  It’s not something you think a lot about when you’re still smoking – it’s often no more than an inconvenience.  Brown on your fingers, teeth, and the odd bit of brown stuff in the phlegm you cough up every morning, but other than that, Tar doesn’t seem to bother you so much… or does it?

Some Facts About Tar

You see the thing is, you have a ‘secret stash’ of Tar deep in your lungs while you continue to smoke, which may have built up to truly frightening levels over years of smoking.  It’s down there in the bottom of your lungs, dark brown or black, mixed up with thick phlegm and sticky as sin, full off thousands of toxic chemicals and damaging your body with every day that goes by. Tar makes it hard for you to breathe, hardening your lung tissues to make it more difficult for you to draw breath.  Along with thick heavy phlegm (produced in reaction to irritation of your airways by smoke, known as Chronic Bronchitis), the Tar fills up a lot of the space in the alveoli – air sacks at the edges of your lungs were gas exchange takes place.  Toxins in the Tar leach out into your lung tissue and then into the rest of your body, damaging almost every part of your person and greatly increasing the risk of cancer.
Basically, you have a toxic time bomb in your lungs, and you definitely don’t want that in there!

A Common Experience

Here at lungdetoxification.com we get regular letters from users of our products, concerned when Tar starts coming away from a recent ex-smokers lungs.  Here an example:

Dear William and Mark,
I’ve been using The Complete Lung Detoxification Guide for several weeks now, and I’m concerned with the quantity and color of the mucus I’ve been regularly coughing up.  It’s thick and black, and it’s been coming up for nearly two weeks now.
My questions are, is this normal (I’m not dying, am I?!?), and how much longer will it go on?
On the up side, I am breathing a bit easier, and my chest feels a bit freer after doing the exercises you outline, so things are improving daily.
Regards,
John Coast
Miami, FL

The really important point with this experience, which is shared by most ex-smokers is, you are definitely NOT dying, it’s quite the opposite in fact. You are beginning to LIVE again! That black gunk in the mucus is Tar, the stuff I talked about earlier that you definitely WANT out of your lungs ASAP!  That’s what a good Lung Detox is all about.  Removing those toxins from your lungs, and allowing your body to function properly again.

Speaking Of Functioning Properly Again…

You know why your lungs don’t eject all this trapped mucus and Tar until you quit smoking?  Because toxins in the cigarette smoke paralyze and sometimes destroy small hairs on the inner surface of your lungs which are the lungs natural cleaning system.  Once you quit, they start to regrow and reactivate, sluggishly coming to life to start moving that vile gunk out of your airways.  Problem is, this can take up to 10 (!) years when your body is not fortified or helped in any way with this task.  You don’t want Tar hanging around in your lungs for nearly a decade after you quit; you want to get it out of there as quickly as possible, because each and every day it’s still in there,  your chances of cancer stay up, and a whole bunch of other diseases are continuing to damage your body, even though you’ve quit smoking.

So that’s why a good, well planned and well executed Lung Detoxification Program is vitally important to get you on the road to health as quickly as possible.  You owe it to yourself to give a Lung Detox a try after quitting smoking, as smoking cessation is only half the answer to improving your health.  Try our Complete Lung Detoxification Guide series for the most in depth, comprehensive Lung Detox available today.  Get that Tar out of your lungs fast, and live healthy sooner.

Until next time,

stay well, stay quit, and lung-toxin free.

William Renolds

WNTD stands for World No Tobacco Day, which is celebrated around the world on May 31^st every year.  It was first suggested by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1987, when the World Health Assembly passed resolution WHA40.38 calling for April 7, 1988, the 40^th anniversary of the WHO, to be “a world no-smoking day.”  In 1988, Resolution WHA42.19 was passed, calling for the celebration of World No Tobacco Day, every year on May 31^st.  Since then, the WHO has supported WNTD every year, with each year linked to a different ‘ills of tobacco’ related theme. This year, the theme is ‘Gender and tobacco with an emphasis of marketing to women.’

Women Are Being Targeted By Tobacco Companies!

According to the WHO, women constitute one of the biggest ‘targets of opportunity’ for cigarette companies today.  The tobacco industry is constantly and aggressively looking to replace lost users – be they lost due to quitting or the half of all smokers alive today who will die from smoking related diseases.  Currently fewer woman than men smoke or chew tobacco.  Of the world’s over 1 billion smokers, only about 200 million are women!  With women, the industry simply has more room to expand.  And while tobacco use amongst men in some countries is slowly decreasing, use amongst women is similarly increasing.

The following are some frightening statistics.  Currently, over five million people a year die from tobacco related illnesses (but that won’t be you, because you’re doing something about it, right?).  Of that five million, currently one and a half million are women. Worldwide, of the roughly 430 000 adult deaths caused yearly by second-hand smoke, about 64% occur in women.   With less than 9% of the world’s population being covered by comprehensive tobacco advertising bans, and only 5.4% covered by comprehensive national smoke-free laws, that leaves a lot of young women to be bombarded by tobacco advertising, without the benefit of equivalent awareness campaigns on the damage and harmful effects of tobacco products.

To quote the WHO:  “World No Tobacco Day 2010 focuses on the harm which tobacco marketing and smoke do to women. At the same time, it seeks to make men more aware of their responsibility to avoid smoking around the women with whom they live and work.”

So what does this mean for you?  Well I make the presumption that if you are reading this blog post, you’re either are smoker, and ex-smoker looking to reverse damage done to your lungs, or perhaps you are a family member or a friend of a smoker or ex-smoker you are wishing to help.  Tobacco and its ills have affected all our lives. World No Tobacco Day seeks to promote a possible future where every day is a no tobacco day. That what we here at lundetoxification.com want for everyone who visits this site with the aim to give up and get their lungs clean; a long, happy lifetime of no tobacco.

Now the WHO suggests that you abstain from smoking on May 31^st.  I think this is a laudable goal.  Even choosing WNTD as your quit day is very symbolic, but seeing it’s less than 24 hrs away for most of us, and as good preparation is key to a successful quit attempt, let me suggest and alternative.  If you are a smoker, wishing to quit and stay free of the ills of tobacco, why not spend a few hours on WNTD looking for ways to support your quit program.  You can abstain from smoking too, but you need to prepare, possibly for weeks before quitting, so keep that in mind before going cold turkey tomorrow.  And for those of you who have quit and are looking to help repair damage to their lungs, do your research on how to help this course of action on WNTD.  Wherever you are on your journey to better health, pass on what you have learned to those that are likewise working towards better health.  By supporting each other on the lung health trail, we’ll all get to where we want to be sooner, and all live longer, healthier lives.

One great resource for not only quitting, but making every day a ‘no tobacco day’ is The Complete Lung Detoxification Guide. We have information on the physical and the psychological sides of tobacco dependence, the importance of stress management, using positive forward projection to keep the goal of optimal lung health in mind at those weak moments, and a plethora of tips and methods to get your lungs free of the ills of tar far quicker than your body can manage on its own.  You owe it to yourself, on World No Tobacco Day, to check it out.

Until next time,

stay well, stay quit, and lung-toxin free,

oh and happy World No Tobacco Day!

William Renolds

I am sure that 99.9% of attempts to stop smoking cigarettes – successful or not – start with a negative emotion. “What the hell am I doing to myself?” “These things are gonna kill me, I gotta give ‘em up.” “Damn it was hard to walk up those stairs. I can barely breathe. I gotta quit the cigs.” Or something similar. Be it a revelation of lung damage, an angry vow, or a significant other’s ultimatum, nearly all decisions to quit and clean up your health focus on the negative aspects of nicotine dependence. Just look at the advertisements on TV; they are designed to scare you into quitting, no two ways about it.

Now don’t get me wrong; you need that critical impetus to quit and clean up your health. Sad thing is, most of us react more strongly in avoidance than we do to the draw of things that are good for us. That’s just human thinking. But if you make that negative, avoidance imperative your only motivation to quit, you are most likely doomed to failure. Why? Well it’s pretty obvious when you look at it.

Motivation fuel

When you try to motivate yourself to do something to improve your health, you are trying to enact a positive change. If you feed a positive change with negative fuel – such as all the doom and gloom of Chronic Bronchitis, Emphysema, COPD and Cancer, it’s like putting the wrong sort of fuel in your car. It’ll go for a little while, but then it’ll seize. That’s what happens when you go back to smoking. Your Motivation Engine chokes and dies.

You need the right motivation fuel to keep you motivated, and that’s where Positive Forward Projection and Positive Mental Conditioning come in to play to help you stop smoking cigarettes.

Positive Forward Projection

To really keep the revs up in your Motivation Engine, you need good, positive fuel. One of the best positive fuels there is lies in Positive Forward Projection. You need to think of the goal in what you are doing, in this case giving up cigarettes forever, detoxing your lungs and being healthier, feeling better and living longer. All these outcomes are highly positive, really enjoyable, and what you actually want. These are the fuel you need to put into your motivation engine when you feel your power to stay off the cigarettes flagging – you know, those times when you are stressed, tired, pushed to your limits, and the siren song of the cigarettes is calling. You need to FOCUS on the positive outcomes of staying the course. You need to be AWARE that this is important, and KEEP DOING IT, no matter what. THAT is how you stay clear of the cancer sticks, and THAT is how you don’t fall into the tired/stressed/weak – need the comfort of cigarettes.

It’s sad but true that you actually use a limited form of positive forward projection to push yourself back towards nicotine dependence. When you are feeling tired, stressed and weak, you look at the comforting effects of your nicotine fix, focus on that, and ignore all the good reasons not to start puffing again. DON’T DO THIS. The price of that small puff of comfort is all the stuff you got angry about before you quit! Focus on the long term goal – health and long life. Be there for you kids, your partner – current or future – and stay the course. Something else that will help in this is general and targeted Positive Mental Conditioning.

Positive Mental Conditioning

Did you know that you are Mentally Conditioned every day? No? Well you are. We all are. It’s just those that REALIZE it is happening have the ability to do something about it. Sad thing is, most of it is negative. Advertising especially is guilty of this. They use repetitive mental conditioning to get you to buy stuff. But you can use Positive Mental Conditioning on yourself to improve your chances of staying quit and successfully cleaning your lungs. Positive Mental Conditioning can put you in a far more positive frame of mind. And when you are looking for the positive in your life, you find it. It also make it much easier for you to focus on your Positive Forward Projection.

So, a positive attitude is key to stop smoking cigarettes successfully, and following through on a full lung detox. If you spend the time getting in the right frame of mind before your quit day, you more than quadruple your chances of quitting smoking successfully and successfully detoxing your lungs. This is so important, that it’s one of the first things we say in each and every booklet of the Complete Lung Detoxification Guides series, and we have a whole booklet that gives you techniques to get positive and stay that way. Why don’t you head over to the sales page and check it out? It could be the most positive turning point in your life yet.

Until next time,

Stay well, stay quit, and lung-toxin free.

~William Renolds