Lung Detoxification

A New Year Is A Great Opportunity

I know it sounds a bit clichéd, but the New Year really is a great opportunity to start doing something positive to help YOU – and quite possibly your loved ones – live longer, better, and more comfortably.  Some people might turn their noses up at a New Year’s Resolution, especially one made in a drunken stupor at ten seconds to midnight on Dec 31, but… if you take it seriously, and understand that there are many others out there doing the same thing (striving to improve themselves), then you won’t feel so alone in this effort.  Also, we as humans often need some sort of point to know when to start things.  New Years is often a good opportunity for this; a New Year, a new calendar, and often time off work, giving you the opportunity to read, learn and start preparing for your healthy change from a clean slate!

I am certainly making some Resolutions and sticking to them.  What about you?

Resolve To Make A Change

Change is often considered quite hard, but the fact is that change is one of the few true constants in our lives.  We keep getting older, people come and go, we change jobs, roles, clothes, even cells in our bodies – every day.  Change is always there, so we might as well embrace it, and make it work FOR us for a change! Yes OK, that is a rather circular statement – but it’s very fitting.

Change comes in two main flavors, like most things; positive and negative.  Negative change tends to happen regardless after we hit our mid 20’s; we get older, our bodies tend to become less highly-tuned, and we have to work harder to maintain them.   We have to put the effort in to effect positive change. It is always hard to star these thingst; there is a theory floating around that every person has an ‘activation energy’ to start something – akin to reaching the motivation needed to start on a new activity or course in your life.  This is always the hardest part; actually starting.  However once you get started, it gets easier.  You still need to focus on it, but it does come more readily as you go along.  Look back at all the skills you have mastered during your life so far, a common example is driving.  It was hard at first to learn, but eventually you did, and as you got better at it, it got easier.  Making a Resolution and following it is much the same.  Get past the start, and you’ll be well on your way, but that’s not all there is to know.

Knowledge Is Power

There is no truer statement.  Know what you are doing and prepare well before you start, and your chances of success skyrocket.  That is what our flagship product, The Complete Lung Detoxification Guide Series is all about; giving you the knowledge you need, and the preparation tips to maximize your chances of success with a straightforward lung detox, or a quit program and lung detox.  It’s all included.

Now the Guides themselves contain a wealth of information for you to utilize to make your Lung Detox quick and highly successful (several months rather than up to 10 years), as well as a mass of Quitting smoking help, Stress Reduction tips, and Motivation methods that should hold you in good stead as you make a grand, positive change in your life.  However, there are two new angles we are covering with our updates based on user feedback:

1. We have added in a raft of worksheets, designed to help tailor your Lung Detox to your own situation.  We have included a ton of information in the Guides, not all of which will be relevant to your specific situation.  The worksheets will help you discover which ones will work best for you, and guide you on your personalized path to Lung Health.
   
2. Some users have said there is so much good stuff in the Guide they were not sure where to begin!  Fair comment, so in the update we’re including a Step-by-step Success Guide/Wall Planner, that will help you draw the information from the four Guides together and make it work for you, with a minimum of fuss.

These are really exciting editions, and we know you’ll get a lot out of them.

6 More Days!

We are closing in on the release of the updated Guides for 2011!  Over the first six days of the New Year, we’ll have a series of New Year’s Resolution Lung Detox posts, all related to the new release and to starting the adventure to a healthier new you.  Check back tomorrow for the first topic in the series; Your Quit Date – Why It’s Important To Get It Right!

Until tomorrow,

Happy New Year, stay well, stay quit, and lung-toxin free.

William Renolds

I have some good news. Firstly, it was announced this week in the Australian Herald Sun that researchers at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, have made a breakthrough in lung cancer research. They have identified a gene that makes squamous cell lung cancer tumors (that account for 30 – 40% of all lung cancers) grow and spread. From this discovery, they are working on a pill that will be trialed in humans next year (2011).

Associate Professor Gavin Wright, lead researcher of the team that is responsible for the discovery, has said…

This is possibly the most significant finding in lung cancer, full stop. The drug, which would be taken daily as a pill, could be standard treatment within three years. Hormones bind to a receptor on the FGFR-1 gene in the cancer cell, making the tumour multiply and spread around the body. If we block the FGFR-1 receptor on the cancer cell, it undergoes the normal programmed death that tired or diseased cells are supposed to.

Two drugs, which in the past had not been identified as useful, have now been shown to block the gene. The drugs have been shown to cause squamous cell lung cancers in mice to disappear in early trials. Human trials will be held in Melbourne at St Vincent’s and at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, Germany. So if you are near either of these two places, and have been diagnosed with squamous cell lung cancer, you could do a lot worse than see if you can get into the trials.

This is indeed good news for some cancer suffers, however, here at lungdetoxification.com we are hoping you never get to the stage of needing these sorts of drugs. So to make it even easier for you to follow our comprehensive program for quitting and detoxifying your lungs, removing damaging tar and built up toxins from smoking so you considerably reduce your chances of developing cancer, we are adding new components to our product. This will initially be at no extra charge, and will help you with motivation to ‘stay the course’ of quitting and lung detox, and will make it even easier for you to follow the comprehensive information in our Guides.

So stay tuned to the blog, as I’ll be introducing you to the new additions to our product in the lead up to the New Year.

Until next time,

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

William Renolds

Sleep is supposed to take up one third of our lives, but for most of us, this isn’t nearly the case.  It is also known as the third pillar of good health, along with the right food (in the right quantities) and regular exercise.  But how many of us really think about getting enough good sleep, and do you have any idea how lack of sleep (known as a sleep debt) can not only reduce your chances of a successful quit attempt, but also a successful Lung Detox?  After reading this, you might just turn out that light a bit earlier and sleep a bit more regularly!

What Does Sleep Really Do For Us Anyway?

Sleep is important not only for your mind, but your body too.  While you sleep, your brain goes over the stronger memories of your day, reinforcing them and then shuffling them from short term to long term memory.  This is why when someone is tortured using sleep deprivation, they often have little clear recollection of that time, as they didn’t have the sleep to lay down the memories into long term storage.  For the average person, 8 hours is the optimal sleeping period.  That is made up of 3 hours of light sleep – where your mind sorts through the day’s recollections in short term memory – three hours of deep sleep – where the ‘important’ memories are shaped and then moved to long term memory – and 2 hours of dreaming – where your mind is trying to ‘sort out problems you’ve had during the day’ for you.   This, of course, isn’t always obvious, because the subconscious works quite differently from the conscious, logical mind.

While the brain is sorting all that memory stuff out, the body is also very busy.  It is digesting, storing energy (in the form of fat), increasing muscle mass (if your muscles have been challenged during the day) and your immune system is busy, protecting and repairing your body.  This is very important for a Lung Detox, as your immune system plays a central role in clearing your lungs.  Without enough good sleep, the detox will simply take longer, or, in the worst of cases, may not work at all.

So If We Don’t Get Enough Good Sleep, What Effects Does It Have?

A recent study of a man who was trying to get by on 3 hours sleep a night showed up some rather startling effects after just a few days.

He was a 15 year martial artist, third dan black belt, and he said after 3 days he was making beginner mistakes (co-ordination and memory problems), and when he was thrown, the room kept spinning (balance problems).

In a driving test, he was unable to properly react to surprises (drop in reflexes), and often unable to make a quick decision when he’d previously been told what to do.  He was also monitored to have had over 60 (!!!)  micro-sleeps (those momentary losses of consciousness that can kill on long trips) during the driving test, many of which were while he was waiting for instructions.

In memory and comprehension tests, he failed almost every time.

On doing blood tests on this daring man, it was found that:

• His insulin production had dropped by half!  This is the same level as pre-diabetes (Type II).
• His levels of PYY production (the gut hormone that makes you feel full/sated) were down by 40%.  This suggests a link between sleep debt and overeating.
• His immune function had also dropped by 50%!  This is the big one, because it opens a sleep deprived person up to infection.  It is also reduces his ability to clean and repair his organs, and this is especially important during a Lung Detox.

So clearly, good sleep is very important.  So how do we get the good sleep we need?

Make Your Sleep Good Sleep & Pay Back That Sleep Debt!

There are a few important points to consider when making your sleep count towards your good health, and a successful Lung Detox. 

 

1. If you have a sleep debt, you need to pay the bank!  All those short nights cannot be replaced by caffeine.  You need to make up the sleep, by sleeping more than an 8 hour night.  Just try this.  Put down the TV remote, or turn off the PC, and get 9 hours sleep a night for a whole week.  C’mon, you can do it.  It’s just a bit of TV, or that game or Facebook you can catch up on later.  Just get that sleep debt leveled off a bit.  You’ll be amazed by the difference it makes in how you feel every day.  You’ll be more productive, clearer thinking, and happier!
2. Work out your sleep cycle and then stick to it.  Not everyone works on a 2 x 4 (=8) hour cycle.  Even if you spend 8 hours in bed a night, it might not be working quite right for you.  When your life is in a position where there are few outside distractions to getting a good night’s sleep, try adding an hour, or taking one away, and over the course of a week, see if you feel better when you awake and through the day.  Play around with the times, adding or removing half an hour until you work out your optimal sleep time.  Once you have it, get it regularly and you’ll be well on the way to having good sleep.
3. Stop concentrating hard at least an hour before you plan to go to bed.  It is important to wind your mind down before settling down in bed.  This should help you get off to sleep a lot easier.  Also, if you’ve had a rough day and are feeling stressed, or you have a lot of unanswered questions running around in your mind, this can also stop you getting off to sleep.  So distract yourself with something light and totally uninvolved in your day to day.  Novels, documentaries on TV, some form of light entertainment that you don’t need to concentrate too hard on.  If that doesn’t work, try meditation or other mind calming techniques.
4. Get some exercise in the late afternoon/early evening.  Just a little exercise near the end of the daylight hours can really help your ability to sleep.  Likewise, exercise early in the day can help you lose weight more effectively.
5. Keep the lights low in the house of an evening. Many people don’t think of this, but all the artificial light we bathe ourselves in once the sun goes down can have a drastic effect on our sleep cycles.  If you use bright halogen lamps at home in the evening, this strong light can actually reset your sleep cycle, and mess up your circadian rhythm!  So keep the lights low after dinner, and you’ll find sleep a lot easier to find each night.

By following these few simple recommendations, you can greatly improve the quality and regularity of your sleep.  Also, keeping stress levels manageable will also greatly improve your sleep.  By sleeping well, and by realizing that stressing does more damage to you than it contributes to solving your problems, you’ll be healthier, and have a more successful Lung Detox.

A successful Lung Detox starts with the right program.  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 (and sleep better at night for it!).

Until next time,

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

William Renolds

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

The good news is medical researchers are always trying to find new ways to fix damage we’ve done to our bodies.  Bad news is, it takes a lot of money, and even more time, to make new treatments a reality for the general public.  That being said, the recent announcement of a breakthrough stem cell treatment that has helped repair lung tissue damage in mice is a great step forward.  But it’s only one step in the long journey to fixing damaged lungs.

As reported in the prestigious American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a newly found type of placental human stem cell (that is, basal human cells that are not yet fixed into a particular role) have been shown to help reduce injury and scarring in the lung, and even generate new lung cells in mice. Associate Professor Yuben Moodley, of the Lung Institute of Western Australia, and the lead researcher on the project, has been quoted as saying that:

“cellular therapies, although in the early stages of development, may form a vital part of future lifesaving treatment. The big advantage is that we can get these cells from placentas that have been delivered and would otherwise be discarded, so there are no ethical issues involved. What we’re trying to do is replace any damaged cells in the lungs so the progression of the disease is arrested and there is also some suggestion that some cells acquire lung-like properties which we’d like to investigate more.”

Good news, but don’t hold your breath (pardon the pun) for this treatment for repairing lungs, as it’s at least five years off, if not more.

So far, they’ve only successfully treated mice.  The humble rodent is a good test subject to ‘get the treatment right’ before testing it on people, but still there are differences between us and mice that may affect how well the treatment works.  Going on what information I’ve been able to gather on the research, it’s very early days yet, and they are still learning about the effects of the stem cell treatment, so it could be a good few years before human trials might begin.  Once that happens, the powers that be will decide if the effects of the treatment make it worthwhile, and then there is the cost of the treatment.  Will it be covered by your countries health service, if you are lucky enough to have one?  Could you afford to pay up-front for it?

So don’t think you’ll be lining up for this sometime next week.  It will be a long time, if at all (some of these research streams don’t pan out, after all).  That said, there are some things you can do to increase your chances of being around for this future lung repair treatment. Quitting smoking if you haven’t, staying smoke-free and then detoxifying your lungs are important steps to your future longevity.

Consider our product, The Complete Lung Detoxification Guide Series, as not only a course of treatment to improve your lung health, but to extend your life, weather you’ve been a smoker for a few years, or a few decades.  At less than the price of a carton of cigarettes, can you afford not to give it a try?

Until next time,

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

William Renolds