I came across blogger Therese Borchard’s personal -and very powerful- list of reasons to quit smoking. It is so good that I am posting it here in it’s entirety.

"You’re almost there. You want to quit. In fact, 80 percent of your brain is sure you can. But 20 percent insists that you can’t. How do you make it over to the other side without falling SPLAT on your face?

Do this. Make a list. Of ten reasons you should quit.

Here’s mine.

1. Smoking Made Me Sick

For real. Within a few minutes of inhaling a few cigarettes, my throat would start to tickle and my head would begin hurt. The day after a binge, I’d wake up with a nasty cold that kept me in bed when I had a million things to do.

Smoking shrinks your blood vessels, clogs up your lungs, and wears down your immune system. Your body is less able to fight off bacteria and viruses, so, yes, you get sick. And there’s of course the lung cancer and increased chances of heart attack, stroke, and other serious health conditions.

2. My Husband Told Me I Smelled

He didn’t issue an ultimatum: “It’s either me or the lung rockets.”
But he did, one night right after we had sex, say, “You smell like smoke. And it’s not sexy.” I could have, theoretically, told him to visit a place where there are no lemonade stands. But I knew he was just being honest with me, and that I needed to file that information in the “reasons I should quit” box.

3. I Wanted to Set a Good Example for My Kids

I got tired of hiding it from them. It was getting complicated. I rationalized that smoking in front of 11-month-old Katherine was okay because she would never remember it and she would be unable to tell on me. But three-year-old David could very well process it and file the picture (and definitely debrief the rest of the house on the white candy sticks). It was too much of a risk. One day I finally said to myself, “Self, if it’s so important to hide this habit from my kids, shouldn’t I quit?” And there was silence.

4. I Looked Stupid Lighting Up After a Run

You can picture it, right? Here I was working so hard on my wellness
program: eating lots of greens, loading up on Omega-3 fatty acids, trying to get adequate sleep, meditating, and of course exercising five times a week. So when I’d light up after a good run, you can imagine the stares. The snapshot was like a Sesame Street episode where you have to pick out one thing that doesn’t belong in the picture. That one thing was the white stick.

5. It Sent the Wrong Message

A few months after college graduation, when I was working at my first job, my mom told me to dress for the position that I wanted… to send the subtle but effective messages whenever possible. Her wisdom translated to smoking breaks. By going out of the building for a few puffs with some co-workers, I was sending a very direct message, and not the right one. So much for the nice suit.

6. I Ran Out of Money

You’ve probably tallied it up, and it kills you, doesn’t it? Knowing how much cash you are squandering for your fix? An average pack of cigs costs about $4.50 today. Let’s say you smoke a pack a day. You’re throwing out $135 a month, and $1620 a year. It’s a bloody expensive habit. I started to see it as babysitting money. And then it hit me. I’d much rather get a sitter and go out to a nice dinner than to be a slave to the white sticks.

7. It Made Me Depressed

Given my delicate biochemistry, I need to avoid all foods, drinks, or chemicals that make me depressed. That’s essentially why I eliminated booze from my life. It’s a depressant: my hangovers involved more than a headache. Smoking cigarettes can also increase the chance of developing depression. By a whopping 41 percent, according to a new study from the University of Navarra in Spain and the Harvard School of Public Health. Researchers discovered there was a direct correlation between smoking and depression among the 8,556 participants.

8. It Was Bad for My Image

I realize I’m not the perfect poster girl for mental health, but I do like to practice what I preach. So if I’m writing about my addictions with a cigarette in one hand and a brandy in the other–all while dispensing smart advice on how you all can break free of your habits–I’m going to feel like a mongo hypocrite. And that creates stress, which is bad for my mental health. So, for as long as I’m in the business of writing mental health material, I need to keep a sort-of clean image.

9. It Looks Ugly

I will always remember the sight at this elegant wedding I attended of a gorgeous bride with a cigarette in her mouth. Take away the white stick, and she could have posed for the magazine of her choice. She was petite and exquisite. Add the lung rocket, and she looked, well, like she had just been dropped off on a motorcycle to her nuptial vows. It was just not a good look at all. Not in anyway. And I started to think to myself, “Yipes. Is that what I look like when I’m smoking?”

10. I Wanted to Be Free

All addictions enslave you. They place you on their schedule, and you have no say in the matter. If you miss your afternoon smoke break, you are a wreck by the evening. There is not much you can do. You grow irritable. You need your fix. NOW.

I don’t like belonging to anyone. Marriage has been a hard enough transition for me. I like to make my own rules. When I want. How I want. So because of that, I had to bid adios to my inflexible friend, to the addiction that wouldn’t let me determine what I did with my afternoon."

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Smoking persists as a major risk factor for death from heart disease and cancer in adults who already have heart disease and receive good medical therapy, according to research reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Current smokers more than doubled their risk of death from heart disease and cancer and all causes in the three-year study period. Current smokers also were at increased risk of heart attack and stroke compared to former smokers and nonsmokers.

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The more movie scenes of smoking they watch, the more likely Mexican-American youths are to experiment with smoking, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Dartmouth College report in the December issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The three-year prospective study of 1,286 Mexican-American adolescents showed the percentage of new experimenters increased from about 5 percent among those with little or no exposure to nearly 30 percent for those who saw up to 600 smoking scenes. The effect was dose-dependent, with experimentation linearly correlated with movie exposure.

"We suspect the greater impact among Mexican-born might occur because movie-viewing is part of the socialization process for those not born here,” said lead author Anna Wilkinson, Ph.D., assistant professor in M. D. Anderson’s Department of Epidemiology in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences.

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Check out these 40 amazing and very creative Stop Smoking Ads here

What do you think?

"Both of my parents were smokers and both of them eventually died from it, but, since my mother was, throughout my childhood until I was 16 years old, an old-fashioned 1950’s style "stay at home" mom, my strongest memories, the ones forged in early childhood, are of her and her smoking more than of my father’s.

Possibly even before, because the other sense which is considered to be strongly associative is the sense of taste and, since I was breast fed for the first few months of my life, (though, because my mother stopped producing milk when I was 8 months old, probably because of her smoking, I was given a bottle which I promptly rejected and began sucking my thumb - a habit which continued throughout my life until I started smoking!) I probably absorbed the taste of nicotine from her very body as an infant and so, when I tried smoking for the first time, the taste and the sensation instantly found a very old neural pathway and dug in"…

Read the entire powerful story here

If smoking wasn’t bad enough for you already, it looks like there may be another good reason to quit smoking, as it seems that Apple have refused to repair a broken Mac because it shows signs of smoke.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out, and if Apple ends up fixing any of these machines in the future.

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Smoking bans are spreading from planes, trains and buses to another from of transit: rental cars

Beginning Oct. 1, Avis and Budget became the first major rental-car companies to ban smoking in their entire North American fleets and to impose a cleaning fee of up to $250 on customers who smoke in the cars.

"The No. 1 request we get is for a smoke-free car," says John Barrows, spokesman of the Avis Budget Group, the parent company. He says a common customer complaint is a car that smells of smoke, adding, "We’re addressing both concerns."

Secondhand smoke is significantly more concentrated in cars than it is in bars, restaurants and other public places, according to a study released last month by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Here’s an item that you shouldn’t include in your ever-growing arsenal of electronic devices, including cellphones, iPods, PDAs, GPS trackers and laptops: the e-cigarette. The Food and Drug Administration today released an analysis of 19 varieties of electronic cigarettes that says that half contained nitrosamines (the same carcinogen found in real cigarettes) and that many contained diethylene glycol, the poisonous ingredient in antifreeze. Some that claimed to have no nicotine were found to have low levels of the drug.

E-cigarettes are promoted by their manufacturers as safer than traditional cigarettes because they do not burn tobacco. Instead, a lithium battery in the cigarette-shaped device heats a solution of nicotine in propylene glycol, producing a fine mist that can be inhaled to deliver nicotine directly to the lungs. An LED glows red at the tip and they even emit puffs of white smoke similar to that seen in stage shows. The devices are available in more than 4,000 retail outlets nationwide, as well as on many websites, with a starting cost of $40 to $70. Over the last year, sales have grown from about $10 million to $100 million, according to the Electronic Cigarette Assn., the industry’s trade group. They also come in a variety of flavors, including chocolate, mint and apple, which make them appealing to children and adolescents.

Most of the e-cigarettes are produced in China, where they have become very popular. The varieties tested by FDA, however, were produced by Smoking Everywhere, a Florida company, and Njoy Cigarettes of Scottsdale, Ariz. In a telephone news conference, agency officials said "quality control processes used to manufacture these products are inconsistent or nonexistent."

They have become very controversial. Some countries, like Australia, have banned them because their health risks are unknown. Action on Smoking and Health, an anti-tobacco group headed by activist John Banzhaf, has petitioned the FDA to regulate the products and Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) has called on the agency to remove them from the market immediately, a call that has been echoed by the American Heart Assn., the American Lung Assn. and other groups.

Even though the e-cigarettes are marketed as healthy, critics charge that the delivery of nicotine directly to the lungs speeds its passage to the brain, enhancing the drug’s addictive properties. Critics also said the devices are appealing to the young and could serve as a learning aid to promote smoking of actual cigarettes. Stop-smoking experts say the devices are not useful for ending cigarette addiction because they do nothing to interrupt the hand-to-mouth behavior that is an integral part of the habit.

For its part, the FDA has classified e-cigarettes as a drug delivery device, which subjects them to regulation and requires proof of safety. The agency has been examining and detaining the product at the border, halting more than 50 shipments, but has not taken any steps to remove it from the U.S. market. The FDA has been sued by manufacturers that say the agency has no jurisdiction over the device because it is not marketed as a stop-smoking aid.

The discovery of carcinogens and toxins in at least two products may encourage the FDA to step up its actions against manufacturers. The agency, however, has not said whether it will move against the makers of the tested products.

"Electronic cigarettes should be absolutely avoided because they clearly have toxic elements," said Dr. Jonathan Whiteson, a pulmonologist at New York University Langone Medical Center. "It is proven now that electronic cigarettes contain toxic elements. Electronic cigarettes play no role in smoking cessation and don’t add to a healthier lifestyle."

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Yesterday, I gave you the American Lung Association’s annual list of grades for each state’s commitment to smoke free air and smoking bans.

Today, let’s look at the specifics for the 10 largest cities in California, by population.

Oakland received an overall grade of B for its policies. Los Angeles and San Francisco earned an overall grade of C.

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The American Lung Association graded the states’ commitment levels to smoking bans and cigarette taxes in its annual ‘State of Tobacco Control’.

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