Smack-the-Smoke...!!!

1^st of all let me say … I do not smoke…!!! 

You may ask...Why not…??? If more than a billion people on this green-planet can be active smokers (Honestly, again, I do not know whether there exist a class called active smokers... I just used it for the sake of my own convenience) & rather enjoy the same... then why not me…???

Well I guess, it is just because, Smoking does not thrill me & drive me… As simple as that…!!!

Now anyone out there may ask me, “Buddy… if you had not yet tasted cigarette even once, then how can you possibly judge “smoking”…??? Well… to them I may say “Is it necessary to drink heavy poison to know the fact that ‘Poison Kills’…???

One strange thing I always noticed about ‘Smokers’ is that, they learn very early to put up a mental wall of denial between the habit of smoking and the harsh reality of the damages this habit inflict upon themselves with every cigarette being smoked & the kind of excuses with which they come up to justify the act.

As a matter of fact it is true that the inhaled smoke of nicotine may provide them a certain level of comfort. And that may be the reason we are being told about the efforts of reducing the number of cigarette consumption & there is always a room for quitting when they really want. Also that cancer doesn’t run in their family. These kind of excuses support the framework of their wall of denial for years & years. 

Eventually though, most smokers find that the wall begins to crumble, and bit by bit, smoking becomes a fearful, anxious activity. This is when most smokers start seriously thinking about how they might find a way to quit smoking for good. 

A crucial step in the recovery process from nicotine addiction involves breaking through that wall of denial to put smoking in the proper light. We need to learn to see our cigarettes not as the friend or buddy we can't live without, but as the horrific killers they truly are. 

If you're thinking that it's time to quit smoking, or have just quit and need some motivation to keep going, use the smoking facts below to fuel the fire in your belly that will help you beat your smoking habit, once and for all.

Believe me when I tell you… Cigarettes aren’t worth enough to die for…!!!

Tobacco offers us a life of slavery, a host of chronic, debilitating illnesses and ultimately death. And think about it: We pay big bucks for those "benefits”… Indeed it is Sad, but true.

Smoking Facts & Tobacco Statistics:

1) There are 1.1 billion smokers in the world today, and if current trends continue, that number is expected to increase to 1.6 billion by the year 2025.

2) China is home to 300 million smokers who consume approximately 1.7 trillion cigarettes a year, or 3 million cigarettes a minute.

3) Worldwide, approximately 10 million cigarettes are purchased a minute, 15 billion are sold each day, and upwards of 5 trillion are produced and used on an annual basis.

4) Five trillion cigarette filters weigh approximately 2 billion pounds.

5) It's estimated that trillions of filters, filled with toxic chemicals from tobacco smoke, make their way into our environment as discarded waste yearly.

6) While they may look like white cotton, cigarette filters are made of very thin fibers of a plastic called cellulose acetate. A cigarette filter can take between 18 months and 10 years to decompose.

7) A typical manufactured cigarette contains approximately 8 or 9 milligrams of nicotine, while the nicotine content of a cigar is 100 to 200 milligrams, with some as high as 400 milligrams.

8) There is enough nicotine in four or five cigarettes to kill an average adult if ingested whole. Most smokers take in only one or two milligrams of nicotine per cigarette however, with the remainder being burned off.

9) Ambergris, otherwise known as ‘whale vomit’ is one of the hundreds of possible additives used in manufactured cigarettes.

10) ‘Benzene’ is a known cause of acute myeloid leukemia, and cigarette smoke is a major source of benzene exposure. Among U.S. smokers, 90 percent of benzene exposures come from cigarettes.

11) Radioactive lead and polonium are both present in low levels in cigarette smoke.

12) ‘Hydrogen cyanide’, one of the toxic byproducts present in cigarette smoke, was used as a genocidal chemical agent during World War II.

13) Secondhand smoke contains more than 50 cancer-causing chemical compounds, 11 of which are known to be ‘Group 1 carcinogens’.

14) The smoke from a smoldering cigarette often contains higher concentrations of the toxins found in cigarette smoke than exhaled smoke does.

15) Kids are still picking up smoking at the alarming rate of 3,000 a day in the U.S., and 80,000 to 100,000 a day worldwide.

16) Worldwide, one in five teens age 13 to 15 smoke cigarettes.

17) Approximately one quarter of the youth alive in the Western Pacific Region (East Asia and the Pacific) today will die from tobacco use.

18) Half of all long-term smokers will die a tobacco-related death.

19) Every eight seconds, a human life is lost to tobacco use somewhere in the world. That translates to approximately 5 million deaths annually.

20) Tobacco use is expected to claim one billion lives this century unless serious anti-smoking efforts are made on a global level.

Take your life back..!!!

If you're a smoker wishing you could quit, make your mind up to dig your heels in and do the work necessary to get this monkey off your back now. You'll never regret it.  

The “Quit Smoking” Revolution

I’m really not sure why i termed this post as a revolution. Probably i feel that such campaigns will bring a revolution in the world and make it a better place to live in, eventually.

Anyways, you might have noticed on my blog that the whole blog is about me. The niche/subjects everything has to do with me or things that I own or admire. Probably that keeps my blog as original as one can be. However there is one thing that i received today in an email that i would like to share with you...!!!
***[I am not sure about the copyrights of the following images and the source of these pics as they were sent via an email. Of course copyrights of the images below belong to their respective owners and I have no intentions to misuse them at all and I do respect owners’ decision if they want to get them deleted from the following gallery.

I will probably post this as a public service message. And of course it will be a constant boost to myself & others for the motivation and determination because the end results are terrible.
So here are some of the images as pictures speak a 1000 times better than words.]

Last but not the least, I will end this looooooooooong post (rather boring for many) with the below 7 more reasons to quit Smoking.

The younger generations, think of smoking as part of being cool. While some believe that smoking adds appeal to a man's rogue effect, women who smoke are regarded as sophisticated. Not all can have the same opinion to these, yet one thing is quite agreeable, that smoking can be very bad for the body's physical features. Smoking can robe a person's good looks and youth. Smoking may cause the following:

Dry and fragile skin: Smoking reduces the water content of the skin’s outer layer.

Wrinkles around the nose and mouth: Chemicals is cigarette such as nicotine, carbon monoxide, tar and lead reduce blood flow to the skin, reducing circulating of oxygen and break down the skin’s collagen and elastin.

Risk of Psoriasis: Psoriasis is a disease that causes red scaly patches to appear on the skin. It can be usually seen in the skin of the elbows and knees, but can also affect any area including the scalp and genitals. Studies reveal that the risk of psoriasis was 37% higher among past smokers and 78% higher among current smokers.

Skin cancer: Smokers are more than three times more likely to develop squamous cell carcinoma of the skin than non-smokers. Smoking induces skin cancer by holding back the immune system. And patients with suppressed immune systems are more susceptible to squamous cell carcinoma in many locations, including the skin.

Hair loss: Hair is able to grow because of hair follicles. The dermal papilla, which are near the bottom of hair follicles, are responsible for creating new cells. The new cells shove themselves upward, moving the old cells upward. When the cells reach the middle of the hair follicle, they die out and become hard. They become the central core of the hair follicle and afterward, become the new hair shaft. Smoking prevents dermal papilla from growing. This hinders the hair  from growing.

Yellow teeth: Nicotine and tar leaves a sticky residue on the teeth. Even with one inhalation of cigarette smoke, stains are left behind. There are brands of cigarettes that contain more nicotine and tar than the others. The higher the ratio of nicotine and tar, the more the teeth will be stained by the cigarette.

Yellow nails: Tar and nicotine are also the components of cigarette that cause yellow fingernails. These two stain the fingernails and the skin surrounding the fingers that hold the cigarette.

So there is nothing cool about smoking. It can definitely rob one's youth and beauty:

P.S.: if anyone out there who read all the above & continued with the habit of smoking, to them I wish to say:

"Mate... Let the GOD himself protect you & bless you".