Immediately after quitting smoking, heart rate and blood pressure, which is abnormally high while smoking, begin to return to normal.
Within a few hours, the level of carbon monoxide, which reduces the blood’s ability to carry oxygen, begins to decline.
Within a few weeks, food tastes better, and your sense of smell returns to normal.
Circulation improves, you don’t produce as much phlegm, and you don’t cough or wheeze as often.
The workload on the heart is decreased and cardiac function improves.
Within several months of quitting, you experience significant improvements in lung function.
In one year, your risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke is cut in half.
In five years, many kinds of cancer, including lung, larynx, mouth, stomach, cervix, bladder, show decline in risk, and that decline approaches the risk of someone who has never smoked.
Within 10 to 15 years, risk of lung disease, including bronchitis and emphysema, are decreased.
Conditions such as cataracts, macular degeneration, thyroid conditions, hearing loss, dementia, and osteoporosis are positively affected.
Medications may work better, enabling some to be taken in decreased doses.
If you’re taking birth control pills, quitting smoking will decrease your chance of heart attack and stroke due to clotting.
You’ll have decreased risk for impotence and infertility.
If you’re pregnant, you’ll protect your unborn child from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and low birth weight.
Years will be added to your life: people who quit smoking, regardless of their age, are less likely than those who continue to smoke to die from smoking-related illness.