Using Detoxification to Help Your Body Heal after a Smoking Addiction
In This Chapter
▶ Identifying the toxins found in smoke
▶ Considering hypnosis and acupuncture for smoking cessation
▶ Sweating out the toxins that smoking puts in your body
▶ Using supplements to help your body undo the damages of smoking
▶ Watching your weight after quitting the habit
Want to shorten your lifespan, ruin your health, and pump yourself full of thousands of dangerous, harmful toxins? All you have to do is take a stroll down to the nearest gas station, pick up a pack of cigarettes, and light up. When it comes to introducing toxins into your body and degrading your health at a rapid rate, very few things can stack up with smoking.
Smoking is involved in one out of five deaths in the United States each year. Direct causes of death associated with smoking include emphysema, bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cancer. These are truly agonizing conditions, and they are awful ways to die. Smoking also decreases the amount of life you get to live before you’re faced with those sorts of awful diseases: On average, smokers die 13 to 14 years earlier than nonsmokers.
As a society, we pay a great price for the damages done to our fellow citizens by smoking. Medical expenses and time lost from work because of smoking cost us an estimated $193 billion every year. Imagine all the good we could do with that kind of money if we could somehow convince everyone to cut out the smoking habit.
I know you’ve probably heard plenty of statistics about the dangers of smoking, so I’ll stop there and let you know how I’d like to bring detoxification into the smoking conversation. After you’ve quit smoking, your body begins to heal itself almost immediately. You can do quite a lot of good for your body and make the process much easier if you embrace a few detoxification methods.
I have three goals in this chapter:
✓ To give you a very full picture of the amount and range of toxins that you put into your body when you smoke. I think it’s important for you to realize just how toxic smoking can be, so you can be even more motivated to quit if you’re a smoker now and even less likely to pick up smoking if you’re not a smoker.
✓ To explain two alternative methods for smoking cessation — acupuncture and hypnosis — that dovetail very nicely with a detoxification life-style.
✓ To present detoxification techniques that can be a boon for your body as it begins to heal and rebuild after a smoking addiction is defeated.
Before I get started, note that most of the details in this chapter apply to all types of smoking (cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and even secondhand smoke), and many are relevant for users of smokeless tobacco, too.
Realizing the Monumental Toxic Impact of Smoking
About 4,000 chemicals are present in cigarette smoke. As much as I’d like to list all of them here to really emphasize the dangers associated with smoking, I’m afraid I just don’t have the space. Instead, I cover a few of the main groups of toxins that enter your body when you inhale tobacco smoke, with the hope that even a small sampling will convince you that smoking is essentially the opposite of detoxification.
Carcinogens
Tobacco smoke contains more than 50 known carcinogens: chemicals that cause cancer. Fifty! The carcinogenic effect of smoke is so great that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has classified tobacco smoke as a group A carcinogen. (That’s the most dangerous group.)
What do all these carcinogens do? Well, back in 1964 the U.S. Surgeon General reported that smoking was causative in cancer of the lungs and the larynx (voice box). That was the beginning. Later, smoking was shown to be causative for cancers of the bladder, esophagus, mouth, and throat. The latest releases connect smoking to some kinds of leukemia, stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, cervical cancer, liver cancer, prostate cancer, and kidney cancer. (Smoking hasn’t been shown to be a primary cause in this last group, but it has a high association with these conditions. And let’s be honest: Would anyone really be surprised if smoking caused these conditions?)
Carbon monoxide
Carbon monoxide is a dangerous gas that can easily cause death if you’re exposed to enough of it. This gas is present in automobile exhaust and in many types of industrial waste. Carbon monoxide is particularly nasty for your health because it attaches to the red blood cells where oxygen is sup- posed to attach, and it does so about 200 times more effectively than oxygen.
In a heavy smoker, the oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells can be reduced as much as 15 percent by carbon monoxide. This is a significant reduction in the ability of your blood to carry oxygen to your tissues. Smoking really does suffocate every last corner of your body.
Nicotine
This toxin is the main cause of physical addiction to smoking. Nicotine does some strange, harmful things to your body, including the following:
✓ Constricting blood vessels
✓ Increasing blood pressure
✓ Decreasing blood flow
✓ Causing cold hands and feet
✓ Creating chest pain
✓ Stimulating the adrenal glands, which affects cardiovascular function
✓ Decreasing bicarbonate release from the pancreas, which slows digestion
✓ Making blood platelets more likely to clump, increasing the risk of clots
As you’d probably guess, none of these effects is positive or healthy for your body.
Other chemical toxins
Here’s a very quick look at just a few of the other chemical toxins lurking in cigarette smoke. All of them are toxic, some are thought to be carcinogenic, and many are very strong irritants:
✓ Acetone: A very strong irritant also found in fingernail polish remover and varnish remover.
✓ Acrolein: An extremely toxic chemical to the lungs.
✓ Ammonia: A strong irritant similar to the ammonia in cleaning fluids.
✓ Creosote: Used to treat railroad ties. It’s a toxic component of the tar in cigarette smoke.
✓ Hydrogen cyanide: A deadly toxic poison commonly used as a rat killer.
✓ Toluene: Very toxic and used to make paint and varnish remover.
✓ Vinyl chloride: Used to make vinyl. It causes dizziness, headaches, and fatigue, and long-term exposure can lead to cancer and liver damage.
This list really could go on for pages and pages. But isn’t the presence of just one of these materials in cigarette smoke enough to keep you from picking up a pack?
Heavy metals
The presence of heavy metal toxins in our environment is on the rise, and you certainly don’t need to add to the problem by smoking. Tobacco smoke is lousy with heavy metals, and the secondhand smoke that comes off the end of a lit cigarette (often called sidestream smoke) is particularly bad. For example, there’s six times as much cadmium — a dangerous heavy metal toxin — in sidestream smoke as in the smoke inhaled by a smoker.
Here are just a few examples of the heavy metals you can find in tobacco smoke:
✓ Arsenic: An extremely toxic, deadly poison.
✓ Cadmium: Often found in large amounts in cigarette smoke; shown to cause a variety of cancers.
✓ Lead: Highly toxic and present in almost all forms of tobacco smoke.
✓ Lead 210: A unique type of radioactive lead.
You need to be spending your time and efforts limiting your exposure to heavy metals and working to detoxify your body, not deliberately adding them to your lungs through smoking.
Choosing a Smoking Cessation Method
Ask anyone who has ever tried to stop smoking: A smoking addiction is one of the most difficult bad habits to quit. Statistics show that 70 percent of smokers want to quit, and 40 percent try to stop smoking every year. Eight out of ten smokers start the habit before they’re 18 years old, and 20 percent of high school students smoke. Starting at such an early age makes the actual habit of smoking very ingrained and even more difficult to kick.
The nicotine in tobacco smoke is extremely addictive on a physical level. It has a very significant effect on your brain, stimulating pleasure centers and increasing natural “feel good” chemicals like norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin. Nicotine also causes a release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands.
The physical aspects of smoking addiction are bad, but the mental and behavioral aspects can be just as troublesome. Many smokers associate having a cigarette with a time for relaxation and pleasure. They smoke during the good times in their day — maybe when they get off of work or after they eat a good meal. Or they make cigarettes part of several daily rituals like getting in the car, talking on the phone, and taking a coffee break. For these types of smokers, quitting is extra difficult because they associate smoking with so many different facets of their lives.
If you’re a smoker and you want to quit, you have lots of options, including the following:
✓ Quitting cold turkey: This method involves simply dropping the habit all at once, with no real planning or weaning of any kind. Research shows that quitting cold turkey is only about 5 percent effective.
✓ Using nicotine patches or gum: Many of these options started out as prescription only, but most are now available over the counter. The patches have shown a success rate of over 20 percent, but the gum is quite a bit less effective.
✓ Taking prescription drugs: A handful of prescription drugs for smoking cessation are on the market. Typically, I’m not a fan of turning to a pill to solve health problems. But in this case you have to weigh the potential benefits of quitting smoking against any ill effects from the prescription. Do some research and talk to your doctor if you’re interested.
These are some of the most common methods for kicking the smoking habit, but they’re certainly not your only choices. I devote the rest of this section to two smoking cessation techniques that often fly under the radar but happen to fit in very nicely with a detoxification lifestyle: hypnosis and acupuncture. Both are toxin-free, holistic methods for snuffing out the smoking habit. If you’re a smoker and you’re looking to quit, I recommend taking them into consideration.
Getting help from hypnosis
In 1958, the American Medical Association recognized hypnosis as an appropriate therapy for the treatment of smoking addiction. Since that time, a whole host of hypnosis methods has been developed to help people stop smoking. Many of the practitioners suggest that hypnosis can work for smoking cession because it enhances relaxation, motivation, and self control, which are all key factors for anyone who’s trying to stop smoking. Some practitioners use a posthypnotic suggestion to avoid cigarettes. Another method is to use hypnosis to replace the physical motion of reaching for a cigarette with another innocuous motion, such as squeezing your earlobe. I know that method may sound a little odd, but let’s face it: Squeezing your earlobe is quite a bit better for your health than inhaling about 50 known carcinogens several times a day.
The data collected on successful smoking cessation through hypnosis varies quite a bit, but most of the numbers point to a success rate of about 20 percent. Some individual practitioners claim much higher success rates, though — some as high as 90 percent.
If you’re a smoker and you’d like to really look into using hypnosis to curb the habit, the first step is finding the right practitioner. The key is network- ing. Start by asking your physician if she knows of a good option. Then ask your friends and family; you may be surprised who has received hypnotherapy before. There may also be a local or state society of hypnotherapy practitioners in your area, so do some online searching to find out. If such a society or organization exists in your area, contact the office and ask for a recommendation. And always evaluate several possibilities before making your choice.
Adding acupuncture to your toolbox
If you’re the kind of person who likes health and medical practices that have been around for a while, acupuncture just may be for you. The practice, which involves stimulating specific points on the body with long, thin, metal needles, has been around for about 5,000 years and has become a more and more popular method for smoking cessation in recent years.
The research on the benefits of acupuncture for quitting smoking is scattered and generally weak, so it’s tough to wrap any hard numbers around the potential for acupuncture in smoking cessation. I do think the practice has merit, though, and like so many of the other methods for kicking the smoking habit, it’s worth considering even if the success rates are fairly low, given the horrendous health effects that smoking causes.
If you want to look into visiting an acupuncturist for help with your smoking addiction, be sure you do lots of research before selecting a practitioner. The difference in the skills of individual practitioners is huge. Some have been trained by masters of this art for years and are very skilled. Unfortunately, others hang out a shingle after only a week-long course.
To be certain your acupuncturist is talented, practiced, and safe, flip back to Chapter 5 and read my suggestions for how to select an alternative practitioner. Focus on vetting credentials, speaking with current and past clients, and confirming affiliations with any trade organizations and other groups.
Sweating Out Cigarette Toxins
If you haven’t quit smoking yet, detoxing is crucial. Many of the toxins in ciga- rette smoke are fat-soluble, and one of the best ways to detoxify for fat-soluble toxins is sweating. (Read all about the detoxification benefits of sweating in Chapter 18.) If you’ve been a smoker for any extended period of time, you almost certainly have quite a large collection of toxins built up in your body’s fat cells. Those toxins are like a ticking bomb: It’s only a matter of time until they start fouling up your body’s important systems, if they haven’t already.
When you’ve finally snuffed out your last cigarette, you should immediately begin thinking about the ways you can increase the amount of sweating you do for detoxification purposes. That’s a surefire way to help your body get rid of the residual fat-soluble toxins that are still hanging around from your days as a smoker.
Sweating is a powerful means of detoxification. It has one-third the detoxification potential of your kidneys, which are world-class detoxification power- houses. Check out Chapter 18 for a rundown of how you can use sweating to ramp up the amount of toxins that you flush from your body.
Supplementing to Heal Your Body
Before or after you’ve stopped smoking, your body has to deal with the effects of all the toxins that you inhaled over the months or years you were a smoker. You can play an active role in that process by taking some of the following supplements:
✓ Glutathione is one of our body’s most important antioxidants, and it can help undo some of the damage that smoking did to your body after you’ve put down the pack. You can find glutathione as a supplement to be taken orally, and you can also boost its effect by pairing it with a melatonin supplement.
✓ Vitamin C is another extremely important antioxidant, and your body has to use a lot of it to thwart the damaging effects of smoking. It’s not uncommon for smokers to have very low levels of vitamin C in their bodies. If you’re trying to quit smoking or if you’ve already been suc- cessful in doing so, be sure you’re supplementing with lots and lots of vitamin C. You need at least 2,000 mg for good health, but don’t hesitate to ramp up your dose to 4,000 mg per day if you’ve recently stopped smoking. It’ll do quite a lot to help your body heal.
✓ Vitamin A, like vitamin C, is decreased by smoking, so vitamin A supplements are very useful for people who are trying to quit or those who have just kicked the habit.
✓ Green tea, grape seed extract, and tryptophan are all great for former smokers. All three supplements fortify the immune system and replace the important materials in your body that tobacco toxins deplete.
✓ Alpha-lipoic acid (ALA) deserves a special note. It supports liver function in an amazing way. Smoking puts an incredible toxic strain on the liver, so be sure to take an ALA supplement to help get your liver back in healthy working order.
Counting Calories after You Quit
Weight gain is a common side effect of smoking cessation, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. While you’re smoking, your body has to expend about 375 calories each day in an effort to repair the toxic damage that smoking causes. If you stop smoking and you don’t also make healthy changes to your diet and exercise routine, you run a real risk for weight gain. In addition to the calories that are no longer needed to repair the harm that smoking causes, recent quitters also often replace the oral habit of smoking with eating. And that new habit sure isn’t slowed down by the fact that food tastes a heck of a lot better after you quit smoking.
Putting on a few pounds instead of lighting up multiple times a day is definitely the lesser of two evils, but no one really wants weight gain to be the reward for finally winning the war against smoking. But here’s the good news: You can quit smoking and avoid weight gain by making some relatively minor adjustments to your eating and exercising. Focus hard on sticking to the detox diet plans I describe in Chapters 7 and 9, and be sure to get at least
30 minutes of vigorous exercise each day. That should be enough to keep you from adding on a few pounds after you’ve waved goodbye to a smoking addiction.
Recipes for Helping You Kick the Smoking Habit
When you’re trying to stop smoking, or if you recently stopped, eating healthy food is a key way to help your body repair the damage done by smoking. An antioxidant-rich diet will give your body the fuel it needs to fight off smoking-related toxins.
Smoking cessation makes food taste better, so many former smokers find themselves eating quite a bit more than they did when the tar and other nasty materials from smoking were dulling their taste buds. If you quit smoking and find that foods taste a lot better than they did before, be sure you’re focusing your meals on healthy food options; that way, if you’re tempted to take a few extra bites, at least they’ll be bites of the good stuff. Here are a few recipe suggestions for people who are trying to quit smoking or those who have recently won the battle.
Mixed Grain Cereal with Grapefruit Yogurt Topping
Kicking an addiction to smoking is one of the hardest things you can do. Making and eating delicious recipes like this one will help to reduce the negative health effects of smoking after you’ve quit and make it easier for your body to heal with plenty of cal- cium, protein, and antioxidants.
Grapefruit contains a compound called naringin, which lowers cancer-causing enzyme levels in your body. Paired with vitamin C, this powerful ingredient will help start to counteract the effects of smoking after you’ve snuffed out your last butt.
1 Prepare the grain mixture: Combine rice, amaranth, oats, millet, barley, and flaxseed in container; mix well. Seal container and store at room temperature up to one month.
2 To use, combine 1 cup of the grain mixture with the water in medium saucepan. Cover and let stand overnight. In the morning, add grapefruit juice, honey, stevia, and cinna- mon and bring to a simmer. Simmer, covered, for 12–18 minutes until grains are tender.
3 Meanwhile, combine yogurt, grapefruit, and 2 tablespoons honey; mix well. Serve hot cereal topped with yogurt mixture.
Crunchy Lemon Chicken with Roasted Tomato Sauce
Foods rich in vitamin C, like lemon and tomatoes, help your body heal when eaten with the protein in chicken. You can make the tomato sauce for this meal ahead of time; simply reheat it gently and pour it over the chicken just before you serve the dish. This recipe is special enough for company but easy and delicious enough to prepare for you and your family anytime!
1 In shallow pan, combine lemon juice, honey, turmeric, and cayenne pepper; mix well. Cut chicken breasts into three strips each, lengthwise; add to marinade. Cover and refrigerate 2–4 hours.
2 Meanwhile, place plum tomatoes, cut side up, in roasting pan. Sprinkle with onions and garlic and drizzle with 2 tablespoons oil. Roast in preheated 400-degree F oven 20 minutes. Add grape tomatoes; return to oven and roast 15–20 minutes longer until tomatoes soften. Remove from pan and place in serving bowl; stir in basil.
3 Remove chicken from marinade; reserve marinade. On shallow plate, combine almonds, pistachios, wheat germ, dried basil, and white pepper. Coat chicken in this mixture. Let chicken stand 10 minutes.
4 Heat 3 tablespoons oil in large skillet. Add chicken; cook, turning once, about 10–12 minutes until chicken is cooked and coating is brown and crunchy. Remove chicken from pan and place on serving plate.
5 Add reserved marinade and chicken broth to pan; boil 2 minutes, stirring to incorporate brown bits from pan. Add tomatoes; heat through. Serve with the chicken.
Brown Rice Potato Pilaf
Root vegetables like butternut squash and sweet potatoes help promote lung health with their high antioxidant content. These compounds counter inflammation and help the healing process. They’re also high in fiber, which helps you feel full and helps your body remove toxins more quickly.
This dish can be served as a side dish or as a vegetarian main dish. Add whatever dried fruits and nuts you like.
1 In large skillet, cook onion and garlic in olive oil 4–5 minutes until just tender. Add sweet potato and squash; cook and stir until starting to brown, about 10–12 minutes.
2 Add rice; cook and stir 3–4 minutes longer. Add turmeric, cumin, and saffron to 2 cups water; let stand while rice is sautéing. Add water mixture to rice mixture along with orange juice. Bring to a simmer, cover pan, and lower heat.
3 Cook 40–50 minutes until rice and vegetables are tender. Remove from heat; add lemon juice, honey, apricots, and raisins; fluff with fork. Cover pan again and let stand 5 minutes, then fluff with fork again, sprinkle with sesame seeds, and serve.
Herbed Fruit Soup
Many people gain weight after they quit smoking simply because they have nothing to do with their hands. So make lots of good and healthy food that combines nutrients with fiber so you are satisfied.
You can make this soup with any red fruit, including cherries, cranberries, boysenberries, watermelon, and pink or red grapefruit. It can be served warm or cold. If the soup is very thick when chilled, stir in some more orange juice or apple juice until you reach the desired consistency.
1 In large saucepan, combine water, apple juice, apple, and honey. Bring to a simmer; reduce heat to low and simmer 10 minutes. Add raspberries, currants, and strawberries and bring back to a simmer; cook 20-30 minutes until fruits are very tender.
2 Remove from heat and add lemon juice, thyme, mint, and vanilla. Serve hot, or cool 30 minutes, then chill. Garnish with fresh herb sprigs.
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