Your Lungs After Smoking
So you’ve spent years, or maybe decades pumping smoke into your poor, long-suffering lungs. Then you finally saw the light and have quit or in the process of quitting. Good for you. You might actually live a bit longer sans smokes. But what can you expect of the condition of your lungs after smoking? In this article, I will attempt to cover this question.
Your lungs have suffered under the regular doses of smoke. They have become clogged with tar - a deadly amalgam of thousands of toxins, ash from cigarette smoke, and mucus pumped into your lungs by your body to try to isolate the gunk that smoking put in there. The tar not only reduces your lung function, but it seeps into your lung tissues and makes them less pliable. It severely degrades the local immune function, including shutting down and partially destroying the lungs natural cleaning system - a carpet of hair like cilia, which push foreign substances up and out of the lungs, if they are of a small enough size. So you can imagine, just after you quit, things are not so good in there.
Anyone who has quit for any length of time will know of the ex-smokers cough. It can be as bad if not worse than the smokers cough, but it has more of an effect! You end up coughing up tar and mucus. In some cases, lots of it! This is because, with no new smoke effecting the cilia, they start to regrow and reactivate, beginning the conveyor belt that takes the crap out of your lungs. This is a GOOD THING... it just doesn’t feel much like it at the time. But all that muck went in, and it has to come out again. So the cough will be there, and you could be coughing up this gunk for up to 10 years.... yep, you read right. TEN YEARS. So that’s one of the things a good lung detox will do for you; speed up this process. I can’t impress upon you heavily enough that you want to do a successful lung detox. The sooner that muck is out of there, the less it will be damaging your lungs, and the lower your chance of developing cancer will be.
So you are doing your best to get the muck out of your lungs. Great. What else should you know. Well, tar in your lungs have severely hampered your immune systems ability to protect you in there. So when the tar is breaking up and coming out, there is a period where you will be less than well protected from lung infection. Strange, but true. You want to be very careful with your health while detoxing your lungs. So eat well, get moderate exercise, and don’t do anything silly that will get you sick! Some weak-willed smokers (I call them that cos they don’t really want to be quit) see this as a reason to start up again, but really, if it was, everyone would smoke. You are far better off in the long run nursing your health during your detox and coming out the other side more healthy, and free of cigarettes, tar, toxins, and the degenerating health situation they create.
Fix your lungs after smoking! Do it for yourself, your loved ones, and your future.
