Scientific journalist Hanny Roskamp is advocating quitting with smoking.

Dear friends, as soon as you re-appear from behind that smoke curtain, you’ll all be prettier, healthier and smelling nice and fresh. And most of all, going out together will be a lot of fun again.

According to the official statistics, ‘only’ one out of three to four women smokes. The numbers sampled from my personal life are much more dramatic. Whenever I go to a café with friends, it’s a consistent fact that only one out of four does not smoke. And that one person would be me. I would sit there for hours by myself, bored to death, tapping my fingers impatiently on the bar counter, while my friends step outside to smoke and continue their conversations there, making me feel excluded and missing big parts of what they are talking about. Sometimes I join them, but I usually end up coughing because of all the smoke, and shivering because of the cold.

Inviting friends over to my place isn’t a great solution either. I would be sitting inside, zapping away in front of the television, while I can hear my friends laughing away, having a great time smoking on the balcony. Or, a different scenario, is when they start begging. ‘Oh please, could I just smoke one cigarette inside? Just one.’ When the temperatures are far enough below zero, I start to feel so guilty that I just give up, and give in.

‘Stress theory is a sham’

My friends argue that smoking is a proven remedy against stress. This might explain why cigarettes are persistently maintaining their position in society, when even rules issued by the government to fight against this bad habit seem to have little effect. Toxic mortgages and combining taking care of a child and working at the same time are big causes of stress nowadays.

Still, that whole stress theory is a sham. Allen Carr, the addiction guru who gained fame with his book ‘Stoppen met roken’ (‘The Easy Way to Quit Smoking’) explains that the stress most smokers experience, is usually actually caused by the addiction itself. As soon as nicotine starts to lose its effect, a stress reaction arises in the body because of withdrawal symptoms. This reaction can already occur after only a few hours (depending on a persons individual need for nicotine, varying from two cigarettes per week to a pack per day) and will only disappear after the next nicotine shot.

If you do this hundreds of times, you might start thinking that smoking does indeed help reduce stress. The truth however, is that smoking causes physical stress. After about four to six weeks after quitting smoking you become calmer, feel less fearful, feelings of anxiety get reduced, and last but not least; your mood improves.

The upside of smoking, the downside for your waist line

What’s worse for women, and unfortunately also scientifically proven: smoking keeps you thin. Many of my friends who stopped smoking, gained so much weight that suddenly I was the thinnest of the whole bunch. And trust me, that’s an achievement on it’s own. But then again, many of my friends who started smoking again lost weight with so little effort that even I briefly considered picking up that habit, which to me is ludicrous to even think about. Gaining weight is mostly attributed to eating your feelings. Missing having a cigarette in your hands is compensated by stuffing food in your mouth.
With every addiction that someone kicks, temporary feelings of sadness and depression arise, because the brain needs to adjust itself to a new situation. The amount of serotonin, the happy-maker hormone, in the brain decreases significantly. To fight against those sad feelings by indulging in all kinds of sweets is pretty normal, since those sweets will make your serotonin levels rise again. In detox clinics, patients are known to even stuff themselves with sugar cubes.

That’s not the whole story though. Nicotine also effects how your intestines work and their peristalsis, which is why smokers absorb less calories from theirs meal than non-smokers do. In addition, smokers fulfill their oral needs by sucking on a cigarette instead of nibbling on peanuts and chocolates. The American tobacco industry took advantage of this fact by launching the brand Virginia Slims; an extra thin cigarette, accompanied by the image of an extra thin lady. Since being thin is so extremely important in modern society, a lot of women get stuck in a catch22 between smoking and gaining weight. ‘Since both smoking and being obese are dangerous to your health, I might as well just stick to looking good’, is what most of my friends seem to be thinking. In reality however, being obese or weighing a bit more is actually healthy to some degree, while smoking Is Seriously Bad For You – even if you only smoke two cigs per day.

Smoking; how many ways are there to die?

Every year, a staggering amount of 19.000 people die due to the effects of smoking. If you’re a smoker, the odds that you’ll die much sooner than Mother Nature intended you to, are about 40 percent. This makes smoking one of the most dangerous things you could do. Next to that, the ways in which you could be dying because of smoking are anything but pleasant. Lung cancer takes first place when it comes to illnesses caused by smoking. But smoking also causes other kinds of cancers. As a smoker, you raise your risk to getting breast cancer or cervix cancer by 60 percent.  Smoking is also a big player in the field of heart disease. And of course we can’t forget COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, or emphysema and bronchitis), more commonly known as ‘smokers-disease’.

Another sad fact is that lung cancer in women has been on the rise the last couple of decades, where it used to be an illness mostly affecting men. Wanda de Kanter is a pulmonologist at the Red Cross Hospital in Beverwijk (The Netherlands) and an activist fighting against the tobacco lobby. Every single day, she stands by feeling disempowered watching cigarettes destroy more lives than she could ever help save with modern medicine.
‘Women are less capable in detoxifying their bodies,’ she says.  ‘This is why their DNA gets damaged faster and adds to how and why they develop lung cancer earlier in life. When smoking light cigarettes, they end up sucking on them harder and inhaling deeper to still get their fix of nicotine. This leads to tumors developing deeper inside the lungs.’

Smoking used to be the male domain. Women only started to seriously smoke a lot in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. The tobacco industry, looking for a larger audience, started targeting the women’s lib movement and deliberately marketed the cigarette as a sexy phallus symbol. De Kanter: ‘It took about twenty years till the first victims of lung cancer started to manifest, so now we see a huge peak within the generation that started to smoke back then. The following years, this trend will most likely continue.’

Of course you already know that smoking causes cancer. Maybe you’re also aware that smoking gives you really bad breath.  (As a non-smoker, I more often than not just pinch my nose when a smoker comes too close.)

Another unpleasant side effect is that smokers will get wrinkles much sooner than non-smokers do, and there is a very big risk that you’ll end up like a toothless little granny because of gum disease. And no, implants are not a solution, because a. they’re expensive, b. as a smoker you increase the chance that even the implants will just fall out and c. many dentists don’t even want go there with smokers because more often than not, it just goes wrong.

Smoking vs. willpower: 1-0

Unfortunately, the sad fact that smoking is life threatening doesn’t do much. Not even now that it’s printed on the packages. Once people start to smoke a lot of times they really just can’t stop. This isn’t because of a lack of willpower. All my friends are super tough women who get things done. But an addiction has nothing to do with willpower; it’s a disease.

Nicotine has altered your brain to such an extent, that it simply influences the choices you make. And these changes in brain chemistry are there to stay for a while to come. The popular myth that the physical addiction to nicotine starts to disappear after only three days and that the rest of the fight is ‘just a mental thing’, is nonsense.

During those first three days, you go through the worst symptoms of withdrawal, such as shaking, sweating and enormous amounts of irritation, but you’ll still be dealing with a biochemically altered brain for months to come, nagging you for that nicotine shot. This means that for those months, you’ll also still be very susceptible to a relapse.
However, even though it may seem like your cigarette cravings are here to stay forever, there will come a moment when even that phase will belong to the past, and your brain has finally ‘fixed’ itself. This will take much longer than those 3 days or 3 weeks everyone keeps talking about. As long as you’re aware of this fact, quitting will be doable.
From De Kanter’s point of view, the most important thing is that young people never even start with smoking:

Being prone to addiction is partly hereditary. This makes quitting much tougher on some than it may be on others.

Although I have never smoked, I can almost understand why my friends went for that first cigarette. Smoking has this certain thing.  Even though commercials with cowboys and cool Belinda’s are a thing of the past, smoking has kept its sex appeal.
Honestly, I wouldn’t even consider kissing a man that smokes, but when said man lights one up all nonchalant, he already seems three times more exciting than his non-smoking buddy does. Have I been brainwashed by Mad Man, the HBO series where the smokes wafts directly off the screen? Mad Man definitely gave a new edge of coolness to inner circle of smokers in Amsterdam.

Still, even before this show smoking used to be interesting, and stood for freedom, excitement, even being mysterious and edgy. De Kanter completely disagrees with these associations. ‘I get so pissed off about connecting smoking to feelings of freedom and such. How on earth is smoking freeing, when you basically have no choice at all because of your addiction?’

Numbers and statistics

Percentage of women smoking in the Netherlands

 Age                        2010       2011      2012

20 – 34 years              29%              24%            28%

35 – 49 years              28%              25%            26%

Percentage of smokers in 2010 in ages 15 -55

Netherlands 24%

Germany 25 %

Sweden 16%

France 33%

Percentage of respondents who tried to quit smoking in the past 12 months for 2010

Netherlands 25%

Germany 25%

Sweden 34%

France 26%

Tips on how to quit smoking

*Deal with stress
Learn a way to deal with stress even before you attempt to quit smoking. Many ex-smokers relapse during stressful situations. Practice mindfulness, meditation or yoga, and turn these into a habit before you quit. This way you have something to fall back on during the hard moments.

*Use a crutch
Cigarettes without any nicotine, nicotine plasters, nicotine chewing gum, Champix and antidepressants such as Zyban will not guarantee success, but they do increase your chances of successfully quitting. Even if these crutches are not covered by your health insurance policy, they are still worth the small investment they make take.  And in the end, these things pretty much pay for themselves.

*Avoid alcohol
At least for the first three months. Alcohol reinforces your need for nicotine and breaks down your willpower at the same time. This makes relapsing at parties or at a bar a serious issue.

*Take quitting seriously
Give yourself a deadline, work hard towards it, make sure you can’t find cigarettes anywhere at home. And never, but really never ever, ‘just take have one’. The smallest amount of nicotine activates your addiction again full on, wasting all your efforts and sending you right back to where you’ve started.

*Exercise more…
… and make sure to eat healthy. This should help to maintain your weight. Don’t panic if you do gain a few pounds; you’ll get rid of those down the line.