QuitSure Team

Constipation affects roughly one in six people who stop smoking, and for about one in eleven it becomes severe. It typically peaks around two weeks after the last cigarette and settles over the following weeks. It is a real, documented effect of quitting, not something you imagined. Almost nobody warns you about this one. You are braced for cravings, irritability, maybe the cough. Then your digestion changes and you start wondering whether something is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with...

Yes, but the odds are measurably worse. In a study of quitline callers who had established a complete smoke-free home, those who lived with other smokers had roughly half the odds of being tobacco free for 30 days compared with those who did not (odds ratio 0.46, 95% confidence interval 0.29 to 0.73). Your environment is not an excuse. It is a real variable, and it can be changed more than most people assume. This question comes up constantly, and it usually arrives with a note of defeat. My...

No. You do not need to feel ready, motivated, or certain in order to stop smoking. In a national survey of smokers in England, 48.6% of the most recent quit attempts were put into effect the moment the decision was made, with no preparation at all, and those unplanned attempts were 2.6 times more likely to last at least six months than planned ones. That finding, published in the BMJ in 2006, is one of the more inconvenient results in tobacco research. It runs against almost everything the...