Millions and millions ride the "I'm still healthy" rationalization until it collides with a massive heart attack, a stroke, or until diagnosed with incurable cancer.
Each nicotine use activates the body's fight or flight response. That response releases extra fuel. You can't hear or see it but stored energy is released into the bloodstream, including cholesterol, the bad kind, LDL.
This energy was supposed to be burned and used fleeing or fighting to save our life. Instead, we sit or stand around doing little or nothing. Instead, released LDL cholesterol begins forming fatty deposits along artery walls.
On the outside, your body mass or size may have looked normal or even thin. Yet, on the inside, an artery started acting as a gathering spot and roadblock for cholesterol, dead cells, waste, and other fats.
Use after use, the plaques build, gather, and grow. They become hardened by nicotine through a process known as angiogenesis. Eventually, the artery becomes totally blocked. All tissues serviced with oxygen via the artery suffocate and die. Whether the result is a heart or stroke, there may have been little warning that disaster was about to strike.
And we never once used tobacco without introducing more cancer-causing chemicals into our body. There's no feeling, sensation, or warning before a house falls on you and that first cancerous cell begins to divide and multiply.
"I feel fantastic." "I'm as healthy as a horse!" "I do aerobics." "I eat healthy." "I walk and run." "I'm athletic."
What does any of that have to do with preventing the scores of cancer-causing chemicals that you daily introduced into your body from eventually causing cancer? Wishful thinking?
Let's turn our attention to the rationalization that kept me using for thirty years, a belief that I was hopeless, that I couldn't stop.
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