If you were to smoke your last cigarette right now, your body would begin to change within just twenty minutes! The Centers for Disease Control offer these interesting facts about your body’s changes after you quit smoking.
Just twenty minutes after your last cigarette, your heart rate drops.
Within twelve hours after quitting, the carbon monoxide levels in your blood drop to normal. When carbon monoxide gets into the body from smoking (and other sources), it combines with chemicals in your blood — preventing the blood from bringing oxygen to cells, tissues, and organs. So after just twelve hours, your body is getting more oxygen that it was when you were smoking. That’s a good thing.
As little as two weeks after your last cigarette, your risk of a heart attack starts to drop. By three months, you will see improved lung function. And that means less coughing and less shortness of breath. It may take as long as nine months to notice the effects, but your lungs will be working better.
After one year, your risk of heart disease is already half that of a regular smoker. Isn’t that incredible? You can cut your risk of heart disease in half within a year by giving up smoking. After five years, your stroke risk is reduced to that of a nonsmoker.
It takes ten years after that last cigarette for your risk of dying from lung cancer to go down. But by that ten year mark, you’ll have half the chance of dying from lung cancer as you did when you were smoking. Your risk of other smoking-related cancers — mouth, throat, esophagus, bladder, kidney, pancreas — is greatly decreased by this point.
You may be wondering, at this point, how long it will take your body to get back to “normal”. I can’t answer that question. But, fifteen years after that last puff, your risk of heart disease is back to that of a nonsmoker. Fifteen years for your body to clear out all the damage that smoking does to your heart.