Supa

I went to my annual health checkup Friday and confirmed some of what I already knew, I look and feel so much better then I did a year ago. This is due in no small part to the fact that this weekend, I am celebrating one year since I quit smoking. I pulled out of an insane nose dive to my death and choose to live my life and heal my body instead. A year on now it feels like waking up from being trapped in a bad dream.

I have analyzed the cost of my addiction in a number of ways. First and foremost is the fact I want to stay healthy and live a long life. There will be a price to be paid for having been a smoker and it usual comes as an early and miserable ending to your life. Studies say that smoking takes an average of a decade off a smokers life. It is probably a lot more if you include the quality of life near the end that is diminished by smoking. For all that doom and gloom there is a bit of hope in that the sooner you quit the less years you might lose.

So I quit soon enough to have a chance to rebuild some of what I have lost, mitigate the damage, and avoid an early end. My recovery was slow but steady for the first eight months, but in last four months since I started juicing I have really seen some dramatic improvements. Being able to create nutrient dense elixirs is proving to be the most valuable skill I have ever learned.

The more I learn about the powers of plant nutrition the more hopeful I feel. A study in the journal Nature showed cells that used up their raw materials became "stressed" and made mistakes copying their genetic code. This is probably one reason smoking causes cancer, it interferes with and depletes your raw materials. So if you want to avoid cancer, it would seem making sure your cells never run out of raw materials is your best strategy.

Quitting smoking has also been a great time to fix more then just one of my bad habits. After finding the power to beat smoking, they are all starting to fall like dominoes as my new healthy daily rhythm widens. Like adding fermenting to my daily regiment, I am learning to create my own healthy pro biotic sparkling drinks and replace my addiction to the overly sweet, nutritionally void, and biologically dead store bought drinks.

There was a study recently where people were asked how much they thought their life would change in the next ten years, and mostly they didn't think very much. But when asked how much they have changed in the last ten years, they felt they had changed a great deal. People are generally pretty bad at predicting personal growth and life change. Well looking back on this last one year of change in me is so mind boggling right now, I can not wait to see how I grow and life changes me in my year two as a non-smoker!