In 5 days, your snot turns from brown to white.

You also gain, on average, half a kilo more per year compared to those who kept smoking.

And aren't anti-smoking statistics notoriously disingenuous when trying to prove causality? Sometimes I wonder if anti-smoking statisticians even know what selection bias means (I know they do but they only seem to use it when vilifying big tobacco).

The chart left out "Three Weeks: your breath stops smelling like a week old PBR can full of cigarette butts."

After your first thorough shower and after all your laundry has been washed at least twice: you stop smelling like shit.

My grandmother stopped smoking in her early 80s, and even at that age the health improvements were dramatic. She could breathe much better and had more strength and energy.

Eventually, the non-smokers around you may stop hating your air-polluting, cancer-propagating guts.

You also immediately become less cool.

Doctors, the American Cancer Society, etc. love this kind of thing. Because they think that if people understood how bad smoking was for them, they'd instantly quit.

Unfortunately, it's not that easy. It's a good bet that 99% of smokers know that smoking is bad for them. After all, it says it right on the pack. And studies show that most smokers (about 75%) want to quit. The problem is that nicotine is a highly addictive drug (as addictive as cocaine) and while medicine has some answers on addiction it certainly doesn't have really good treatments.

But the treatments are getting better and that means that if we took the amazing amount of energy that goes into stating the obvious and put it into helping people get treatment and finding new treatments we would all be better off.

Meanwhile, here are some suggestions for those who want to beat this addiction:

• 
  Nicotine Anonymous like other programs of its type has been found to be a very effective way of getting free from addiction.
  
• Just switching from smoking to nicotine gum or the nicotine patch greatly improves your health and lowers your health risks.

  
  

• Drugs like Wellbutrin and Chantix have been shown to increase success in those trying to quit smoking.