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Teen Smoking How To Help Your Teen Quit Smoking

September 6th, 2009 admin No comments

Teen smoking is a cause of alarm for the people across the globe. For the past few decades, it’s the youth that is more attracted to smoking cigarettes .After all, teens who smoke are likely to turn into adults who smoke. It is very important that one takes teen smoking seriously and help the youth to quit that demeaning habit at a very early stage itself.

In order to genuinely help the teen to quit smoking, one needs to be curious and at the same time be supportive. There should be pondering in the initiative that has triggered the youth to resort to smoking in the first place. There could be reasons like stress, financial problems, adapting in a different environment or it could also be for sheer pleasure of it. Sometimes teen smoking is an attempt to feel cool or more grown-up.

Once there is an understanding into why teens have opted to smoke, making them quit smoking becomes a much easier task. One must encourage the teens to share his or her concerns and there should be a vivid explanation given to the smoking teens about the consequences of smoking like cancer, heart attack, strokes and other respiratory ailments.

One can also put forward other aspects of smoking such as bad breathe , foul smelling hair and clothes, yellow colouring of nails and teeth, paler looking skin and early aging.

As a parent, he or she has the most powerful influences in the teen’s life and the parents actions speak louder than the words. So if the parents smoke, then its time they quit and set a good example for the teens in the house. It is more of a responsibility that the adult shoulders in the development of the child in the house.

Many teens who smoke think they can stop anytime, but research shows this isn’t usually true. In fact, most adults who started smoking in their teens never expected to become addicted to nicotine.

It is actually easier for the teens to quit smoking than the adults so it is always earlier the better. Few steps that can be followed to help the teens to quit smoking are:

  • Help the teen to choose a date to stop smoking.
  • Encourage the teen to write down all the reasons he or she wants to quit smoking. The list can help the teen stay motivated when he or she is tempted to smoke.
  • Get the teens to be associated more with children who don’t smoke
  • Help the teen practice saying, “No thanks, I don’t smoke.”
  • Remind the teen that if he or she can hold out long enough, then the craving for nicotine will pass. They can choose a sugarless gum or cinnamon sticks to help them keep their mouths busy.
  • Join a support group. Some hospitals and local organizations offer stop-smoking groups just for teens. Teen groups are available online, too.
  • Consider stop-smoking medications like stop-smoking medications such as CigArrest stop smoking gums, patches, inhalers or nasal sprays.
  • Learn from mistakes. If the teen slips, remain supportive. Congratulate the teen on the progress he or she has made so far, and encourage them not to give up.

With all these, it is extremely important to celebrate the teen’s success in staying smoke free. Small rewards and plenty of positive reinforcement can help the teen maintain the motivation to stop smoking for good.

Teenage Girls and Cigarettes

September 3rd, 2009 admin No comments

In the current world scenario, teenage girls are obsessed with their body figure and go to any extent to become super slim and stay thin all the time. To add fuel to the fire, there is a myth floating among the teenage girls that smoking cigarettes help in maintaining their body slim. There are many tobacco companies are increasingly capitalising on this and targeting teenage girls, using cynical marketing ploys that tap into young women’s fears about their weight, and introducing “female-friendly” packaging.

There are other tobacco companies that uses terminology like ‘super slim’ to make the link between smoking their product and losing weight. These kind of cynical advertisements catch the target audience in a jiffy. Girls anxious about their weight and desperate to stay slim get attracted to these products. Further more; there are some tobacco companies that glamorise smoking by getting celebrities to endorse their products. With famous people voting for a cigarette, marketing the product becomes easy since the teenage girls fall for them.

Many tobacco companies have tried to forge a link between smoking and slimness. The first ad which emphasised the “benefits” of smoking for weight control was brought out in the late 1920s, with the slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”. The popular US brand Virginia Slims hammers the message home with varieties Virginia Slims Super Slims Lights and Virginia Slims Super Slims Ultra Lights.

Coming to the actual facts, teen smokers are more likely to experience obesity as adults, according to a new study from Finland. Girls who smoke 10 cigarettes per day or more are at greatest risk, particularly for abdominal obesity. Their waist sizes are 1.34 inches larger than non-smoker’s waists are as young adults, according to the study.

Scientists know a correlation exists between women’s weight and smoking, the young women who smoked more than 10 cigarettes per day were 2.32 times more likely to become overweight than non-smokers, according to the study. The difference could be either biological or cultural. Biologically, it might be that tobacco and gender specific hormones interact differently in girls and boys in ways that affect appetite and fat distribution.

There are also teenage girls who smoke for just the pleasure of it or blame it on the stress factor. However, majority of teenage girls smoke primarily for wait loss .This is not a solution for people to loose weight. Smoking is a very harmful habit and has a lot of after effects on the human body. It is time that girls who are very young and smoke realise that it is just a false theory of smoking in aid of weight reduction and quit smoking at the earliest.