The next time you’re tempted to light up, remember this: Every cigarette you smoke reduces your expected lifespan by 11 minutes, according to researchers at the University of Bristol in England. That means that 10 cigarettes a day for 10 years takes more than nine months off your life.
Tobacco was responsible for the deaths [...]

We invited readers of Essence and All You magazines to send in their stories about quitting smoking—some successful, some not. Here are some of the responses that came in. View the slideshow.

For decades, doctors, scientists, celebrities, and cool-cat executives were all used in cigarette ads to deflect fears that smoking was dangerous. The health-claim strategy evolved into “low-tar” claims that became the subject of a Supreme Court case in October 2008. We pulled these examples from a large documentation project by the Stanford University School of [...]

On the day the Dow plunged almost 800 points, Erick Giliberti was doubling down on his smoking habit.
Before the turmoil, says Giliberti, a manager at Deloitte who works with mortgage-backed securities, “I was maybe a pack a week.” Now? “Probably double that…I can’t stare at my computer screen anymore and watch the market collapse [...]

You may find yourself missing more than nicotine when you finally snub out your last butt. Cigarettes are designed to manipulate your taste buds too, and research shows that tobacco’s flavors, both natural and added, can hold extra sway for many people struggling to quit.
“The sensory components—the taste of it, the feel of [...]

Will you gain weight if you quit smoking? Probably. Four out of five quitters gain some weight—4 pounds to 10 pounds each, on average. The good news, however, is that quitters usually do get back to a normal weight, especially when the focus is on stopping smoking first.
Should you put off quitting in order [...]

It’s been a month and a day since I abandoned my binge-smoking ways, but only yesterday did I truly kill my desire to smoke.
The most apt description of what I’ve been fighting is this: Smoking creates an itch in the lung that only a cigarette can scratch. This past week my lungs have felt [...]

Becoming a nonsmoker reminds me of what it’s like to start a new job. You know what you’re supposed to do, but you have no idea how to accomplish it. You spend the first few days just figuring out the coffeemaker and putting your mistakes in the shredder. You end the week wishing you could [...]

In 2001, a group of young cigarette smokers was fitted with opaque goggles and nose clips at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After lighting up, the women in the group collectively rated their cigarettes less “satisfying” than the men did. In another study, women who sampled both standard and low-nicotine cigarettes noted less [...]

Some say that when you quit smoking, you get clearer skin, whiter teeth, etc., but all I see on Day 17 is more Libby.
I’ve added five pounds to my 5-foot-9 frame. Aesthetically, that’s just fine by me. Medically, it’s not fine. Scientifically, it seems inevitable.
I’ve always heard people describe my body type as [...]