I stumbled upon the term Vanity Quitter right before I quit. I'd been looking at articles on how smoking affects your appearance and at first I was a little uncomfortable with it.
Vain? Vain people are jerks. I'm not at all vain, I have no right to be vain. And I thought, surely I'm not so silly as to let concern about wrinkles make me quit when years of reading about what it was doing to my lungs left me unmoved. (Oh, the excuses we make to avoid quitting.)
But then I thought: I do come from a line of people who look disgustingly young for their age, so on a genetic level, the fact that I look my actual age is a Bad Sign. And yes, every doctor in the world can talk themselves purple about what smoking does to your internal organs but there's no way to show a person their internal organs. At least a doctor can't show you your internal organs without committing a number of ethical and legal violations and at that point you probably wouldn't care.
However, I can see my face. And even though I am a "new" ex (6 days today), I can see some differences already. This morning I noticed my pores looked smaller. I did some reading and what do you know? Smoking enlarges your pores. I think the fact that I've been gobbling clementines and carrots and guzzling water is partially responsible, but that's just helping with the clean up.
So this will be my Vanity Quitters blog. I'll keep an eye on my face and share the differences along with anything I learned that will help minimize or perhaps even reverse the effects of smoking.
