The truth, admitted grudgingly even by tobacco companies, is that smoking causes impotence. It happens because smoking causes your arteries to harden and narrow, decreasing the supply of blood and oxygen to all the important parts of your body - the brain, the heart, the genitals.

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Smoking might look cool to some, but it's a short-lived thing; smokers lose one day of life each week, and in the US, the number of smokers dying daily could fill three 747s.

The good news is that giving up has immediate health benefits. Stop smoking for a couple of days and your heart rate and blood pressure improves. It takes just three months for your trouser furniture to shrug off the harm of smoking; your erections will be harder and your sperm count will increase.

Just 12 weeks - about the time it takes to get the smell of tobacco out of your car and home, and make both fit for visitors. Call it coincidence.

Scared of weight gain?
But what if you're worried about turning into John Candy when you quit smoking? For many blokes this is a real concern, and for many others simply a convenient excuse to keep smoking.

You're most likely to gain weight during the first three months of quitting, when the cravings are the strongest. Find diversions until the cravings pass. Most will last about three minutes, and you can fill this time by eating some fresh fruit. As your body shrugs off the harm inflicted on it by tobacco, your sense of taste and smell will improve, too.

Considering how much money you'll be saving on cigarettes, this might be a good time to splurge on some hot new running shoes, a tennis racquet, a kayak or a mountain bike. The exercise and the credit card slip will help take your mind off the nicotine craving.

You should also examine your routine and identify when you smoke. If you usually light up over coffee after supper or over a beer at the pub, that's when you need to have substitutes handy, or you may need to change your routine for a while.

Get support
If you have a partner who smokes your task will be more difficult, so it would be worth trying to convince her to quit with you. You should also explain to your family, friends, and colleagues that you'll be quitting. Enlist their help.

There's been some debate about how useful and healthy nicotine chewing gum, sprays and patches are, so speak to you doctor before trying nicotine replacement therapy.

The most important point is to not give in. If you fail to give up, keep trying. The statistics say that few people succeed the first time, but that most manage to give up eventually.

And remember that however sexy smoking looks, it's not. It causes death, cancer, heart disease and impotence. So the actor with the ciggie dangling from his lips might woo the starlet, but like the cigarette, things may just be left hanging. Bit of a let-down, really. – (William Smook)

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