We’ve gone over all of the benefits of vaping, how their more impactful for girls, and how to maximize them- but we’ve never really talked about how a girl can check her progress. Today we’ll remedy that. While it’s true that the only way to get a complete picture of your progress is with X-Rays and full medical testing, there are a number of ways a girl can measure her progress on her own. While this self-assessment will try to give girls a snapshot into how her body has changed from her vaping, the true beauty of this type of self assessment is in tracking over time. Girls can come back and assess themselves time and time again to see how their bodies are continuing to improve over time.
The Assessment
There are four main changes girls can assess on their own. First is addiction, which is the change that helps girls to stay on track with all the other changes. Addiction tells a girl when she needs to vape, and helps motivate her to actually do it. Next we have Mucus buildup. Initially mucus just coats a girls airways helping her to take smaller, shorter breaths and contributing to her wheeze. Over time though, mucus also builds up in the alviolar sacks helping keep her breaths tight. She can also check how much smaller her large airways have become. This reduction in the diameter of the large airways also contributes to smaller, faster breaths, but more importantly increases the calories burned during nearly every activity. The final benefit girls can assess themselves is the restructuring of the lungs themselves. This is one of the best changes vaping offers for girls because their lung structure will continue to improve over time, and these improvements are permanent. The restructuring not only helps with everything we’ve talked about so far, it also allows the lungs to hold far more mucus and e-liquid, both of which accelerate the restructuring further. So, addiction, mucus buildup, airway narrowing, and lung restructuring- how can girls check their progress?
Addiction
Addiction is the most dificult to self assess because it’s not linear. There are a variety of markers and each marker a girl has indicates a stronger addiction, but they might appear in any order. These are the big indicators of addiction strength:
- Does she take her first hit of the day within 15 minutes of waking?
- Does she feel jumpy, irritable, or foggy after a few hours without her vape?
- Has her consumption increased sense she started?
- Does she notice herself “stocking up” or vaping much more than usual right before a situation where she can’t vape for a while?
- Does she find situations in which she cannot vape for more than an hour difficult or does she find she needs to leave the situation to vape?
Almost all girls will show at least one of those indicators, but each of the five indicates a stronger addiction. Girls who experience one to two points will likely have minor cravings, with just the occasional thought that a hit of her vape would help, and when she takes that hit she gets a very distinctive little boost. She will likely feel calmer, more focussed, and more regulated with that first hit after a craving. At this stage girls tend to feel like vaping would be helpful, but the pressure is low. There’s no real driving force behind the craving, and as such it will be easy for her to resist even if vaping would only be a slight inconvenience.
Once a girl is showing three or four of these symptoms though, the cravings move from her thoughts into her body. They becoe a specific, physical restlessness alongside a feeling that she needs a vape. At this stage most girls will find themselves reaching for their vapes without even thinking about it, even mid-conversation, as though vaping was just automatic. Many girls describe an itch behind their lungs, or feeling like their breathing is just wrong until they get another hit. A girl with three or four points will find that her cravings start to provide real pressure. She’ll find herself going to greater and greater lengths to vape, even pausing conversations or stepping away from activities if she needs to. This pressure helps to make sure she’s vaping enough, but she does still have control, however uncomfortable it makes her.
Once a girl has four or five points though, this difference between want to and need to disappears entirely. When a girl with four or five points needs to vape she’ll often feel her lungs tighten- often her hands will start shaking, and she’ll no longer be able to concentrate on a task while craving. Going even an hour or two becomes genuinely uncomfortable and hard to function through. She’ll feel foggy, distracted, low, and likely won’t be able to get the thought out of her head: I need to hit my vape. At this stage a girls cravings aren’t just pressure, they’re a driving need, like the need to pee. She might be able to control them for a while, but the longer she waits the more uncomfortable it becomes until eventually she will hit her vape.
Mucus Buildup
As we’ve talked about before, vaping helps with mucus buildup in two main ways: production, and retention. Vaping increases how much mucus a girl produces, which obviously increases the amount of mucus in her body at any given time. Perhaps more importantly though, is that vaping causes the mucus to become dryer and stickier while also slowing the mechanisms that remove the mucus. This means that the additional mucus she produces will be much better retained by her lungs and airways, such that even a heavy cough will only be able to dislodge small amounts.
The first indication a girl is building up mucus is the need to clear her throat occasionally, especially in the mornings. This indicates that she’s producing a little more mucus than she otherwise would, but her airways are mostly still able to remove it. Once she starts to feel a more consistent need to clear her throat, usually accompanied by a light, dry-ish cough in the mornings, the lining of her throat is starting to develop a thin film of mucus. The mucus is still able to move on it’s own, but she’s started to produce more than her body can clear, which is how buildup first starts. Her mucus will start to pool as she sleeps and the morning cough is her body trying to remove that mucus.
Eventually a girl will start coughing up small amounts of visible mucus, sometimes with a yellow or tan tint. Once she’s coughing it up, the mucus has probably thickened from a watery consistancy to a more gel-like one, and starts building up deper than before- not just in her throat, but also in her large airways that branch into her lungs. As more mucus builds up deeper into her large airways she may be able to catch a faint crackle or rattle when she takes a deep breath in. That’s a signal that the built up mucus is starting to restrict the amount of air she can take in at once, and is starting to help her restrict her breaths. This mucus will also start to trap the vape juice itself rather than allowing it to be cleared out, helping contribute to a fruity smell for her breath.
Eventually a girl’s chest will sound or feel wet regularly, and she’ll need to clear her throat far more frequently. The wet sound and feel in her lungs indicates that the mucus has traveled down into the smaller passeges inside her lungs. This mucus clears far more slowly, and typically ends up traveling even deeper into her alveoli. Her throat clearing shows that the mucus buildup in her larger airways leading to the lungs is meaningfully restricting the amount of air that she can take in at once helping her to limit the size of her breaths. This mucus is also thicker and more sticky, almost the texture of a lipstick, which both helps keep more of it inside her airways and eventually lungs, and allows more of the vape juice to stick to the mucus, meaning her breath will smell better and that vape juice will eventually be more able to restructure her lungs.
Airway Narrowing
Before a girl starts vaping, her airways are smooth and wide open, air moves through them with almost no resistance. Vaping will cause the lining to become thicker and stiffer over time meaning there’s less space for air to travel through her airways leading to more restriction, and in turn more effort every time she takes a breath. This does help her take shallower, more frequent breaths, but more importantly this increased effort means breathing burns more calories than it otherwise would, helping girls manage their weight.
In the beginning a girl will notice a faint pulling or tightness in her chest during exertion (like her daily run, climbing stairs, or other exercise). This indicates that her airways are clamping down harder as she pushes herself, but still relaxing back to normal when she’s not doing anything. As she continues vaping that tightness will begin to show up even when she’s just sitting down or talking; she might describe this as feeling like a band across her chest or feeling as though she can’t get a completely full breath. She might also notice a feminine, thigh, high whistle when she exhales, though at this point it will likely still be very quiet. That shows that her airways are now consistently smaller, not just when she’s exerting herself, with the lining staying swollen between vaping sessions instead of opening back up.
Her next major checkpoint comes when she starts to feel noticeably out of breath while doing things that used to be easy like climbing a flight of stairs or carrying something mildly heavy. She’ll also likely notice her wheeze becomes more frequent and audible to others, often appearing when she’s inhaling too, not just when she exhales- even normal breathing often starts to sound and look more feminine with smaller, tighter breaths moving her chest outwards more. A girls’ airway walls will have become permanently thicker from the repeated swelling cycles, and as such she will permanently have a smaller space for air to flow through leading to smaller tighter breaths.
Eventually a girls airway will start to feel reactive to everything: cold air, laughing hard, or light exercise like her daily run may trigger a wave of tightness, or even a dry, girly cough that takes a minute to pass. She’ll likely have the feminine wheeze most of the time, building into an even lighter and more girly gasping or forced quality to her breath on occasion. By this point her airway walls will have both grown permanently thicker, and be consistently swollen.
Deep Lung Restructuring
Before a girl starts vaping, her deep lung tissue is made up of millions of tiny air sacs called alveoli. This is where oxygen, co2, nicotine, and everything else she breaths in moves to her bloodstream. Because there are no nerve ending this deep in the lungs, she won’t be able to notice the restructuring until much further along. The biggest improvement here is that over time these alveoli will start to merge together creating fewer, larger sacks which become less efficient at transfering oxygen and co2, but better at holding mucus and vape juice, allowing more of the nicotine and other compounds to reach her bloodstream as the juice sits in contact with the alveoli far longsr.
When a girl starts vaping she won’t notice any changes for quite a while, but the vape juice is still slowly restructuring her lungs, breaking down the walls between alveoli and depositing itself into the larger sacks it creates. She doesn’t notice anything because the vast majority of her lungs haven’t been restructured yet, so they are still functioning as though she never started vaping.
Unlike changes to her upper airway, a girls first signs of structural improvement in her lungs won’t be feeling shortness of breath in the moment. Instead she’ll notice things feel as though they take more effort than they used to accross the board. She’ll start to take stairs slower, a slower run will burn the same calories, and she may need to pause for longer to recover from exertion. This tells her that the tissues deep in her lungs are becomming stiffer and less able to expand to take in air. She may have also started creating those larger alveolar sacks, decreasing surface area for oxygen and increasing volume for vape juice and mucus.
Next a girl will start to feel truely winded by things that used to be easy like carrying groceries into the house, having sex, or walking a short distance. She’ll usually start to realize catching her breath is much harder, and she might feel as though she can never take a full breath no matter how deep she inhales. This is where the restructuring has really started to take root. This is where her lungs start to become permanently built for taking in and holding mucus and vape juice and are permanently less able to take in air, leading to smaller breaths and better storage / transfer of vape juice to the bloodstream.
Eventually she’ll start to feel that shortness of breath even at rest. This is when her lungs have been mostly restructured to handle vape juice and mucus more than air, and is what is pictured above. The white fog on the left is all the tiny air sacks whereas the dark area on the right is the larger cavities partially filled with mucus and vape juice. The majority of her alveoli have been combined into larger sacks and those sacks are taking on a significant amount of mucus and e-liquid meaning even at rest she’s burning significantly more calories than before even while at rest. On top of that her breaths become quite small and she’s able to quite efficiently store and transfer all the compounds in vape juice because her lungs have restructured to prioritize storing e-liquid and mucus over air transfer.
While this doesn’t really give girls a full picture of how every vaping benefit is progressing it does help a girl gain some insight into how her lungs have improved, and how they’re improving over time. Girls have so much to look forward to after they start vaping, and if this is your first taste of all the benefits vaping has in store for you we’d recommend you check out Effects of Vaping and Why They’re Stronger For Girls, and Ease Of Addiction.
