When he was a child, Tom Freid smoked just about anything he could get his hands on. He sneaked puffs of his dad’s pipe when nobody was looking. He swiped imported cigarettes from the restaurant where he worked. If he couldn’t get tobacco, he smoked corn silk.

The retired grocer and headstone salesman finally quit smoking on Jan. 1, 2009, a couple of weeks before he found he had emphysema. Even though his smoking gave him an incurable disease that has weakened him, Freid considers himself “one of the fortunate ones” because he was able to quit.

Freid, 77, thinks giving up cigarettes has helped make his life more livable during the last decade, and he agrees with a U.S. surgeon general’s recently released report that shows quitting smoking has major and immediate health benefits for men and women of all ages — even people who have smoking-related illnesses.

The report, billed as the first comprehensive study of the benefits of quitting, shows that:

Former smokers live longer than people who continue to smoke. After 15 years without cigarettes, the risk of death for ex-smokers is nearly the level of people who never smoked.

Smokers who quit reduce their risk of lung cancer and other cancers, heart attack, stroke and chronic lung disease. People benefit from quitting even if they stop late in life or after they have developed a smoking-related disease. Those who quit gain on average only five pounds.

The report said more than 38 million American adults have quit smoking, and two-thirds of the 50 million Americans who continue to smoke would like to quit. Most successful quitters kick the habit by themselves, without the help of a stop-smoking program.

Freid, said he was recovering from bronchitis when he took his first morning cigarette out of his mouth, unlit, and never smoked again. His 50-odd years of puffing had already hurt his lungs, though. Later that month, his doctor showed him an X-ray of lungs blackened with disease.

It’s not a pretty picture, Freid said. “It never really entered my mind that I had emphysema, but I guess I’d have to say I knew I wasn’t 100 percent in the ’90s,” he said. I knew when I walked I was getting out of breath. That’s one of your first indications.

After the diagnosis, Freid took therapy at a local medical center, learning some exercises to help with his breathing and circulation. He said that he had continued to maintain the yard of his house for a couple of years, until the day when “I mowed one round and I just couldn’t mow any more. That was the end of my grass mowing.” The couple moved to a cottage at the retirement community in 2007.

Because emphysema is a progressive disease, Freid’s activities have become increasingly limited. He went through several years of depression after he was diagnosed. She helped me through all that,” he said, nodding to Helen, his wife of 58 years.

Today Freid can’t walk very far or very fast, and he has to stop frequently to catch his breath. His lungs are down to 46 percent of normal capacity. Even with all his problems, he said he’s better off because he quit smoking. His advice to smokers is to quit. His advice to non-smokers: don’t start.

Take a little bit of an inventory of yourself. See what you want to do, what you want to be. Say no to a cigarette the same way you’re supposed to say no to crack.