Smoking

[littlegreenman]

I reckon part of the trick is to remember that even when you were a smoker you must have spent an awful lot of time not smoking - you're just extending that.

I used to joke that I gave up smoking every day, just after bedtime. The trick seems to have been with the not starting again when I woke up, got an 8 hour headstart.

[bochetagrave]

Good work

I'm just about to quit again for the umpteenth time - am reading that Allen Carr book

It's very good!

[further]

Good luck,I gave up about seven years ago.Never had so much money.

[dafuzz]

It's very good!

A couple of blokes I worked with said the same - fingers crossed!

[FBF]

Good work

I'm just about to quit again for the umpteenth time - am reading that Allen Carr book

Worked for me.... I'm approaching the end of year 3 as a non smoker after more than 30 years addicted to the tubes of devil's semen.

To be honest I'm not sure he should have gone into comedy, his books are awesome.

[mctoot]

I actually found the first week or two much easier than I had anticipated (after 20-odd years of 15-20 a day). You're so pumped up about giving up you'd fight off a lion that was trying stick a tab in your gob. The danger, I find, comes after 2-3 months. It was as if my guard dropped and I started to lose the urgency for giving up in the first place. I've fallen off the wagon a few times like that, but am more or less over it.

I still find watching things like Inspector George Gently very difficult, though. He and Sergeant Bacchus and the rest of the cast do nothing but smerk throughout the programme and it makes my mouth water...

[Danny1969]

I gave up about 3 years ago after 25 years of smoking. I used the Champix drug, very successful and never been tempted to fall off the wagon yet.

[Grunfeld.]

Good work

I'm just about to quit again for the umpteenth time - am reading that Allen Carr book

That book cost me £5.99 in 1991.

Since I finished it on 26th November that year I have not had to find £58,414.08 to spend on fags (at today's prices). EDIT: What astonishes me is that one of my best mates has spent that. We both started smoking the same time but I stopped and he hasn't. That's a lot of fags and a lot of cash.

So it was probably the most important book I ever read in a way, certainly the best return on a fiver I've ever had.

All the best to all who are stopping smoking. You all deserve a well-earned break from it.

[holnrew]

Good luck. I found it easier because it was giving me loads of stomach bother, getting relief from that really helped at the start.

[Emperor Fabulous]

I smoked from 13 until February 3rd this year - just before my 48th birthday. I tried all sorts to give up, patches, fake fags, books, cds etc etc. I succeeded for a couple of months at a time but would always relapse. Unfortunately, it took something as severe as my heart attack to get me to stop. Where all of the aids and stop-smoking paraphernalia had failed for years, it took just one sentence from one person to make to quit instantly for life.

I was lying the in the cardiac care unit, 24hrs after my heart attack, on Feb 5th and the surgeon was doing his rounds. He explained to me what had happened to my heart and about the stent he had fitted. He told me that the biggest risk to me now was the stent clogging up and a clot forming and that the absolute quickest way to make that happen was to continue smoking. Never smoked since and I know I never will.

The funny thing is that now I'm a non-smoker, I can look back and analyse my mindset when I smoked. I always used to imagine being a non-smoker as one eternal hell of permanent craving for a cigarette. That somehow life would be dramatically and irreversibly changed into a blander, more boring reality.

The truth is, of course, that life is exactly the same. I genuinely no longer crave cigarettes and the only thing that has changed is I no longer smell like an ashtray (and it's only once you quit does it dawn on you how fucking disgusting smokers smell) and... more importantly, I'm not paying £7 a go to slowly kill myself.