Quitting smoking

if allen carr tries to stand between me & the bakery I will run him down

dont dent your fender on his coffin

but, uh, i appreciate the sentiment

Yeah, aerosmith my dad used to be a notorious chain-smoker, you could smell him coming from 3 towns away - 2-3 packs a day since the fifties and for a year and a half he has been totally SMOKE FREE! It can be done! He looks great now, had to have heart surgery after quitting tho so let that be a warning to you.

If I could control my dreams I'd smoke my way through them every night. Almost six years on and I still miss smoking at least once a day.

I still have the dreams where I've somehow stuck twenty cigarettes to each other end-to-end (centipede style) and I stretch my arm out to light the last one.

I probably have a hidden desire to light fire to my penis, but they're still pretty good dreams.

Alan Carr book seconded, it is pretty amazing at shooting down any reason why you think you might want to keep smoking.

The Nintendo DS game based on his book is NOT recommended, however, save yourself the $$$.

One thing that also helped me was living next door to the world's biggest fuckhead, a 75-year-old asshole who bragged that he'd slept with his wife and daughter at the same time. o_O He had emphysema and was hooked up to an oxygen tank, but he'd still lift the tubes out of his nose every 15 minutes to smoke a cigarette. He was usually naked, with just a sheet covering his junk (sometimes this fell off though, argh) and accidentally ashing all over his disgusting white chest hair and third nipple. And then hacking and coughing and struggling with his oxygen. I told myself, I do not want to end up like this guy. So thinking about him helps me if I ever get nostalgic about smoking.

o.m.g.

i'm not sure i want to keep breathing after hearing that, let alone smoking.

it's both a good thing and a bad thing that i feel so much better so quickly after stopping. a good thing in that it seems like i'm not too far gone to "recover" completely. a bad thing in that it makes it seem like smoking is no thing so it doesn't matter if i do or not. but i don't want to push it to the point where it doesn't seem like no thing.

i'm never sad to have my singing voice back. this alone makes me feel baffled that i ever get back on the cigs.

the allen carr book is total rubbish. i read it a couple of years ago when everyone read it and allen carr got a millionaire or something by writing that pile of shit. he is so wrong, stopping smoking is not easy at ll, stopping smoking is bloody difficult. i had my last cig more than two years ago and i still have cravings. and my throat has been burning for all the time untill today. and the only reason why i haven't relapsed is that i don't want to go through the hell of stopping smoking again.

you keep mentioning that your throat is still burning. you may want to go get that checked out if you haven't already - that shit isn't normal. I smoked for about 20 years and quit 9 months ago and I haven't had any kind of sore throats or congestion at all.

I have, um, kind of started smoking lately. At age 39.
I'm not proud of this fact.
But right now, I only smoke one or two cigarettes a week.

Can I keep this up? Or am I on the edge of the abyss here?

I have heard of people who can be casual and occasional in this way and never get really sucked in, but it seems like a really slippery slope, and I've watched people close to me struggle for years to quit. I won't go into the whys of how I started up but I see that this is self-destructive and a bad idea. Talk to me smokers and ex-smokers.

x-post (there are many people who succeed in smoking occasionally)
did you smoke roll-ups? bison, samson, van nelle tobacco? a packet (40-50 grams) every two days? plus the occasional joint which i inhaled like crazy? i think my lung is pretty huge, i have been running marathons before i started smoking 22 years ago. there is still lots of tar in my lungs, i am sure. isn't there this rule of thumb that if you have smoked heavily for x years, you need x years to tidy up your lung?

lungs not lung

nope didn't smoke roll-ups. I guess it makes sense that they would be worse. did your throat hurt while you were a smoker?

xps i smoked about a pack a day or 1.5 days for around 12 years, and then cut right down to 2 a day in july 2008 - still at 2 a day. occasionally 3. if we're away from home i can go at least 6 days without evening thinking about it.

the problem with this method and with the allen carr method is that neither of them are gonna suit everyone. for me, giving up smoking was about the routine of it: i crave a cig when i get home from work, bc that's when i always have one, but i never think about having one now at any other time (except still when i'm drinking - that's the hardest - which is probably why i rarely drink these days). everyone said that quitting or cutting down when i moved countries would be the worst time, and i guess it probably was in some ways, but it was also the best bc i had an entirely new routine which was untainted by a smoking habit. i got to basically start over.

haha should have doublechecked before i posted - i basically already posted the exact same thing already! except we did move and i didn't completely quit bc goddamnit i enjoy a cig when i get home from work, esp now we have a pretty backyard i can sit in while i do it.

QUIT SMOKING!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!1!

did your throat hurt while you were a smoker?
when i smoked too many cigarettes, let' say 40 a day or so it did. i also often had the smokers cough (Raucherhusten), ie when you don't smoke for a while, eg in a cinema, you start coughing as your throat is sore or scratchy.

dr3w u r on the edge of the abyss, for real

Made it through my first friday night without smoking. Ran 5 miles this morning and just trying to make it past this weekend

got shitfaced and only puffed on two fags, going pretty well imo

Day 7 of not smoking, including three nights when beers were had.

This competitive thing with my friend (I won't crack until she does) is really working for both of us - but I have a feeling she's on the verge (her live-in bf is still smoking), I have to be able to stay the course after she does.

2 WEEKS YO

5.5 years... i'm still plannign on writing my book about quitting!

quitting s1ocking

48 days, four hours and 55 minutes. Still not lapsed, unexpectedly.

im going to try AGAIN, this sunday. I bought one of those electric cigs.

slocki when you write you book, you should not come up with or use a bunch of different synonyms for cigarettes. I mean, you can if you want, but it gets kind of maddening to read a book where they have some cutesy new name for the things every paragraph.

"backer-wackers"
"mouth buddies"
"lung-treats"
"inhaler wailers"

mouth buddies makes me think of

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_OqhPZgP-VR4/TFi-DakX3hI/AAAAAAAAJrA/y-JSNDqAZvQ/s640/AIR+BUDDIES+2006+DVD.jpg

they fucking TALK

Good literature featuring quitting as a central theme:

The narrator / protagonist of Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience quits frequently.

X20: A Novel of Not Smoking by Richard Beard. Again, about quitting, but on the Oulipo tip, with numerous writing constraints based on the number 20.

my husband started smoking again. must resist temptation to have one myself. ARGH

mouth buddies makes me think of

gis'd what "mouth buddies" makes me think of but will not post results

there just comes this time in the evening when i want to head outside and lean against a wall and stare up at the sky and smoke a cigarette.

I lasted 3 whole days before I caved lol :( But, I'm getting better at going 24-36 hours without smokes, so I'll just try and get more disciplined. I have ZERO willpower bcz basically I dont GAF.

Just the phrase "mouth buddies" makes me glad I'm not a smoker. It makes me glad I'm not a lot of things.

im going to try AGAIN, this sunday. I bought one of those electric cigs.

― thebingo2010 (chrisv2010), Tuesday, October 19, 2010 7:56 PM (Yesterday)

huge pro tip here - the first 1-3 days you will be convinced that the thing isnt going to work out and that it isnt giving you enough nicotine and whatever, but stay the course, from what i can tell thats just withdrawal from all the pointless bullshit in cigarettes, once you get past that the e cigarette is the shit.

(note: if u smoke camels that is the worst for this effect.)

also load up on cartridges, its way too easy to run out and then go "oh hey ill just buy a pack while im waiting for the shipment to arrive"

plus dropping $100 on a shit ton of cartridges worked my "must use everything i buy as much as possible" weird old miser nerve really well

ecigs did nothign for me, like smoking vapes, I hated em.

Also, any money savings from ecigs is theoretical at best. You'll end up spending way more till you find a PV and liquid you're happy with.

First try a disposable Q-ecigarette for $10 to see if vaping is remotely plausible. Then I recommend the Joye eGo (650 mAh batteries mean you're not constantly swapping batteries). E-liquids are a usually a mix of propelene glycol (PG, not antifreeze, for throat hit), vegetable glycerin (VG, for visible vapor), flavorings and nicotene. My experience is that nearly any amount of PG gives the smoke a saccharine sweetness I hate. I liked the VG only liquids in mild flavors. A retailer I liked was www.cignot.com.

In the end, I discovered after a couple months that I really had a better (and far cheaper) experience importing snus. I gave all the e-cig kit I'd accumulated to a nephew who has used them for a couple years.

that sounds way more complicated than quitting

The 2 ppl I know who invested in ecigs smoked them for a week or 2 then went back to smokes. They *are*handy for smoking in non-smoking venues, mind you (if the venue'll allow that).

one week today. from about 15 a day. still kinda want to just murder everything, but it is getting a bit better, i think. pretty confident i'm gonna make it, at least.

How do you get past the whole not even WANTING to quit thing? Thats basically where I am. I only even tried last week because I am sick of being a compulsive smoker and it putting off potential dates (as well as aging my skin/being stinky). But beyond that I genuinely dont *care* about giving up. Not in the least.

(Sorry JD - you were so supportive of my declaration on FB, I feel bad now!)

for me it just happens once a year or so, usually after being sick with something and remembering how much i really would hate being unhealthy for an extended period. while i always kind of know i should quit, sometimes emotionally things just seem to align, and i always wait for that before even trying. that's where i'm at now, and obviously it makes it soooo much easier. while i want to smoke, the desire not to be a smoker is much stronger right now. hoping the feeling lasts.

So I've been leaving my cigs at home when I go to work in an attempt to cut down and finally quit. Seems I can go the day without em, but yesterday I ended up getting OTT stressed out, nearly shouted at my own boss and went to have a cry in the toilet. My emotions were utterly out of wack for the rest of the evening.

How do you get past the whole not even WANTING to quit thing?

I have this problem. Like, I know I should quit for health reasons. I think the problem with me is that I don't smoke very much so I don't really notice any adverse effects like a smoker's cough or running out of breath, or spending loads of money, so I don't have much in the way of motivating factors. I end up thinking, well I only smoke when I'm out drinking, is it really doing me that much harm that's it worth going through cravings every time I go for a pint? Which unfortunately is what happens, I've given up for months before and it doesn't seem to go away.