Have you ever said that, I was once told to stop smoking all you had to do was to stop smoking for one hour, and then another one. Within an hour of my earnest decision never to smoke again, I began to itch for a smoke, and that powerful craving would never subside or fade. When the phone rang, when a visitor came to my office or home, when I ran into a momentary work problem, when I was at a party, even when I first opened my eyes in the morningI thought of a cigarette. Stop Smoking for the sake of my health! Mmmmm! The craving for a nicotine fix outweighed everything else. That cloying feeling at the back of the throat, the sub-concious action of reaching for a fresh pack of cigarettes. Can I stop smoking for an hour?
In the fine tradition of people who have given up smoking, I gained weight whenever I stopped. In order to substitute something for the cigarettes I craved, I chewed gum at the rate of about three packages a day (which, after all, added only 60 calories) and kept some gumdrops at my desk (but they're only 30 calories each). And as a substitute activity during moments at the dinner table that might otherwise have been occupied by tapping a cigarette from the pack, lighting it, puffing it, flicking ashes from it, putting it in and taking it from the ashtray, and finally stubbing it out, I ate a little more bread than usual at lunch and dinner. (But those extra rolls and slices of toast and even the larger-than-usual desserts didn't add more than 300 extra calories daily.) I took to having one or two well maybe three biscuits with my tea and coffee, but they did not add up to much did they, not nay calories but I was getting overweight, would this lead to diabetes. Had I changed from cancer to diabetes being my cause of death?
I quickly learned that it only takes 3,600 extra calories in order to put on a pound of fat, and why is it you always put fat on in the most see able places? I gained, to be precise, at the rate of about two pounds a week. Soon the tailor had to open seams and shift buttons . . . and then when even my "expanded" wardrobe became uncomfortably tight, I simply started smoking again. "Anyone knows," I explained to myself in justification, "that it's worse for a man in his fifties to be overweight than it is for him to smoke'.
While all this was going onthe unfulfilled desire, the gaining of weight to obesity proportionsI was neither a particularly endearing companion nor a productive co-worker. How could I be? If you tie the most rollick some pup in the world just far enough from a bowl of food for him to see the dish but not taste its contents, he will rapidly become a barking, yapping, whining, snarling, jumping, lip-curling cur. Cigarettes were eternally on view for me but, so to speak, "out of reach." So I barked and snarled and growled.
If only stopping smoking was as easy as reading a book, yes you will have withdrawal symptoms, yes there will be times when you think to yourself if not out loud - WHY GO THROUGH THE TORTURE?
This is an extract from the book "The Painless Way To Stop Smoking" in 17 Days or Less - Even If You Think You Have Tried Everything Before