Written by Boris Dzhingarov
These evil little things have haunted me most of my life, ever since that first sweet drag of nicotine when I was 14 I’ve had an on-off love affair with the cancer sticks. Quitting is something that I’ve done intermittently, I’m not entirely sure that I have ever truly quit for any great length of time, sure I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I am no longer a smoker, because a post-sex cigarette is very different to actually being a smoker, right? Wrong, that post-sex cigarette soon joins the post-food cigarette, the just-woken-up cigarette and before you know it the ‘ah-it’s-3pm’ cigarette and you’re back on the smoking wagon. I’ve decided that having my growth stunted, my fingers yellowed and clearly visible crow’s feet actually does bother me so this time is for real and here’s how I’m going about it.
E-Cigarette
I thought this would be a decent option to start with, all of the ‘benefits’ that come with smoking just without the 10,000 harmful chemicals that cigarettes pump around my already frail body. This worked out pretty well and I seamlessly made the shift from real cigarettes to e-cigarettes. A word of warning, there are countless e-cigarettes on the market and many of them taste foul, don’t last long or have absolutely no similarities with a real cigarette, do a little research online before you buy or you may end up wasting a lot of money like I did.
Food Replacements
Soon the time came to ditch the e-cig, whilst they do say that nicotine isn’t really harmful, just addictive as hell, I wasn’t convinced that my replacement option of e-cigarettes were doing me any favors, I was living with that thing in my mouth. I knew from past experiences that when one stops smoking, the amount you eat goes through the roof, I’m no supermodel so I simply couldn’t run the risk of gaining too much weight, it was like a trade off between lung cancer and diabetes, I had to search for an alternative. I decided on a crunchy, healthy snack to get me through the day, to ward off the cravings and to prevent the inevitable 10kg that I would be gaining, I can honestly say that it’s worked very well. Carrots, celery and red pepper are my snack of choice, if I’m feeling a little crazy then I’ll throw some nuts in too and every time I crave a cigarette, I just tuck in to my snacks, The sheer amount that I’m eating is a little worrying and I could’ve sworn that I peed an orangey-carrot color the other day but hey, it’s better than cancer right!
Phone Apps
There are lots of phone apps on the market that will help you stop smoking, you still need to be disciplined but the apps will give you gentle reminders why you’re doing it, display pictures of dead fetuses to discourage pregnant smokers and regular images of horrific lungs will be shown to discourage the rest of us, they actually work pretty well. I decided to download all of the apps available, maybe I was trying to replace my nicotine addiction with an addiction to quitting, anyway the point is that these apps really keep me on track with my quit plan, most allow you to put in how many you smoked per day, how much you spent and how long you’d smoked for and they track how much money you’ve saved and how much your health has improved since quitting. After weaning myself off the smokes with e-cigs and then using these apps, combined with my salad based craving stopper, I have so far completed just over 3 months without a cigarette. It’s not really getting much easier but I know that if I keep going that it will, or at least it had better!