Smoking, that’s a beautiful word isn’t? Some examples: When we arrived home, we knew father was home because our fireplace chimney was smoking. We went for skiing on the hill nearby the village, and we saw the smoking chimneys of the houses.Yesterday while I was going down to catch the metro this smoking hot woman was coming up the stairs. There was some smoking coming out of the neighbor’s window, so we notified the fire department. Is it a beautiful word, right? But unfortunately, when someone hears the word smoking, his or her mind goes probably to a more poisonous “habit” namely cigarette smoking.
Healthy minds and healthy brains are in effect free minds, liberated minds, and think out of the box minds. Unfortunately, not a lot of free minds on this planet. Lots of junk food addicts out there, caffeine addicts, processed carbs addicts, sugar sweet addicts, illegal drug addicts (cocaine, heroin and so on), sex addicts, porn addicts, sex cam site addicts, alcohol addicts, carnivore addicts, gambling addicts the list is endless.
The ones that have the power, land and money on this planet who are not many, a handful of rich families, suit them fine for a big chunk of the population to be addicted to something. They can pass their inhuman agendas more easily and with fewer obstacles. Who is going to realize anything is wrong on this planet when most of the population is busy trying to satisfy her or his addiction. They also use people’s addictions to turn them against them, and against each other. They apply the simple rule that the British Empire applied for so many years during its existence and Great Britain still applies as her foreign policy until today, divide and conquer.
All the mentioned addictions can easily stop comparing with the nicotine addiction, which is the main physiological reason people smoke cigarettes one behind the other until they drop dead either from some form of cancer or other smoking-related diseases and illnesses.
Studies have shown that nicotine addiction is harder to get rid off than heroin or cocaine addiction, which both of them are considered hard drugs!
The Irony
Isn’t it funny and ironic that cocaine and heroin addicts end up in prison if they get caught buying or selling them? Instead, a cigarette smoker can buy his drug from a store or a supermarket in front of kids and even smoke in front of them exposing them to the poisons carried in the fumes and smoke of the cigarette?
Isn’t it even more ironic and hilarious that a drug that is killing more people than the illegal ones (According to CDC, during 2011 tobacco killed 11 times more Americans than all illegal drugs combined -443,690 versus40,239!) is still out there sold like candies?
If you are reading this article, you are probably seeking ways or a way to get rid of the disgusting nicotine addiction. Face it you are a nicotine addict and the sooner you admit it, the sooner you will be able to reach to that epiphany moment of, oh my God how could I be such an idiot and stupid and ignorant, like I felt and had seven years ago.
Let’s begin the catharsis.
Let’s begin the process of transferring your mind back to a smoke-free state before you poisoned your lungs with tar and thousand of toxins and infested your brain with nicotine which in reality is the natural insecticide of the tobacco plant. Yes for years I will put in my body through the filthy “habit” of smoking an insecticide. Let’s begin the catharsis.
Do you remember the first time you put in your mouth the tube like sticks of death? Then proceeded to light it either using a red plastic lighter or a match with a camel depicted on the matchbox cover?
Mental Exercise Number
Let’s do this mental exercise together, close your eyes and try to remember the first time you put the little stick of cancer into your mouth.
Try and remember the place you were, was it indoors or outdoors? Out in the country? In your room? In your friend’s room? Out in the street? In the toilets of your school? Try to remember.
While you are trying to recollect, I will tell you where I was when I first light my first cigarette. You can also find more about my smoking experience and how I quit in my first book Thirsty for Health
I was outside in the woods, doing a military exercise, I was serving my country. A lot of things happened that day, bad things both emotionally and psychologically that had a negative impact on me, and being a 19-year-old kid, I found a way out of by my then perceived dead end by finding comfort and support in the lighting of a cigarette. I know stupid, but then again we all do stupid things in our lives and for me, smoking was one of them.
Did you bring from memory your first cigarette lighting? Maybe you can’t, one of the many nasty side effects of cigarette smoking and obviously, nicotine intoxication is memory loss, yep, you hear me right, you lose your mind every time you smoke a cigarette. Five minutes of “pleasure” and puff you forgot your kids first birthday, another 5 minutes of nicotine fix and puff again, you forgot your wedding day shall I draw a picture?
Now if you still remember the first time you light one. Can you remember the cold plastic like the feeling of the filter and the straw odor of the raw unburnt tobacco going strong through your nostrils?
Then you light the cig and took a deep sip taking that smoke down into your lungs and then.
All hell breaks loose, you started coughing like crazy because your lungs were screaming for oxygen and you instead of oxygen you filled them with carbon monoxide one of the deadliest toxic gasses in the universe.
Your throat was screaming for water because of the burning sensations and the thousands of cancerous substances that numbed your senses and poisoned your bloodstream with chemicals and your lungs with tar.
Most of us felt disgusted and wondered what the heck people find on this awful and filthy habit?
Most of us should have never put another disgusting cigarette in our mouth again right? I mean every time you smoke, you put thousands of chemicals into your body that enter into any imaginable place, lungs, fills with tar and in time, your lungs become black and lose year after year, cig after cig the ability to get oxygen and supply the rest of the body with oxygen.
The inside lining of your stomach, which is there to protect us from our hydrochloric acid gets weakened and weaken as we continue to smoke.
Your hair is full with nicotine, our hands and mouth stinks of nicotine and smoke.
Our skin gets old and wrinkly with smoking, the antioxidants in our body get depleted faster than we can replenish and if we are eating junk food and not enough plant based food our skin gets older faster.
Let’s not forget though the big prize people get when they continue mindlessly to smoke and that is a variety of cancers.
Aren’t you scared yet? No? Hmm, what’s wrong with you?
Let me repeat
Most of us felt disgusted and wondered what the heck people find on this awful and filthy habit?
I tell you what they find; they find nicotine, yes I am repeating myself because you might even forget already, why you smoke, let me refresh your memory, you smoke because you are a nicotine addict admit it and start doing something about it.
Nicotine is the main reason people around the world cannot stop smoking even if many of them end up in the hospital with respiratory problems, even many of them know what is doing to them is dangerous and cancer promoting.
I saw pregnant women smoke! I saw fathers smoke in the car with all the windows shut with their kids in the back seats.
We found our villain, our culprit, the “bad guy” If Nicotine were a bad guy in a western movie of the 50”s it would wear a black hat!
People think they are invincible; they think that bad things will never happen to them, that’s human nature or human stupidity, I don’t know which is what. People always think that bad things will happen to other people, not to them.
Hey, maybe for some it works, maybe by thinking like that they create a positive thinking that has a protective effect on the poisonous effects of smoking, like a placebo effect.
One thing is for sure my good people, you may not get cancer, which nobody wishes, of course, but smoking will contribute in a big degree to your speedy demise.
You can’t put into your body more than 3000 chemicals and toxins which about 50 or so are proven to be cancerous and expect to be healthy! It’s just plain stupidity and ignorance if you think that.
I know I was stupid and ignorant for 16 years, I reached a point where I was doing four packs a day! That’s 80 cigs a day. The only time I wasn’t smoking was when I was sleeping!
Here Is an excerpt from the chapter Smoking of my first book Thirsty for Health
Stopping Smoking: Second Attempt
My second attempt at stopping smoking was also a disaster. After the nicotine patch failure, I decided to stop smoking cold turkey. I stopped buying cigarettes; I threw away all of my matches and lighters, and I gave away all of my ashtrays. I was determined to rid myself finally of this culprit.
I lasted for a week, which was amazing, especially considering I had chosen the worst week of my life to stop smoking: finals week. On the sixth day of that week, I started crying for no reason; I would just start to cry while doing anything, even eating, and suddenly tears would run down my face. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I called my parents and told them that I couldn’t seem to stop crying, and after a small benevolent interrogation, I mentioned to them that in addition to dealing with my final exams, I had also decided to stop smoking.
They told me to start smoking again because that was probably the cause of my sudden crying bouts; their advice was a bit of a shock to me because I had expected a more supportive attitude towards my decision to stop smoking—the last thing I had expected to hear was advice to start smoking again!
They were right, though; as soon as I started smoking again, the crying bouts ceased. I think the combined stress of the exams and stopping smoking was the cause of my crying, as I was neither physically nor emotionally ready for the challenge of such a drastic change.“
The reason I cited this paragraph from my book is three-fold. First to show you that I am not just a guy that decided to write an article about quitting smoking just because it sells online. I want to show you I am talking from my heart and experience about this. I was a heavy smoker for 16 years, and I wish I never put those cancer tubes in my mouth in the first place.
Second, I am at my seventh-year smoke-free, I see people smoke now, and I feel sorry for them, as I am sure they were people back in my smoking days that saw me and felt sorry for me like I feel now.
Third, I belong to that very rare category of people who quit smoking and never relapse.
Don’t get me wrong; I am not proud of being a cigarette smoker. I hope my personal experience will help other smokers out there who seek to cut the nicotine addiction also to quit smoking and taking back their life because let’s face it; smokers are slaves to nicotine; they are slaves to give their hard earned money to the tobacco companies day in and day out.
Tobacco smokers consider going out to smoke while their kids are sick, or a family member is lying on its death bed.They consider satisfying a technical and abnormal addiction their right, well, I am here to tell you a big NO, and I don’t care if I get accused of not being sensitive or not.
People, like I was eight years ago who kill themselves by smoking cigarettes, do not have any rights to kill others around them. Smoking cigarette is not a right; it’s an addiction, and that’s how you need to treat smokers, like all the rest of the addicts out there.
We allow people are smoking in front of us but seeing a man or a woman shooting heroin up his or her arm a crime! There is no difference people wake up, they are both drugs and actually as I already mentioned heroin addicts can quit their addiction easier than nicotine addicts.
There is two big major reasons heroin is illegal, and nicotine is not, one you have tobacco industries and in the recent year pharmaceutical companies with their tobacco-free products (nicotine chewing gum, nicotine patches, etc.) behind the commerce of tobacco, big lobbying, and competing interests. Lots of money are getting made on the nicotine addictions of millions of people on this planet.
Second, tobacco smoking and nicotine intoxication doesn’t kill as quick as heroin does. IT takes years for the cancerous effects of the tar and the toxic effects of nicotine to appear on our body.
Let me give you some sad mathematics; this is another excerpt from my chapter Smoking of my first book Thirsty for Health
“Sad Mathematics
Before I close this chapter, I want to go through with you an average evaluation of how many years of my life I lost by smoking.
So let’s assume that on an average day, I smoked 40 cigarettes, which is a good estimate of my previous smoking habit.
365 days in a year, times 40 cigarettes per day, equal 14,600 cigarettes a year.
I smoked for 16 years; if we multiply 14,600 cigarettes per year by 16, we get a total of 233,600 cigarettes smoked.
Now we multiply 233,600 cigarettes by 11, which is the number of minutes that you cut your life short with every cigarette you smoke; that gives us 2,569,600 minutes. We divide that by 60 to find out how many hours that is; it’s 42826.67 hours. Divide that by 24 and we have 1784.44 days. Divide that by 365 and we have approximately 4.89 years lost from smoking.
So I have lost almost five years of my natural life because of smoking, which was an addiction that offered me nothing and was robbing me of my health.
I only hope that with my running habit, which I started back in 2010 (five years ago now), I will gradually get back those years with my good health. I also hope that my vegan diet will help to keep me healthy.
How much money did I spend on average on cigarettes during those 16 years of smoking? A pack of cigarettes is, on average, about 3 Euros now (or about 3 dollars). Dividing the numbers of cigarettes I smoked (233,600 cigarettes) by the number in each pack (20 cigarettes), we get 11,680 packs; multiply that by 3 and we get 35,040 Euros ($35,040) that I spent to kill myself! I sure would love to have that kind of money saved in the bank, rather than smoked it.”
The purpose of this cited paragraph is to give you another second motive except your health to quit smoking, the economic one, look how much money I waste on my 16 years of smoking, 35 thousand Euros that’s about with the current currency 33 thousand dollars.
Shall I say anything else? I was stupid and addicted; I know a lot of stuff I could do with 33 thousand dollars right now!
Ok, enough bubbling around I am going to tell you how I quit smoking and never relapse. I am going to tell you what I did and maybe my way it will be your way as well, maybe you can use a portion of my tactic or not you never know until you try.
Here is another excerpt from my chapter Smoking of my first book Thirsty for Health
“What Helped Me Stop Smoking
- A strong state of mind. You should want to stop smoking, and you must not have any doubts about what is your goal and why are you doing it.
- Stopping for you. You should not stop as a favor for someone else. If you don’t stop smoking for yourself, then you will start smoking again once the conditions that led you to stop emerge.
- Stop smoking with a friend, a family member, or a group of people. The mutual emotional support is invaluable.
- Announcing to everyone you know that you are going to stop smoking: family, friends, colleagues, and others. It’s positive peer pressure.
- Removing anything that reminds you of smoking (whether in your car or house): lighters, matches, ashtrays, pipes, machines that roll cigarettes, snuff boxes; get rid of them all, even if some of them were presents from loved ones. Throw all smoking paraphernalia in the trash.
- Buying chewing gum, toothpicks, or drinking straws to chew on (or eat and drink instead of smoking; you might gain a few pounds, but your goal is to stop smoking, so you can worry about nutrition and live an otherwise healthy lifestyle later).
- Making a list of things to do instead, when the strong cravings and urges come knocking your door (and then following through).
- Making a calendar and crossing off every day that you are smoke-free.
- Keeping a diary to write down how you feel every day This will help you with your confidence (and yes, guys can do this, too; it’s not girly to keep a diary).
I hope sharing my smoking and stopping experience helps you to stop smoking or at least think about stopping smoking. Remember, no matter how many years you are smoking, it’s never too late to change. Here is a list of what happens after you stop smoking; the effects are phenomenal:
Within 20 Minutes
Your blood pressure returns to its usual level.
Your pulse rate slows to normal.
Your circulation has improved enough that your hands and feet warm to normal body temperature.
Within 4 Hours
Half of the carbon monoxide from your last cigarette has left your bloodstream.
Within 8 Hours
The carbon monoxide from your last cigarette is no longer in your bloodstream. Your blood now carries a normal amount of oxygen.
Within 24 Hours
Your chance of a heart attack is lower than when you were a smoker.
Within 48 Hours
Damaged nerve endings start to re-grow.
Your sense of smell and taste improve.
Within 2 Weeks to 3 Months
Your circulation is better since your last cigarette
Walking and physical activity is easier comparing than before
Lung function increases up to thirty percent.
Within 1 to 9 Months
You cough less.
You have more energy than before
You don’t become short of breath as easily.
The cilia in your lungs re-grow, and you will have less phlegm and infection.
Within 1 Year
Your heart attack risk has fallen to the halfway mark between that of a current smoker and that of someone who has never smoked.
Within 5 Years
If you used to smoke a pack a day, you have now cut your risk of dying of lung cancer in half.
Your risk of heart attack and stroke approaches that of a non-smoker.
You have cut your risk of mouth, throat, and esophageal cancer by half.
Within 10 Years
Your chance of dying from lung cancer is almost as low as a non-smoker’s.
Your risk of mouth, throat, esophageal, kidney and pancreatic cancer continues to diminish.
Within 10 to 15 Years
Your risk of dying from any cause is almost the same as that of someone who never smoked.
The way I did it
Now my secret is this; I know I left it for last, but if I were going to say it at the beginning, you would never read the article in the first place, just kidding relax.
Now my secret, my method of quitting smoking is doing it cold turkey. Yes, you hear me right, any other way will not guaranty you that you will stay smoke-free for life.
I repeat I was in your shoes eight years ago I was a NICOTINE JUNKIE AND A NICOTINE ADDICT, I know what I am talking.
You need to hang in there for at least the first three days where anxiety withdrawal symptoms peak. After three weeks the receptors in our brain will fall back to the number of receptors you observe in non-smokers brain. That’s when the urge to smoke will diminish considerably. All you have to face after that is no longer a nicotine addiction, but social smoking related addictions are meaning, I had coffee, I need to smoke, I had sex I need to smoke, I just ate I need to smoke, I went out to a club I need to smoke. You need to stay with people that are not smokers, so you realize that you can live and most importantly thrive as a non-smoker in this beautiful planet that we call earth.
Stay away from friends and relatives that smoke at the beginning until you get your self-esteem and self-confidence back, start exercising, incorporate more plant-based food in your diet, namely fruits and vegetables.
If you want to learn more about smoking and how I did it you can always check out my first book Thirsty for Health and also my newest book “How I quit smoking forever, my story.”
Also, two books I found very useful and informative are:
Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking
Freedom from Nicotine – The Journey Home
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