I Quit Smoking In 2011

I quit, Yay! by Perlyyyy
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I know there's always an excuse, but just like losing weight, you need to find a reason to do it and run with it. For some people it's difficult to see past tomorrow, so quitting smoking to extend our life may not be the right reason to motivate you. No matter what you do, find your motivation and run with it.

I found that a major motivator for me was greed. I downloaded an app for my cell phone where I have entered the day that I quit smoking, the amount of money a pack of cigarettes was costing me, and the amount of cigarettes that I smoked a day. The app then keeps track of how many cigarettes that I have not smoked and how much money I have saved since July 9th, 2011. I think I am up to $500 as of September 27th, 2011. For someone who is trying real hard to take care of debt, pissing away $500 killing myself is pretty difficult to fathom.

There were other motivators for me as well, but I think that I am personally ready to share them with the world yet.

HELP SAVE A LIFE TODAY!DON'T IRRITATE ME!I AM T... by HABITBRAKER
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No matter how motivated you are, you need to understand the effects that nicotine has on the body before you quit. Understanding the side effects gave me the knowledge to get through the tough first 4 days.

1. The average cigarette raises your heart rate enough to burn 20 calories, so you need to understand that your metabolism will lower. Originally I wanted to finish losing weight and get to my goal before quitting, but I realized that this was just another excuse that the nicotine had put into my head to delay the inevitable. In order to fight this, you will need to make up for this deficit. So if you smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, you will need to burn an extra 200 through exercise or cutting back on food in order to maintain your weight. An idea that may help would be to get up and walk around the block when you get a craving for a cigarette, you will be burning calories and keeping yourself occupied during your craving.

2. The cravings suck. However, they only last 3 minutes. That's right, get through 3 minutes and you will have gotten through the craving.

3. While your craving may only last 3 minutes, that 3 minutes may seem like a lifetime. Believe it or not, one of the side effects of quitting smoking is time seems to stand still. I don't know if this was made worse by the fact that I quit in the summer, so working was even more difficult on my brain, but you should expect time to drag for the first 4 days.

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What worked to help me quit, may not work for you, but these are the tricks that I used to get through the first week of not smoking. I have to admit that once I was through that, it has been a lot easier.

1. I found something else to do in the car. Like many smokers, the first thing I always did when I got in the car was light up. With a half hour commute to work every day, getting through this habit was going to be difficult. I already had a good habit that I had developed while I was smoking and that was flossing my teeth with those portable flossers. So, instead of lighting up right away, I grabbed a flosser from the bag. Once I was done with my teeth, I would chew on it to keep my mouth busy. I would also keep the window all of the way down while I was driving, since my hair was extremely long at the time, there was no way I could smoke with the window down because I would have singed half of my hair off.

2. I am a pretty private person in my real life, so I chose not to tell anyone right away. I doing like a lot of people making a big deal about my accomplishments and I felt that telling everyone would put too much stress on me. If someone asked me about it, I would share, but for the most part I was just going through my normal life, just without smokes.

3. For me, cold turkey was the way to quit. For someone my age, nicotine is the most dangerous part of smoking and I didn't want to risk getting addicted to nicotine replacement therapies. Also, I tried the patch once and didn't like it, it was a pain in the rear to get off of my skin because I was too much of a wuss to just rip it off. I do not like taking prescription drugs, so I didn't want to go the Chantix route either.