Smoking Sucks! Quit Smoking Now!

This page was inspired by an old friend who recently resolved to quit his longterm smoking habit. Way to go, Ted and all other new quitters!

His facebook status updates include posts such as

" non smoker for 9 days 5 hours and 36 minutes...saved 92 bucks...not smoked 230 cigs and gained 1 day 8 hours and 33 minutes to my life"

I'd love to find the handy tool he's using to calculate that, since I quit at midnight on May 10th, 1998. That would add up to an incredibly large number of dollars saved and time added to my life!

In today's dollars, if I were still smoking 20 cigs per day my dirty smoking habit would be costing

$56.00 per week, $240.00 per month, and $2920.00 per year.

That's an astronomical amount of hard earned money being flushed into somethat that would be slowly sucking my life away. Double that for the two of us, and multiply by 13 and you'll have the number our household has saved over the years.

See for yourself how much you'd be saving by quitting!
Calculate the Cost of Smoking

Many think this is the hard way to quit, but it worked for my husband and I.

What worked for me may not work for you, but I can tell you what made the difference in our situation.

1.Quit as a team.
If others in your household smoke, try to quit together. Several times one of us had attempted to quit separately unsuccessfully. The cravings and withdrawals are hard enough to handle without being faced with the added temptation of having others smoke infront of you. It wasn't until we made a commitment to quit together that we finally kicked the habit.

2.Set a Quit Date
We set a date two months in advance so we had plenty of time to mentally prepare ourselves for the challenge. We told everyone we knew were were quitting on that date so that we would feel pressured and be held accountable. We marked it with a big red circle on the calendar so we could see it every single day.

3. Smokes and Lighters or Matches
This goes against what everyone will tell you, but we purposely kept everything we would need to fail.Most will tell you to remove everything from the home. They'll advise you to get rid of the ashtrays, throw out or break all of the cigarettes, lose the lighter and matches so it's out of sight and out of mind. We took the exact opposite approach so that it became Us VS cigs. It was a battle we were NOT going to lose so we forced ourselves to face and conquer those cigarettes.

My husband kept a cigarette behind his ear, a package containing several cigarettes in his front pocket, and a lighter. I kept a full pack of smokes ontop of the fridge at home and had an assortment of ways to light them if I caved. While we were actively smoking things like running out of cigs or being unable to find a lighter would cause us to freak right out. Being in that situation while quitting may have led us to hop in the car and bolt out to the nearest convenience store to buy a new package of cigs and after all that effort to get them, we would have lit it up and lost the war. YMMV but hey, it worked for us.

4)Faith in a Higher Power
Again, this is my personal story so it would be incomplete without including what I consider to be the most important reason we were successful in quitting. Our religious beliefs gave us the strength to get through each day, minute by minute and hour by hour until the cravings subsided. We are not biblethumpers, and do not attend organized church services but we do have faith. Whatever your beliefs may be, in most corners of the world there is a God, entity or spirit that guides and assists those who ask for it. We asked, and we recieved.

Is nicotine a natural substance? Does it cause cancer?

Take this short little 5 question quiz about Nicotine Myths to see how much you know about cigarettes and nicotine.

Here are a few no smoking stickers I found for you to place around your home or office, in your vehicle, etc


Tar and nicotine collecting on your windshield can make it a hard to see through smeary mess, and the smell will linger long after the last smoldering ciggy is butt out in the heaping ashtray. Try hanging this on your rearview mirror to let everyone know you don't want them smoking in your car!



Remind yourself how glad you are to be a non smoker with one of these keychains or buttons!