quitting smoking

[chef]

Ouch! smoking's not THAT bad for you

haha beat me to it ravello

[BoredBloke]

I gave up about 4 years ago. The way I did it was

1 - work out how much I was spending on cigs. That more than the health benefits gave me an incentive.
2 - got my wife to give up at the same time. We had this rule that if one person smokes then the other will. So because I didn't want her to and she didn't want me to, neither of us did.
3 - as snaw said earlier try to anticipate the triggers. For me, a really stupid one was a speed camera on the A40 just by the Greenford turn off. I knew that if I lit up at that speed camera, I could finish my cig by the time I got to the gates at work. Once I gave up I found my hand would literally itch. Once I was aware of this I could anticipate this.
4 - don't have any cigs around as you will make up an excuse to have one.
5 - don't make any rules up like only smoking when you go out etc. It doesn't work.

I did it by going cold turkey while my wife used the patches (good thing that I worked at GSK at the time and could get them for £4.39 instead of the £17 they were charging at Tescos). A bit later on my mother in law gave up and she was a 40-60 a day person. She did it through being hypnotised. While it didn't remove the will power part of things it did help a lot. She'd tried many times in the past to give up without any joy.

When I go out for a beer I could still murder a cig. What I found straight after was that when I went out I got pi55ed more because instead of holding a cig I would hold my pint. As a result I tended to finish it quicker and so drink more pints per night. The good thing is my lungs should be much healthier now although I am awaiting a liver transplant

[Bob Dalek]

As Willie Rushton so wisely said, "Stop putting cigarettes in your mouth and lighting them."

Or, as Mark Twain said, "Stopping smoking is easy: I have done so thousands of times."

[DS23]

the urge to smoke is a test of your resolve. how determined are you to stop? your nicotime nemesis will be tricksy but you can do it!

my wife and i stopped smoking when our first born was conceived over 9 years ago. for us there was no option but to stop - so we stopped. actually, i found it remarkably easy depite having been quite a heavy cigar smoker - i just needed a reason not to smoke that was more signficant than the urge to smoke. everybody is different though. money, smell, health... focus on one of those and use it as a weapon against the urges that will twist inside your gut.

good luck.

chefs shouldn't smoke!