Welcome to My Quit Smoking Challenge

Today I have taken my first step towards becoming a non-smoker. I will start blogging about my experiences with the Think Quit program tomorrow morning. But today, I thought it might be useful for you and certainly for me, to provide some background.

I have been a smoker for almost 20 years. My parents are smokers, my sister is a smoker and my brother is an ex-smoker. I was 20 years old when my 19 year old brother taught me how to inhale. Although I had shared many cigarettes with my girlfriends in high school, up until that point I had never really inhaled. Not that I blame my brother at all, like me he grew up surrounded by cigarette smoke and at the end of the day, the choice to start smoking was mine and mine alone.

It was April 1990 and there was already quite a lot known about the dangers of smoking. But like a lot of those I knew, I thought smoking was an effective way of managing stress. I also lost a lot of weight when I started smoking and being at an age when being thin was everything, I was soon hooked. Over the next five years or so my decision to start smoking and to continue smoking was reinforced again and again (I’ll go into that in more detail over the coming days).

Fast forward to February 2010.

I was inspired by Tania McCartney’s ‘My no-sugar, no-wheat, no-dairy, no-alcohol Challenge‘. For more than a week now I’ve watched Tania faithfully document her journey using only Anna Richardson’s Body Blitz Diet book as her guide. Like Tania, I’ve been delighted with the amount of web traffic her blog posts have received and I would encourage those of you who have been following Tania’s journey to help her along by adding some comments to her daily blog postings on the website. Although she is one determined lady, like all of us, she needs to know someone is out there reading her entries and cheering her on from the sidelines.

Anyway, I was just thinking about doing something similar with the Think Quit book when a publicist from Allen & Unwin contacted me about a free quit smoking seminar in Sydney, where the author of Think Quit, Mark Stephens, was planning to hypnotise 100 smokers in front of TV cameras for a national television program. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, they haven’t released the name of the TV program yet. But I will let you know once this information comes to hand.

So initially, I was just going to volunteer to be one of those hypnotised. But after talking it over with Kate from Allen & Unwin, I decided to take a leaf out of Tania McCartney’s book and share my experiences on the web in the hope it might actually inspire others to quit smoking.

I already had a review copy of Mark’s book on my desk and I was quite taken with the press release of the book and in particular:

Of use to everyone from the casual or social smoker to the 60 a day lifetimer, Think Quit combines Allen Carr with Paul McKenna and a touch of Bruce Lee for life changing results.

Cool, Bruce Lee! Although it’s a tenuous link to the Kung Fu master, it’s a link just the same and being a child of the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s, my interest was piqued.

Where I came unstuck during my first reading of the book was the ‘smoking diary’. For 7 days you are required to write down every cigarette smoked, what triggered it and how you felt about it. After 4 hours of this I tossed the diary aside. I found the process of keeping a smoking diary to be a major disruption to my daily routine and to my work as a writer. You see, I’m one of those writers who smokes like a chimney when I’m working. You know the type, you’ve probably seen one or more of these characters in Hollywood movies – fag hanging out of their mouth while their fingers tap away at a keyboard. Knowing this, I am concerned that I won’t be able to write without a cigarette. But I’m assured that this will pass.

Despite the illusion created by Hollywood movies, I can attest to the fact that most writers are non-smokers. I recall attending a one day romance writers conference in Sydney back in 2005 and being quite bewildered by the fact that I was only one of 3 smokers out of the 60 or so who were in attendance. Maybe it’s the just the romance genre, but I don’t think so.

What, or should I say who, convinced me to give the smoking diary another try was Kate at Allen & Unwin. She successfully completed the Think Quit program back in December 2009 and she gave me some great tips for maintaining a smoking diary. Being a busy woman with an active social life, she didn’t always have time to stop and fill out the diary. So she would carry a pen with her and just mark the number of cigarettes she had on the palm of her hand or on the inside of her arm. This way if she was walking down the street or socialising with friends, she didn’t have to stop what she was doing and whip out her diary whenever she lit up a cigarette. Of course she must have looked quite a sight after a night out on the town with friends, with all those pen marks on her arm.

But Kate’s little pep talk worked. As I write this on my PC at home, I’m noting down each cigarette on a piece of paper and using my own system of short hand to minimise the disruption to the writing process. When I’m done I will transfer this data over to the smoking diary that is included in the Think Quit book.

The author of Think Quit, Mark Stephens says that keeping a smoking diary is the most important part of preparing to quit because the information collected in the smoking diary will be used to identify your smoking triggers and create strategies to combat them. Therefore, it is vital that you don’t skip this step during your 7 days of preparation prior to quitting.

Related Posts:

• My Quit Smoking Challenge: I hit a wall on DAY FIVE and I have to start over

• My Quit Smoking Challenge: self hypnosis and the turtle

• My Quit Smoking Challenge: DAY THREE

• My Quit Smoking Challenge: DAY TWO

• My Quit Smoking Challenge: DAY ONE

• Looking for 100 Volunteers to Quit Smoking on TV

I would like to hear from others who are taking the quit smoking challenge and from those of you who are thinking about quitting  or have already kicked the habit. I welcome your contributions by way of the comments section below and/or by posting in the Quit Smoking Challenge forum on AWO Connect.

Main photo credit: www.thinkquit.com.au

Think Quit: smoke free forever by Mark Stephens is published by Allen & Unwin and is available now at book retailers across Australia (RRP $24.99). The book is due for release in the United States in June 2010.

YOU CAN BUY THIS BOOK ONLINE AT:

SeekBooks.com.au – $19.99

TheNile.com.au – $22.49

QBD The Bookshop – $24.99

Amazon.com – released in the United States in June 2010