I agree with AVG.

On Thursday I will be 2 weeks without a ciggy and this is with no book.
Just shows you don't need the gum or whatever.

The book will tell you gum, patches or any other form of nicotine is just another way of getting your nicotine. Smoking is not a habit...it is an addiction. Remove the nicotine in any form. Quiting is all a state of mind.

Conga rats to all those quitting.

In this case, we love quitters. :yeah:

Best of luck to all of you. :salute:

Oh, a sticky, so we all can easily get here to point and laugh?

I hope Neal doesn't mind I stickied this thread as it is great people are quitting and maybe this can be encouragement.

Yep once the nicotine is removed your practically given up. When i started using the nicotine patches within minutes yes minutes not hours or days but minutes the craving disappeared - im speaking for myself not others for others the patches might not do a thing but for me it was a shock to the system in a good way. I was put on the highest dose of nicotine patches available for heavy smokers so thus might be the reason why it worked as ive heard of smokers having patches on one arm and smoking a cig with the other! - the dose wouldn't of been enough to help. I didn't even suffer from withdrawals etc thanks to the patches ., but the habit was still there - every time i had a coffee/beer or straight after dinner i would want a cigarette. I would just talk myself out of it or find something to do with my hands - this wanting a cig usually lasted about 10minutes i would just forget that i wanted one as i found myself doing something else.

Yup....and you really need to understand that! If you dont understand the mental mechanics behind smoking, it will be really hard for you to quit, because it will all be on willpower - you will loose!

I tried the patch when they first hit the market. They made me short of breath and I was still smoking with the patch on:shifty: I dumped those. I tried the gum once. No good. SNUS satisfied but I was only getting the nicotine in a different form. I found it best to just drop them and keep a positive mind. It seems to work. Tomorrow puts me at a week away from smoking.

What I have noticed:
Increased energy
coughing just about stopped (lungs working on getting it all the chemicals out)
House smells better
Car smells better
I smell better
I'm less stressed as I'm not worried about getting cigarettes
Food tastes better
I have money in my pocket. The same $5.00 in my wallet since a week ago
breathing much easier and I do not loose my breath walking up stairs

That list sure beats COPD and walking around with a O2 tank strapped to my back.

Why point and laugh?

The point is that getting over the physical addiction is the easiest part of quitting smoking.

All the gum and patches do, and i've tried both, is drag that out which makes getting over the psychological addiction that much more difficult.

Well for me i couldn't of done it without the patches i was to weak willed to do it any other way lol. I tried so many times over the years - cold turkey a form of herbal recipes, weight training, yoga, was even one time there going to try hypnosis which they say has a 99% success rate. I would never get past the first week when trying to kick the habit. Then i decided to try the patches and gave up within 3 weeks.

Its been a little over a year now since i gave up. A smoker for 22yrs.

I didn't have the coughing thing but now everything does feel better.

Maybe my lungs are too screwed to be cleaned but what I enjoy best is waking up in the morning without feeling tired and not having a sore throat.

The coughing for me was getting bad. It would wake me at night so I could hack up some of the nastiness. Since I stopped the coughing is just about gone and I sleep through the night.

It can take up to one year to clean out the lungs. From what I read it could be just a good cough in the morning or small coughs throughout the day. Either way your cilia is growing back and the cilia clean out the lungs.

All the best to anyone attempting to quit the dreaded weed :up:

I wish all you Quitters the very best. I've lost two close friends to COPD and Emphysema.

They both died a slow and painfull death.

It made me wakeup and go cold turkey. 4yrs Smoke free. :woot: