Easy Way to Stop Smoking (12 page)

Just think of it this way. If you had a nice new car and allowed it to rust without bothering to do anything about it, that would be pretty stupid. It wouldn't be the end of the world though; it is only a question of money and you could always buy another. Your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. You only get one. It's a cliché that our health is our most valued asset. How true that is, as any sick millionaire will tell you. Who could conceive of a more ridiculous pastime than to spend a fortune for the privilege of poisoning the vehicle upon which your very life depends?

Wise up. You don't have to smoke, and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU.

Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself, if you knew for certain that your next cigarette would be the one that triggered off the cancer in your body, whether you would actually smoke it. Forget the disease itself (it's difficult to imagine something so painful) but imagine that you have to go to your local cancer hospital to suffer through the endless rounds of chemo. Now you are not planning the rest of your life. You are planning your death. What is going to happen to your family and loved ones? How would it feel to have your hopes and dreams smashed to a pulp in a single heartbeat? Your whole life snatched from you to be replaced by emptiness, terror and an excruciatingly painful and humiliating death? How would you even begin to explain it to your children?

The saddest part of my job is that I often see people to whom this has happened. Of course, they are just like you and me, they never thought it would happen to them either, but it does. The worst thing that happens isn't even the disease itself; it's the knowledge that they only have themselves to blame and the guilt they feel towards their innocent families. All our lives as smokers we say, ‘I'll quit tomorrow'. But tomorrow never comes, does it?

Those poor smokers all say the same thing: ‘If only I could turn the clock back…' Sadly, this is the one thing they can't do.

You have a golden opportunity to save your life by breaking free from this awful addiction and the limitless pain and suffering it brings to so many millions of lives. You have a choice. Make no mistake; if you choose to continue to smoke after reading this book, you'll be a smoker for the rest of your life. Is this really the future you are choosing for yourself and your family?

At the beginning of the book I promised you no scare tactics. If you have already decided to become a non-smoker, this does not fall into that category. If you are still in doubt, skip the
remainder of this chapter and come back to it when you have read the rest of the book.

Volumes of statistics have already been published about the damage that cigarettes can cause to the smoker's health. The trouble is that until the smoker decides it is time to stop, he goes to great lengths to avoid being exposed to such information. He doesn't want to know. Even the on-pack health warning is a waste of time because the smoker doesn't even register it. And if he does see the warning, it is likely to cause anxiety and stress, which will make him want a cigarette.

Smokers tend to think of the health hazard as a hit-or-miss affair, a bit like Russian roulette. Get it into your head: the deterioration to your health is already happening. Every time you take a drag you are breathing cancer-triggering fumes deep into your lungs, and lung cancer—horrific as it is—is by no means the worst of the killer diseases that cigarettes cause or contribute to.

While I was still smoking, I'd never heard of arteriosclerosis or emphysema. I knew the permanent wheezing and coughing and the increasingly frequent attacks of bronchitis and asthma were a direct result of my smoking. But although they caused me real discomfort there was no real pain.

I confess that the thought of contracting lung cancer terrified me, which is probably why I just blocked it from my mind. It's amazing how the fear of the horrendous health risks associated with smoking is overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It's not so much that the fear of quitting is greater, just that it's a more immediate one. The fear of contracting lung cancer is a fear of something that might happen at some point in the future, so we can distance ourselves from the risk and the fear it creates. We think, ‘Who knows? I might not get it. Surely I will have quit by then?'

We tend to think of smoking as a tug-of-war. On the one side we have the fear that it's killing us, costing a fortune and
making us a slave and an addict. On the other side, it's our pleasure or crutch. It never occurs to us that these perceived ‘benefits' of smoking are really just more thinly disguised fears: the fear that I won't be able to have fun, relax or handle stress without the cigarette. Of course both sets of fear are caused by the cigarette. And I hardly need to point out that non-smokers have none of these fears.

As I have said before, it's not so much that we genuinely enjoy smoking, but that we get miserable when we can't. This is not genuine pleasure, it is an attempt to avoid discomfort—a discomfort that non-smokers don't get.

Think of a heroin addict deprived of his drug and going through withdrawal. He is miserable, stressed, panicky and experiencing severe physical symptoms. Now picture that same addict's utter relief when he shoots up and is able to remove those awful symptoms. Non-heroin addicts don't suffer that panic feeling. The heroin causes it. The subsequent dose partially relieves the symptoms, but also ensures that addict will go through withdrawal again. So the addict shoots up again to remove the symptoms and the cycle of addiction continues. Why is all this so obvious with other people's addictions, but not our own?

Non-smokers don't get anxious, panicky or stressed when they can't smoke. The cigarette causes those symptoms and the next cigarette partially relieves them. But the smoker withdraws from that cigarette too, and the need to smoke returns. So the smoker has to light up again and again.

The fear of contracting lung cancer scared me but didn't make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. You either got away with it or you didn't. It didn't even occur to me that I didn't have to walk through the minefield in the first place. I felt that I knew the risks and that it was my own business and nobody else's. If a non-smoker ever tried to make me aware of those risks I would defend my rights
vigorously, using the evasive tactics all addicts adopt to attempt to justify the unjustifiable.

‘You have to die of something'

Of course you do, but is that a logical reason for deliberately shortening your life?

‘Quality of life is more important than longevity'

Exactly, but surely you are not suggesting that the quality of life of an alcoholic or heroin addict is better than that of someone that isn't addicted to alcohol or heroin? Do you really believe that a smoker's quality of life is better than a non-smoker's? Surely the smoker loses on both counts—his life is both shorter and more miserable
.

‘My lungs probably suffer more damage from car exhaust fumes than from smoking'

Even if that were true (it isn't), is that a logical reason for punishing your lungs further? Can you possibly conceive of anyone being stupid enough to actually put their mouth over a tailpipe and deliberately inhale those fumes into their lungs? And pay for the privilege?

THAT'S WHAT SMOKERS EFFECTIVELY DO!

Think of that next time you watch a smoker inhale good and deep on one of those ‘precious' cigarettes!

I can understand why the congestion and the risks of contracting lung cancer didn't help me quit. I could cope with the former and close my mind to the latter. As you are already aware, my method is not to frighten you into quitting, but the complete opposite—to make you realize just how more enjoyable your life will be when you have escaped.

However, I do believe that if I could have seen what was happening inside my body, this would have helped me to quit. Now I'm not referring to the shock technique of showing the smoker's lung next to that of a non-smoker (I figured that both subjects were pretty dead). Anyway, it was obvious to me from my nicotine stained teeth and fingers that my lungs were unlikely to be a pretty sight. Provided they kept functioning, they were less of an embarrassment than my teeth, breath and fingers—at least no-one could see or smell my lungs.

What I am referring to is the progressive clogging up of our arteries and veins and the gradual deterioration of every muscle and organ caused by depriving them of oxygen and other nutrients. Even worse is that we replace these nutrients with poison and deadly compounds such as carbon monoxide.

Like the majority of motorists, I don't like the thought of dirty oil or a dirty oil filter in my car engine. Could you imagine buying a brand new Cadillac and never changing the oil or the oil filter? Or even worse, deliberately adding impurities that you know will ruin the engine? That is precisely what we do to our bodies when we become smokers.

Until very recently, the tobacco industry denied that nicotine is addictive (to this day the word ‘addictive' does not appear on US cigarette pack health warnings) or that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema etc. The industry and its apologists hide behind an argument based on something called etiology. Their argument goes something like this: because we know that many things (possibly thousands) might contribute to the formation of cancer cells, it is impossible to blame one thing (i.e. the cigarette), so long as even one of these other so-called confounding factors is also present. You can never be certain, they argue, which caused the cancer. Using this as a model, it is impossible to prove that banging your head against a brick wall causes headaches, so long as another co-factor (listening to Swiss yodeling music, for example) is present.

While I strongly support the right of everyone to have their own opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts. To argue that smoking doesn't cause these diseases is stupid and dangerous. I also find it incredibly callous and disrespectful to the millions of smokers who have paid the ultimate price, to say nothing of their families left behind.

One needs only to see the mountain of cigarette butts outside the cancer wards of hospitals around the country to see the link between the two.

The statistical evidence in support of the dangers of smoking is so overwhelming as not to need further debate here. No one ever scientifically proved to me exactly why, when I bang my thumb with a hammer, it hurts. I soon got the message.

I must emphasize that I am not a doctor, but I didn't need to be to know that my permanent cough, congestion, frequent asthma and bronchitis attacks were directly related to my smoking. This was confirmed to me in the strongest possible way when I quit smoking and all of the symptoms either disappeared or improved dramatically. You don't need to be a doctor—or a rocket scientist—to know that smoking is bad for you. The only question in the smoker's mind is whether they can survive it or whether it'll kill them.

In my view, the most devastating damage the smoker experiences is to his immune system. Every species on the planet is under constant attack from germs, viruses, parasites, etc. The best defense we have is our immune system, which routinely protects us from these types of attacks. But how can our immune system function effectively when we are starving our body of the oxygen and nutrients it needs to thrive and survive? How can it work properly for you when it is under constant attack from the poisons contained in tobacco smoke? It's bad enough that smoking causes so many life-threatening conditions, but what is worse is that it on top of this, it also works, like AIDS, to brutalize our immune system making us less able to fight off other diseases, infections and conditions.

Many of the adverse effects that smoking had on my health, some of which I had been suffering from for years, did not become apparent to me until many years after I had quit smoking.

While I was busy despising those idiots and cranks who would rather lose their legs than quit smoking, it didn't even occur to me that I was already suffering from arteriosclerosis myself. I attributed my gray complexion to my natural coloring and an unhealthy aversion to exercise. I didn't realize that it was due to the blocking up of my capillaries caused by smoking (incidentally along with smelling a lot nicer, a vastly improved complexion is one of the first things that people will notice about you when you quit, and it usually happens within a week or so). I had varicose veins in my thirties, which have disappeared since I stopped. About five years before I quit I began to have this weird sensation in my legs. It wasn't a sharp pain, just a persistent, restless, slightly sore stiffness. I would get Joyce to massage my legs every night. About a year after I quit I realized that I hadn't needed a massage since a few days after quitting.

About two years before I quit, I would occasionally get violent pains in my chest, which I feared must be lung cancer but now assume to have been angina. I haven't had a single attack since I quit.

When I was a child I used to bleed profusely from cuts. This frightened me. No one explained to me that bleeding was a natural and necessary part of the healing process and that the blood would clot when it needed to. Later in life I would sustain quite deep cuts yet hardly bleed at all. This brown-red gunge would ooze from the cut.

The color worried me. I knew that blood was meant to be bright red and I assumed I had some sort of blood disease. However I was pleased about the consistency, because it meant I no longer bled so profusely. Not until I quit did I learn that smoking thickens the consistency of your blood and that the brownish color was due to the lack of oxygen. It didn't particularly bother me at the time because I was blissfully ignorant,
but today with hindsight it is this that scares me the most about smoking. I used to deny that smoking caused heart disease. In fact, it's a miracle our hearts can stand up to the punishment—being required to pump this ever-thickening gunge throughout our body without ever once missing a beat. It made me realize, not how fragile we are, but how robust, strong and ingenious that incredible machine is!