Well done J, it's day 6 for me and I still feel ok.

I'm out on the beer on Wednesday evening for the second leg which will undoubtedly be my biggest test yet. Fingers crossed.

How are you getting on cycling to work Jeffers?

My first commute of the year today - felt really good. Just hope the frosty weather doesn't come back.

ps - don't bother with tracky bottoms - get yourself some of these bad boys:

It's day 15 for me, my most challenging day being when I was out on the beer for the Villa - B'burn game, followed by a poker game until 4am with 5 out of the 7 players being smokers, and smoking round the table.

Having got through that evening resisting temptation, I feel I should be ok.

(touch wood)

Well Done!!

Gradulaising yourself off over a period of 4 weeks is better, as you get yourself out of the habbit slowly but surely. look at this link to see if this gives you a lil push in the right direction bud. http://www.quit-smoking-stop.com/harmfu ... ettes.html
this is a passage from that link. quote
Tobacco smoke contains over 4,000 different chemicals. At least 50 are known carcinogens (cause cancer in humans) and many are poisonous.

My mate paid £75 to a hypnotist on Monday evening to give up smoking. I said your a cock and wasting your money as you will be smoking again By Wednesday.
It was a group session about 25 MUGS paying £75 each.

I was wrong..



He was smoking again Yesterday

your right dot, your mates are mugs lol

Funnily enough i wouldn't mind a pair of them. they look quite comfy!

Cycling was ok, but i am really out of practice. I have a bit of a bug at the moment, so haven't managed to cycle today.

Nice one. keep it up.

I went out saturday night and got more drunk than I usually do. in fact I hardly drink at all anymore. Anyway, i had a really close call with a cigarette, but managed to avoid it!

Although I have always failed to give up, I am not sure having one when pi55ed counts. If you consider yourself a non-smoker, and not have one the next day, when sober.

I should closet this with a tale about an old friend, who said he did not smoke. However, when he was drinking he would smoke 20 in a night . He started calling to go to the Pub more and more (he lived over the road), and then started when sober, and I was more sober

Out of practice? It's like riding a bike....

Bib shorts / tights are the dogs. Don't usually bother on the commute as it's only 10 miles, but on a longer ride they're pretty much essential. Very comfy with no cold spots on your back / riding up round the waist.

Just have to put up with the wife calling them Mankini's - plus you do need to be confident enough in your own body to turn up to work wearing lycra

And he lets you borrow 'em?

Have discovered that lycra doesn't offer much protection when sliding along the road at 20mph on your arse, so maybe tracky bottoms aren't such a bad idea Jeffers.

At least I was only wearing £10 Decathlon shorts. Picked a couple of quids worth of them out of my leg last night. If I was wearing my best bib shorts I'd not have been happy.

Unlucky Unc, own fault? My bibs haven't seen much action since I bought them early Dec. This and last week being only just commutable. Not been on a club run/training for over a month

Good luck with packing the weed in chaps. I quit around 18 months ago now. You wont know why you started in the first place after a while.

Yep - my fault. Turning right at lights but concentrating too much on the lights and not enough on the road. Lost traction on an oily patch in the middle of the road. Unlucky to hit oil, but should have spotted it. Garmin stats show me slowing from 34mph down to 20 and then suddenly zero. Bit sore but no major damage to me or the bike. Pretty spectacular slide though (pretty spectacular roadrash on my leg as well).

v impressed with the guys staying off the fags. How long is it before you'd say you'd really cracked it? 3 months, 6 months. Must be well on the way to quitting for good by now.

I still have the scars of my slide down a hill at 25mph+

From my point of view its a closed book and has been for a year I reckon. A mate has recently started up again after 6 months quiting He was doing fine too, just started again, bored or something Cycling at club level and smoking dont mix so I should be fine

A whole month gone by now and I am still smoke free!

Not really reaping the benefits yet as I still feeling ill and i have developed a bad cough as well now. At least it isn't a smokers cough!!!

I was waking in the morning and the first thing I would think about was a cigarette, but now it doesn't even enter my head (sometimes allday). When did that stop???

thats just a habitual neurotransmitter thats stopped working, because its noticed your systems have changed. when i quit i would reach for fags as my brain had got used to reaching for them, then my resolve would kick in and say no, it will make me ill.

well done so far mate. when i saw this programme on channel 5 last week about smokers who had developed cancer of the throat or tongue, and how it had damaged there faces, it was horrendus. enough to put you off for life. keep going bud.

Hows everyone getting on.
47 days gone by now and still no ciggies have touched my lips. Definately a lot easier to resist now although I have had some pretty strong urges at times, they don't last for very long.

Well done jeffers! Fantastic effort! Keep it up...

Nick_The_Game - when I gave up smoking I forced myself to sit through loads of Youtube adverts about throat cancer and mouth cancer etc... every time I found myself thinking one cig wouldn't hurt I watched one to remind me why I wanted to quit. Graphic, horrifying and sickening - when I smoked I would switch that shit over straight away, but when you want to give up it definitely helps.

49 days for me now, and I must say, I don't think it gets easier!!!

Anyone been through it before know when the urges and cravings simply disappear because although I feel like i've broke the habit, i feel as if I could smoke again anytime soon!!

Took about four months before I thought of myself as a non-smoker rather than someone who was giving up - but I still didn't trust myself when I'd had a drink, the cravings were still there. It took another couple of months before I was really confident I wouldn't give in to temptation. So probably about six months altogether.... Now, the thought of a cigarette makes me sick and I can't believe I ever used to do it

Just reading this post for the first time - I stopped nearly 5 weeks ago after 22 years - doing well on the cold turkey route will power only but out-of-the-blue I could murder a fag today so have come looking for some pearls of wisdom on here.

I'm definately gonna have to up the exercise regime because i'm whacking on the pounds at an alarming rate by shovelling food into my fat little face but I'm determined to stop so thats a small price to pay at the moment.

Hope everyone else on here is staying strong and resisting the urge

Excellent posts. I started smoking when I was around 25 Now smoke around 20 a day. I met my wife by asking her for a cigarette in a night club ( corny chat up line I know but it worked)
My wife who used to smoke around 25 to 30 a day has been smoke free for around 6 years and is the most smoker hater person I know.
She gave me Alan Carr's stop smoking DVD for xmas and it made a lot of sense.
I was tempted but collapsed at my first urge to smoke.
Paying £6 a packet was shocking as I normally stock up on our frequent holidays away from blighty.
She went to France last Monday and I gave her £320 to get me 1400
The key I think to packing up is really wanting to pack up not just feeling that you should.
Have set myself a target now of packing up after I have got through this latest batch which ties in nicely with a holiday abroad. How can I pack up when a friend we are going with is a chain smoker?
Wish me luck.

If you really wanted to pack up you would do it now and not prevaricate and say you will when your supply runs out (which ties in nicely with another holiday wher you can buy them cheap )

Good luck mate but remember you won't top unless you want to, have a peek at mouth cancer pics on google images and sack it off now (that worked for me in my weakness this morning)...smoking is just not worth it in the slightest...sell your chain-smoking mate the foreign fags at a discount if you have to, whatever you lose you'll make back in savings in no time

So true

Cotinued good luck to all those who want to stop and are giving it a go.

I smoked for the best part of 20 years and have now been smoke-free for 5 and a half years. I still get the odd weird craving to have a cig but they're very few and far between now. When I first stopped, I was getting these little urges a lot. I worked out why they started to go away; it was because my brain was de-programming itself of all the little excuses I had for lighting up - cup of coffee, pint of beer, after food, and so on. You would be amazed how many hundreds of these little triggers are wired into your brain.

The secret to beating these hooks is realising they are they. Quite often, I found an urge coming up when I did something I hadn't done since before stopping, like say getting off a plane. But as soon I realised why that particular urge had come, it was back in its box and never came out again. Gradually these triggers have been erased and there are very few left now, if any, hence why I get so few urges nowadays.

As others have said, you have to want to stop. Don't see it as giving up anything, except an addiction. Alan Carr is right when he says the only reason you want another cigarette is that you are suffering withdrawal symptoms from the previous one, or your brain is still de-programming itself from that addiction.

I stumbled twice in my five smoke-free years - one a drag on a funny cigarette that was being passed round at a party. The other was a drag on someone else's cig at the funeral of a friend. The former of those was me bing silly but the latter felt like a ritualistic thing, as my mate who died loved his cigs and it was a tribute to him. (No, they didn't kill him). And that should be that for me.

And, yes, you do get your sense of smell back. I'm now very intolerant of anyone smoking near me; when I was in Spain just recently, I was in a bar where people snoked and when I got back to the hotel, I could smell it on me and my clothes the next morning., Yuck! To think I had to put up with that before the smoking ban. Happily now I can wear the same pair of trousers the next day - as long as I didn't spill any beer on them!