Smoking - am I a dumbass or what?

When I was a kid, I hated my mother's smoking habit. Back then, every once in a while she would ask me to go to the shop to get her some cigarettes & quite often I would refuse, even if she sweetened the deal with a little money in it for me to buy whatever I wanted to. Sometimes I'd buckle & go, not because of the money - I would usually buy comics with the money rather than sweets, as I've never had a particularly sweet tooth, but rather because she would cajole me into it by pleading & then whining and I would eventually go in order to have a quiet life.
I would lecture her on the dangers of smoking, what it would do to her and plead with her to stop. I think I even hid her pack once or twice and maybe put a pack in the bin once.

Then, at the age of 16 I crossed the line which made me into a hypocrite, I took up smoking. To this day I still don't know why. I was working in a chip shop and the owner used to say, "go have a fag break," to which I used to reply, "but I don't smoke!" and he'd reply, "yeah I know, just go have a break." in a slightly exasperated tone.

For some reason one day he said it & I though, "Hell with it! If I'm going to have a fag break, I might as well have a fag!" and asked one of the other girls who worked there for one. I expected to do the usual, light-inhale-hack-choke-never smoke again, type of thing but instead I lit it, inhaled without incident and proceeded to smoke up to 20 a day for the next five years. Then one day when I was 21, I was walking home smoking and I thought, "I'm really not enjoying this anymore. It tastes like shit." I put it out and decided to quit as suddenly as I decided to start.

I decided I needed a gimmick to help me quit as I had tried before without success. I decided to leave one cigarette in a packet on top of my T.V. and the thinking behind this was that I still had one left, so I didn't have an excuse to go buy another packet, avoiding the "I'll quit after I've finished this packet," problem. Secondly, I only had to resist one fag - not as hard as resisting lots of imagined cigarettes when you don't have any. I had the fallback of having one there at the ready if I wanted one and all I had to do was not smoke it.

This worked for me and I quit smoking for the next 8 years. Then at 29, several events happened that turned my life as I knew it upside down, the main one being that I was dumped by my long term girlfriend who I'd spent the last 11 years with. After that happened I decided on a new start, so I moved cities. Between the move, trying to find a job, getting over the end of a long relationship and adapting to single life, I started smoking again. After 8 years without a cigarette I broke and have been smoking ever since. I did quit again for 6 weeks at one point but otherwise I've been smoking anything up to about 20 a day again.

I've been feeling pretty rough when I've been smoking the last few days and I got to thinking about my stepdad, who started smoking at 15 and who at 60, has got a lung and breathing disorder and has now been told that if he doesn't quit smoking, he won't see 65.
So I've decided to quit again and I didn't smoke yesterday or today. It's been OK but there have been some tough moments. Earlier I came as close to buckling as I have so far but held fast in the end.

I can foresee two problems: One is that I might put on weight. I've heard that smoking is an appetite suppressant and also people eat when they stop smoking because it gives them something else to do with their hands & mouths. Strangely, when I quit about a year or so ago for 6 weeks, I actually lost weight, to the point that I got to my thinnest that I've been as an adult. My trick there was simply to recognise when I felt I wanted to eat and decide whether it was just because of the smoking or if I was genuinely hungry. I made a rule that I was only allowed to eat if I was genuinely hungry and that would be proven if my stomach growled. If my stomach didn't growl, I wasn't really hungry & couldn't have something to eat. I continued this rule for a while after I started smoking again & it served me well. I remember reading that most of the time when you think you want something to eat your body actually is thirsty, so you should drink instead. So whenever I felt like something to eat, I would have a glass of orange juice. If my stomach growled I would eat, but even then I would only eat small portions and stop eating when I still felt a little hungry. This way I would be full after 20 minutes but not overly full and bloated, which is how I used to feel after every meal because I ate until I was full without giving my food time to settle. I started measuring out my food when cooking - not with exact measurements or anything boring and long winded, but instead I got a plate, put some food on it and looked at it on the plate. If it looked like a lot, I took some off. If it looked about right, I cooked it. After a little while my stomach shrank and I was no longer able to even contemplate eating the sort of amounts I used to. I felt pretty good like this and dropped from 15 stone which I was at my heaviest, to 11 & 1/2 stone. I no longer had a round face that to me looked like a potato with a beard, I had a pretty flat stomach & I just generally felt better. Sadly I fell out of this habit a little while back and fell back into bad habits of eating when I wasn't properly hungry and also eating far too much food, which has always been my biggest problem.

The second problem is that it's Monday tomorrow. I've spent the weekend with my girlfriend, who is very supportive and despite really wanting me to stop, (she quit about 3 years ago,) she hasn't nagged me about it and has found many interesting diversions to take my mind off wanting to smoke. Tomorrow I go back to work where pretty much everyone smokes. There's a real community based around going outside for a fag break & there are even one or two of the type of people who sneer at you for wanting to quit. That doesn't bother me so much, as I can always go outside and stand and chat with people without smoking as it will get me used to being around people who do without doing it myself, plus if people want to sneer, that's fine with me. I know that comes from a place of insecurity - it's their way of doing the 'you're not one of us', playground crap. I like to be able to fit in with people, but I do it on my terms. I didn't start smoking because of peer pressure and I'm not going to keep smoking to fit in with other people either. If they don't like that, then that's their problem, not mine. Anyway, the biggest problem will be if I get stressed at work, my normal response is to have a cigarette - not straight away, otherwise I'd spend most of the day outside, smoking, but that release is there for me.

I understand the science behind it, in that smoking doesn't really relax you, rather it increases your heart rate and bocks the production of serotonin in the brain, (the brain's own 'happy drug',) making it harder to feel happy and relaxed when you smoke than when you don't, but to be honest I think you can understand all the scientific explanations in the world but they won't help because smoking is a response to emotional needs. The number of times I've stood smoking and been thinking, "This is essentially poison in a tube, by smoking this I am putting myself at risk of cancer, emphysema, bronchial problems, etc etc, and then taken another drag.

Anyway, I'm doing OK so far, and I'll continue to try to resist temptation, not only of smoking but also of eating when I don't need to and I'll update you as to how I'm getting on.