Kicking the habit

When I was younger, I was renowned among my friends for being a smoker. I started after taking a few puffs on a stub found in the ashtray of my parents car when I was about 10. By around 12, I was joining my brother in the loft having cheeky ciggies before becoming a fully fledged smoker who was known to even smoke 40 a day (albeit only on occasion). It wasn't the healthiest of lifestyles for a young girl but it's what I did.

That was until, in my mid twenties, I read 'C Because cowards get cancer too...' by John Diamond. An amazing writer, he told his story, his battle with cancer and what it did to him physically and his family emotionally. I had bought the book for my father who had recently had cancer and yet after picking it up and reading those first few pages, I had no choice I felt, but to give up smoking. For the first time, I realised what puffing on a little white stick could do to me and it scared the shit out of me.

So, almost ten years later and still smoke free, I am trying to get my twin off the weed. Here was my advice, for what it's worth:

Top tips:

1. Keep cigarettes and lighter in the house but don't go near them, and get rid of ashtrays (if you are anything like me, not having them in the house will make you want them more). If you know they are there, it makes it easier to get on with the job of giving up (i.e. YOU are in control).

2. Get supplies of chewing gum. Smoking is more often just a form of habit. You are used to lighting up with your coffee first thing in the morning and whilst waiting for the bus, chew gum at the times you would normally smoke. Pop one in as soon as you finish a meal. When you would normally light up after eating, the taste of chewing gum, as well as the action, will put you off the need for having a ciggie.


3. Thirdly, 'C Because cowards get cancer too...'

4. Finally, remember the reason you are giving up. It is a habit that will kill you and not in an easy, you go to sleep and close your eyes and die in your sleep way. Millions of people every year use their hard earned cash to pay towards having a horrendously painful death (lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, blood clots - in the UK, smoking kills five times more people than road accidents, overdoses, murder, suicide and HIV all put together).

When you put it like that, it's amazing that anyone smokes at all - think about it, if someone said to you when you started smoking, "give me £50,000 and I will knock ten years off your life, 10 years more you could have spent with your family, husband, kids and grandchildren and, what's more, for free, I will throw in an extremely painful and potentially long suffering death, one that you will not only endure and see you struggling to breathe but, one that your family, children and grandchildren and husband will have to watch you go through", would you do it? Would you smoke?

So there you have it. Having read my tips, my sister is doing OK, although I will refrain from seeing her... for a few weeks at least.