Why setting a quit date may be the most important decision you make — and how you can do it without breaking into a cold sweat
• How a no-risk strategy called a “mini-quit” can be the most manageable and confidence-boosting tactic to prepare you for your big day
• How your body will begin repairing itself within twenty minutes after your last cigarette
• Why nicotine patches, gum, and lozenges are quite safe, and why they may be among your most helpful allies in your effort to quit
• How your life can change in amazing ways that you may not be able to even imagine today
Why Listen to Us?
So who are we, and what do we know about quitting smoking? We’re the 200 highly trained smoking-cessation coaches, also known as “quit coaches,” at Alere Wellbeing, a Seattle-based company that for 25 years has been helping smokers in all 50 states quit smoking with our Quit For Life Program. Many of us used to smoke, so we know what you are facing because we’ve faced it ourselves. Every day we coach more than 1,000 smokers over the phone, guiding them, with compassion and straight talk, through the process of giving up cigarettes. Our program is backed by the American Cancer Society, and our methods follow the U.S. Clinical Practice Guideline for Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence, produced by a panel of national experts under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. If you read the Guideline,1 you will find more than 850 references to cited studies, many of them involving our methods.
In short, we know what we’re doing.
In our phone coaching and in this book, we don’t offer gimmicks. We don’t promise that you’ll magically not want to smoke. We are promising something much more real: a step-by-step, scientifically sound plan that has been used by two million tobacco users.
How to Use This Book
The book guides you through a logical progression that demystifies the quitting process and makes it achievable for even the most hard-core lifetime smoker. We suggest you read the chapters in order, but we also encourage you to go back and reread chapters for additional support or reinforcement. For example, if you get to Chapter 9, Controlling Your Environment, and you’re still afraid to throw that last pack away, then it may be time to go back and reread Chapter 2, Overcoming Your Fears About Quitting.
The book is divided into three parts:
PART I: Before You Quit
Relax! You won’t start off by quitting! As you read the first five chapters, you’ll simply start thinking about quitting. We’ll explain why giving up cigarettes can be so hard, assist you in overcoming your fears about quitting, and help you shift your thinking so that you consider smoking much more a chore than a pleasure. Then we’ll teach you the key preparation skills: analyzing your smoking patterns and practicing “mini-quits.” Finally, we’ll preview the five steps to a successful quit.
PART II: Quitting in Five Steps
In this section, we’ll show you how simple quitting really is. We didn’t say easy — you do have to work to become tobacco-free. But the process isn’t complicated. We’ll take you, at your own pace, through the strategies that research has identified as particularly helpful: setting your quit date, choosing a medication, overcoming urges to smoke, controlling your environment, and enlisting support from friends, family, and coxworkers.
PART III: You’ve Quit — Now What?
Quitting isn’t so much an event as a process. Yes, there will come a day when you smoke that last cigarette, and that is a momentous day to celebrate and remember. However, staying tobacco-free, like quitting itself, takes commitment and motivation. A single puff on a cigarette can derail all that you have worked so hard to achieve. In this part we’ll explore what triggers relapses, including stress and fear of weight gain, and we’ll present strategies to keep you a nonsmoker for life.
Booklet: Your Quitting Roadmap
Each chapter in the book includes one or more brief exercises to help you cement your commitment to quit and implement the quitting strategies we recommend. This booklet is a compilation of these exercises. We’re not the smoking police or the homework police — you can choose whether you want to complete the recommended lists and fill in the blanks. But most folks who’ve participated in our program find that these exercises help clarify their thoughts and offer a sense of accomplishment as they take steps toward becoming a nonsmoker.
Ready to take your next step? Let’s get started!
1 http://bphc.hrsa.gov/buckets/treatingtobacco.pdf
• The ties that bind you to cigarettes
• You’re addicted, but you’re not helpless
Before her plane landed for a layover at the Atlanta airport, Christine Burke was already on edge. She hadn’t seen her 21-year-old son, an Air Force aircraft inspector, in three years or met his wife or baby daughter. Now she was heading to Salt Lake City to visit them for a week. “I didn’t know if his wife was going to like me or what my son was going to look like after so long,” says Burke, 50, a church custodian in Oak Island, North Carolina. “The stress was eating me up.”
By the time she deplaned in Atlanta, Burke had gone four hours without a cigarette, no small feat for a 37-year, pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker who often lit up if she awoke in the middle of the night. But what sent Burke spiraling, upon arrival, was the airline’s announcement: Due to mechanical problems, her next flight would be delayed.
Awaiting further news, Burke didn’t dare stray from her gate in search of a designated smoking area. Besides, she was traveling with her 11-year-old daughter, who’d have given her the “stink eye and the silent treatment,” Burke says, if she’d dragged her across the airport to smoke. Two hours passed. Then three. Then four. Fidgety and miserable, Burke paced the terminal until she reached her breaking point. “I wanted a stinkin’ cigarette,” she says. So she ducked into the restroom.
“Next thing I know, I’m hanging over a toilet, blowing smoke into the water,” she says. “That’s when reality slapped me in the face. I thought, You’re as much of a junkie as a heroin addict. It was infuriating that I couldn’t even obey the law. I saw that smoking wasn’t just something I did to reward myself or cope with stress. It was an addiction.”
Dependence