Introduction

*WARNING* This is NOT an anti-smoking page. If you came here looking for anti-tobacco propaganda or if you are an anti-cigarette fanatic you came to the WRONG place.

This IS a place where smokers who are struggling with beating the habit can come for a gut check. These pages were built by someone who beat the habit himself after years of struggling, and has no agenda other than passing along many years worth of data collected while attending The School of Hard Knocks. No conspiracies. No scare tactics (per se). No hidden agenda. Nothing but a Cold Greasy Dose of the Castor Oil of Truth.

This site is built on the premise that “The Truth” is often a very unpleasant and distasteful thing. like Castor Oil if you will. The stench alone is enough to make most people wretch, but if you can bite back the gag reflex, and swallow it down, it will absolutely cure what ails you.

And there are two simple truths that you must come to terms with up front if you ever want to successfully kick the habit:

It doesn’t come in a bottle. There is no pill, or patch, or piece of chewing gum that will save you. Period.

If you continue smoking your life will be significantly shorter than it will if you quit. The statistics are staggering. Perhaps by as much as 20 or 30 years. Think about that for a moment. 30 extra years above ground. 30 extra springtime’s. 30 extra Christmases. 30 extra summers. 30 extra birthdays. My old grandma used to say that “any day above ground… is a GOOD day”. I tend to agree.

There is no “easy” or “painless” way to quit smoking. It’s a hard and hellacious road. But one that you obviously must travel or, quite probably die.

You will NOT under ANY circumstances find the path to being smoke free at your corner drugstore. Get used to that. Stop looking there. Stop hunting the shelves desperately. Stop reading the boxes. Stop listening to the empty claims. Stop listening to friends who think they know better. Stop being gullible. There is one and only one way to beat this demon.

Pain. Tenacity. Hard work. The right mind set. Cold Turkey.

That’s right motherbear. I said Cold Turkey.

The patches. The gum. The pills. The hypnosis. Tapering off. Tapering down. Step down filters. All these things have one huge and inescapable flaw:

They all prolong your addiction.

They turn a 3 day physiological process into a weeks or months long withdrawal nightmare.

My theory is simple really.

When you quit “Cold Turkey”, your body begins the withdrawal process. It isn’t pretty. Addiction rarely is, and you are addicted. Make no mistake about that. Your going to go through complete and total nicotine withdrawal hell. By no means an exhaustive list: Dry mouth. Headaches (possibly severe). Fatigue (possibly extreme). Irritability (unquestionably severe). Shortness of breath. Sleeplessness. Forgetfulness. Night sweats. Nightmares. Increased appetite. Weight gain (probably significant). Plus more. Much, much more.

All this. For about 3 days. Total. 72 hours. Tops. After that your body will begin to quit complaining about the low nicotine levels in the blood, start to get used to functioning without it, and begin to repair itself.

When you put on a patch, or chew the gum, or start to “taper”, you begin to deprive your body of it’s comfortable blood levels of nicotine and other addictive chemicals. You’re body begins the above mentioned withdrawal process. And continues the withdrawal process the entire time you are “tapering”. Never fully achieving separation or teaching itself how to get along without the chemicals in your bloodstream.

You have now taken a process that should have taken about 72 hours and have started to stretch it into something that is going to take much longer, and be much more difficult to overcome in the long run.

Eventually you will abandon the self torture, and return to smoking, in order to cease the prolonged period of being uncomfortable. As any sane being would of course.

* But in reality… it’s the difference between being uncomfortable at about a level 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 for 72 hours, or being uncomfortable at a level 8 for about 3 months. Which would you choose?

To put it another way, as quitting smoking is sometimes compared to “pulling teeth”:

Would you schedule 20 or 30 dentist appoints to have a root canal? Allowing him to drill and fill just a teensy bit with each successive visit? How painful would that be? Why not just schedule one visit, and be done with? Right? Then why would you do the same with an addiction that will arguably be almost as uncomfortable?

It’s like being eaten alive. By a duck.  Forget it.

I chose the less painful path. And it worked for me. I’ve been smoke free for over 10 years now. I’m here to share some of the tricks I used to get that way with you. Free of charge. I am not selling any false hope here. Just a good, cold, greasy dose of the castor oil of common sense. That’s been proven to work. At least… for me it has.

On the pages that follow I am going to share with you 10 secrets to successfully quit smoking. These are 10 very hard lessons learned over many, many years of agony and defeat at the hands of the demon smoke. These are the 10 things that made it possible for me (one of the most weak-willed and addictive personalities one could ever meet) to actually exorcise that demon.

They are unique and interesting techniques that I’m (pretty sure) you haven’t seen anywhere else. In short, they aren’t rehashes of the same old wives tales and stupid tricks that everyone knows just don’t work. These are tried and true baby, tested right down on the battlefield where the hair, eyes and teeth fly.

Some of these “tricks” will go against “conventional wisdom”.

Some will seem “bizarre”.

Some will seem “cruel”.

All will help you if you let them.

In as much as “Trick Zero” is the acceptance of the fact that you are not going to be able to BUY your way out of smoking. We’ll move on.