The running man

This picture was taken by the official photographers at last weekends Lourensford 10km trail run. Cost me bloody 50 bucks to buy it off their website, but it's ok this time as it's the first proper photo of me running a real live race with a number on my shirt and all! I think it's a very cool photo, the scenery in the background says a lot about the place, which was stunning!

BTW, the smoking cravings have eased off slightly today! I still have my moments in the office where the boredom gets the better of me and I'd usually go out for a brain-break smoke which takes a bit of frustrated will-power to soldier on and ignore the craving. If I sneak off to the kitchen for a few mouthfuls of my lunch salad or suck down a glass of water helps. But anyway, it is improving and I'm sure I'll be over it by the end of the year, especially after my 9 day year end holiday which should be much easier to bear than at work because I have less triggers at home to smoke than at work.

I still get strong cravings when I'm driving too, or when leaving the gym in the evenings, or when the wife winds me up is when I ache for a smoke the most! Other than those few old habitual reasons I used to have a smoke the want for a niconine fix is slowly abating. Yesterday was definitely the worst day so far!

Tomorrow is a week since I quit, much to many people's disbelief I have stuck it out this far without even a sniff of cigarette smoke. Well the carrion-scavenging skeptics can keep on watching eagerly for this to fail and break down to the curse of the cigarette... well keep watching until you wither away because I'm stronger than that and I won't give in!

Ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa!!!

5 days of a frustrated ex-smoker

Right now exactly 5 days ago at 13h20 I killed my last smoke, as you may have read so dramatically in my last post, so I have now been a non-smoker for 5 days and for now it has become really difficult, especially at work. During a normal working day I used to take frequent smoke breaks, not just for the sake of smoking but also as a break from my mind-numbingly boring work and to stretch my legs and get my blood moving, and some feeling back in my arse which goes quite numb after a few hours sitting on it! The smoke breaks broke the boredom and gave my brain a much needed break.

So the last two days at work have been particularly frustrating because I have been craving quite severely! I understand that theoretically it's that physical nicotine addiction, or the "monster" in my belly, starving for a fix and going crazy with hunger so it's ripping at my mind trying everything to convince me to have a smoke, making me think about it constantly and working hard at forcing my sub conscience to instinctively send me outside to find a cigarette!

The cravings are frustrating, and highly annoying, making me irritable and restless and at times ridiculously short tempered.

But I know it's just that starving nicotine monster getting insanely desperate, as would any creature desperately hungry and delusional with the aggressive need to survive!

The first day or two it was like the proverbial itch that just needed a scratch. It's way beyond that now, I can almost feel the claws and teeth ripping away at my insides as the beast within thrashes around in desperation to get fed, to be sated and soothed with a cigarette and a good calming dose of nicotine! I know that would be the easy relief to this frustration, and in a way it would be nice, a blissful relief!

But that's just the psychological perception and not any kind of physical reality, and all it would serve to do would be to start the problem all over again and revive the need to constantly desire a cigarette to keep the beast fed with every reason and excuse in the book as to why I "need" the next cigarette, while in essence those cigarettes do absolutely nothing for me, other than to continue ruining my life, both physically, mentally and socially!

No no no, I will not go back to smoking not even one little harmless looking cigarette, I will not succumb to temptation. After all, it only took that first drag of that first cigarette 18 years ago to get me hooked on a lifetime of nicotine addiction, an unwitting slave, unknowingly allowing those harmless looking little cigarettes to control my life and personality, and dictate the person I would be for 18 years!

I have also realised that smoking has gradually and progressively fuelled my alcohol addiction without my realising, like an evil little motivator! Sounds strange to come up with something seemingly so absurd, but I'm quite sure of it! The urge to drink is not as strong without the prospect of having the cigarette involved. The two clearly go hand in hand, like destructive, soul-destroying, conniving, anti-social partners in crime breaking me down and overcoming my sense of reality and responsibility. But like bullies on the playground, strong and arrogant in numbers, but weak and cowardly if caught on their own, so now I'm thinking the pull of the alcohol will be a lot weaker without the added muscle of it's ally, the little Peter Stuyvesant.

But in the meantime I will continue to fight this urge to smoke until it goes away, which I'm sure will be soon. I don't need the cigarette, and that Allen Carr session last week taught me to think about why I don't need, or want a smoke, and why that little green beast will try make me think and even feel otherwise! Earlier when I was really getting irritable I took a walk, much to the amusement of my colleagues, out into the fresh air and around a huge university residential complex for 15 minutes, and that really helped to ease the craving!

By Friday, after 7 days, the nicotine addiction should be dying significantly, and in 2 weeks after that should be completely dead and gone. I just need to be strong and stick it out until then to be home free! at the moment it's peaking, I can feel it, it will get easier soon!

My only concern is I have not lost (or gained) any weight since I quit smoking. I do find I've been eating a little more, though not anything unhealthy or in large quantities, and I'm still exercising furiously. So that's a bit disheartening as my weight should still be going down, and I've disappointingly realised I won't reach my weight target by Christmas. The consolation is that in January when the year end functions have died down and I'm too broke to have too many unhealthy "treats" I'll catch up, but in the meantime I've scored a great victory in my battle to get healthy in that I successfully quit smoking, before I'd intended to even try!

My first blog as a non-smoker

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Today, 2 December 2011, at exactly 13h20, I extinguished my very last cigarette!

I am now a non-smoker, and I'm very happy to be!

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This morning I attended the Allan Carr clinic from 8am to 2.30pm, I went in as a smoker, sceptical about whether the session would work, and I left as a non-smoker confident that I will never smoke again for as long as I live, which is surely to be even longer now than it would have been had I carried on smoking!

The clinic was excellent, Dr. Charles Nel the 'therapist' is fantastic. I was sure to be a tough nut to crack, yet Charles and the programme cracked me and not only convinced me to quit the smoke for good, but made it easy to do so by successfully changing my psychological and mental attitude to smoking. I won't go into detail about exactly how, but it's a great system that really works!

I have a week or two to deal with the actual addiction to the nicotine, which should be fairly easy to manage with the way I'll be thinking about it, after that I will never again in any way be a slave to that disgusting little life destroying drug that has been in control of me for the last 18 years of my existence! Never again will I be tempted to go back into that addiction, that monster that grabs hold of you and takes over your mind, body and personality!

No, never again, my days of smoking are history, and I am happy to know that I will never smoke again because I don't need to, nor do I want to.

One thing that today taught me is that by giving up the smoking I am not actually losing anything, but rather I am gaining a lot that the smoking has slowly eroded and taken away from me! To name a few things my health, my nervous system will recover, my brain will get back to reasonably normal functionality, my confidence, my dignity, my stamina, my cash, and my life and well-being in general! And of course no longer I'll have the stigma around me of being the smoker in the group, the outcast, and endure the embarrassment and discomfort of being conscious of the fact that my social time revolves around smoking and the next cigarette!

Throughout the session this morning we took regular smoke breaks as a group. I smoked more this morning than I usually do in that amount of time except when I'm drinking. Until we were sent out to smoke our last cigarettes. It was quite an emotional and sombre moment for me as that last cigarette slowly burned down, then it became a fantastic feeling of elation. Despite the nervousness at the magnitude of what I was doing I was overcome with happiness and excitement at the idea that I would thereafter be a non-smoker. It was like a weight being dumped off my back, like a dark cloud clearing and the sun coming out, a feeling of emotional and psychological freedom!

Of course within 20 minutes I was thinking about having another smoke, but I don't see it as a craving, or a need. I see it as that addiction in the form of a little monster that needs to be fed, that tries to con my brain into thinking I need to feed it a cigarette to get some kind of perceived peace and comfort, but I will not feed that monster or give it the satisfaction of fuelling the addiction. I will starve that evil shit until it dies, and soon I'll be free of the cage of smoke! If that makes any sense at all!

To any smokers out there who are considering quitting, it really is the best thing you can do for yourself! You don't realise how that cigarette controls you and takes away a lot of good things in your life without giving you anything good in return except the perception that it makes you feel good. That's just the addiction which needs to be fed like an itch that needs to be scratched. This Allen Carr thing is really good, I certainly recommend attending the clinic (no I don't get any commission or benefit if you sign up), it really does work, and it does not involve any gimmicks or hypnotherapy or drugs or patches or anything like that. It simply changes the way you think, it treats the main problem, the mental and psychological addiction, more than the physical one. Besides, using gums, patches, zybans, etc simply fuels the nicotine addiction, they don't remove it! You don't treat an alcoholic with alcohol, so why treat a nicotine addict with nicotine?

That's about as much as I will go on about this, except to say that I am genuinely excited about spending the rest of my life without being hooked on smoking, and no longer revolving my life around the next cigarette, and not exposing my wife and my beautiful daughter to my disgusting and dangerous cigarette smoke just because I'm addicted to that toxic rubbish! Most of all I look forward to getting my health back and keeping myself fit and healthy and free of that unnatural poison that I've been destroying myself with for so very long!

Good bye Peter Stuyvesant, you will NOT be missed!

Last day as a smoker

That last day would be today, and quite honestly I have mixed feelings about it! In around 25 hours time I will be smoking my last cigarette, if all goes to plan with this Allen Carr thing tomorrow. I'm not quite sure what exactly to expect with this 6 hour clinic that is supposed to change my psychological and mental outlook on smoking and why I smoke and the need to smoke, etc. Quite frankly I think I'm going to be a tough customer because right now I like smoking and I enjoy my cigarettes, in some situations more than others. The regular habits and connections that work for me with a cigarette are going to be tough to break, eg a smoke makes a beer more enjoyable, smoking is a good excuse to take a break in the office when there is no other reason to leave my desk, unless I take up throning a long relaxing dump 4 times a day with maybe a wank or two while I'm there to make the trip interesting. That's unlikely to happen because with my healthy eating I hardly need to go these days anyway!

Bullshit aside, breaking the mental connections to certain regular habits in my life is going to be very difficult for me, the psychological addiction to smoking and the physical addiction to nicotine go together like Siamese twins, inseparable and hard to ignore! Today I have had 6 cigarettes already and consciously enjoyed every one of them as I think about the fact that soon I will be without that little pleasure and comfort and excuse to take a walk outside soon, despite the fact that I know that every cigarette costs me R1.50 and countless useful living cells in various vital parts of my body, those issues are outweighed by the stubborn perception of enjoyment of that disgusting little stick of poison!

Anyway, I'm going to this clinic willingly, of my own choice and at my own expense. Nobody forced me or convinced me, it was my decision and I will go in there with an open mind and a positive attitude with a desire to quit and the will power to at least give it my best shot. Hopefully the session is not too obviously gimmicky and cheesy because I don't fall easily for Americanised style marketing pitches or church sermons, that will just bore the crap out of me. If it's realistic and relevant and interactive I'll take it more seriously.

Besides, it's no secret that I'm doing this, because it's not in my nature to be secretive about my life-changing endeavours, as you well know. My life is publicised on Facebook and this blog, and so is my big ambitious plan to quit smoking tomorrow, so I'm just going to make a complete ass of myself as a failure if I do this thing and it flops. That said, I believe it can happen, just like I managed to lose all the weight in the time that I did through dogged determination and I took up running and actually enjoy running and the results it's giving me when not long ago I hated running with every excuse in the book. Yes I am under no illusion that of all my recent drastically dramatic lifestyle changes, this chapter, giving up the fag, is by far going to be the toughest part!

So, my dear readers, besides the usual babbling about my weight and my drinking problems and the running and all the other regular crap I waffle on about you are now soon to be obliged to listen to me bitching about life without the cigarette, and it's not always going to be pretty! There are going to be times in the coming weeks that I will be grumpy as an elephant with sore nuts, and at times my temper will be so short fused that I can't even predict the consequences; so for the miserable bitch that I'm sure to become, however temporary, I apologise in advance, especially to my wife and child who will no doubt bear the brunt of my frustrations. So I just hope they have the strength and faith to stick it out and bear with me because it will be better for all of us in the long run!

This then ends my final blog as a smoker, when you read this page again things will be quite different, hopefully for the better!

On another matter, tonight is that pub run, I have to say I'm thoroughly looking forward to the experience! My day at work today is incredibly dull and boring, I'm losing my sanity so this evenings event will really inject some excitement into my life. At least I get to enjoy my final cigarettes with a few beers!

Oh, and I nearly forgot, I have something serious to bitch about! Since my run up Chapmans Peak on Sunday I have been regularly checking the relevant websites and Facebook pages for the much advertised "free" photographs taken at the event. I know there were pictures taken of me because I ran past a few photographers and even gestured to them with smiles and hands raised as I heard their shutters firing aimed at me! This morning the main gallery of 877 photo's (excluding hundreds of others on Facebook) was released, I was not in a single fucken photo, not even in the background somewhere! Oakpics.com were the photographers, and they got loads of great photo's especially of the ladies and the 21km runners, some people featuring in many shots. I was not in one single photo, and I'm seriously fucked off about this because it was my first ever run, I was enthusiastic and excited about the run and I worked my ass off up there and ensured I was running comfortably past the photogs so I could show off afterwards with some kind of graphical momento of the occasion. There are more photo's than there were runners, so I don't know how they fucked that up and missed the one person more chomped to see the photo's than anybody else, judging by the small number of "likes" on their FB page. I'll probably get over this, but I feel disappointed and hard done by.

But hey, shit happens, boo fucking hoo. Oh well!