﻿ BREAKING THE ADDICTION: HOW TO QUIT SMOKING ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright 2009-2013. Published by Marlow Doyle (JDV) at Smashwords All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the permission of the publisher and author. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Table of Contents "Weighing In"(Introduction) Part I – Mental Toughness - Introduction - Fighting You - The Hook Part II – Fighting Strategies - Intrinsic Value - The Voices in Your Head - People Watching Part III – Becoming A Legend - The People in your Corner - The Rounds - The Life of A Champ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~Weighing In (Introduction)~~~~ My name is Marlow Doyle. It is a pen name, for I wish to keep my identity anonymous. After 10-years of smoking, I quit cold turkey during the first week of September, 2008. It's now been four years since I've smoked. I did not use the patch, gum, or any prescriptions, nor have I met a person who has successfully quit by using nicotine aides. I feel they aren't effective at helping people quit forever. The trick has to do with mentality; it boils down to what you want out of life. When I tell people I have quit, they usually ask me how. They always want a quick, effortless way to help them stop. They expect a button to press that will solve their problem. It doesn’t happen like that. You must want a lot from life for a good chance at quitting. Being successful has to do with how you see yourself and what you want from the world. Although it is relatively easy, quitting can be difficult at times. But I know you want to quit. I know you have that voice inside of you. I want to help you because it feels incredible to be nicotine free. Good luck conquering the world. I know you can do it. Keep your dreams alive. - Marlow Doyle Please note that the words written in this book are my opinions. I am not responsible for how you interpret this information. Nor am I responsible for any actions you take regarding it. Nothing I state is based off research or evidence, however, only my opinions are expressed. ~~~~Part I: Mental Toughness~~~~ ~~~~Great Fighters~~~ Michael Jordan, Alexander the Great, Gwen Stafani, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Austin, Helen Keller, Marilyn Monroe, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Tupac, Britney… All these people accomplished many amazing things in a lifetime. The fact is, they are not much different than you and me. You were meant to conquer the word and live your wildest dreams. Don't associate with anyone who tells you otherwise. It boils down to will power, and it’s in you. There’s a voice inside telling you to quit. Listen to that voice. If the people I have mentioned can accomplish truly wonderful things, then you can quit smoking. Once you quit, you can start accomplishing your own marvelous goals. So whatever dreams you have, get ready to chase them down. It’s no coincidence that the famous people at the top of the charts are always saying you can do anything if you put your mind to it. ~~~~Fighting You~~~~ In order to quit smoking, you need to face the facts. Although it is difficult to accept, you must embrace the following notion: Nicotine is a highly addictive drug, and you are addicted to it. It sounds horrible, but you have to UNDERSTAND you are a drug addict. From personal experience, I know nicotine is dictating your life. It’s the first thing you do when you wake up, and it’s the last thing you do before you go to sleep. You smoke when you’re happy because it feels good, and you smoke when you’re sad because it makes you feel better. You will justify any excuse to have a smoke. You become irritable if you go a morning without a cig, and when that happens, lighting up is all you can think about. You need one after you eat to settle your stomach, and if you had to choose between a quick lunch or a cigarette, you would most likely choose a cig. Again… nicotine is a drug, and you are a drug addict. The physical effects nicotine has on your body are devastating. Not only does it greatly increase your chance of heart disease and cancer, but it also effects your body in more subtle ways as well. If you are anything like I was or many other smokers I know, nicotine most likely suppresses your appetite. Because of this, you probably aren’t eating enough healthy food. Therefore, your body isn’t getting the proper nutrition it needs to thrive. After the morning cigarette, you don’t feel like eating a large breakfast. This leaves you hungry, irritable, lacking focus, and stressed out. As a result, you fill up on junk food and soda while smoking more cigarettes due to stress. Also, most smokers I know usually substitute sugared drinks for water thus leaving their bodies dehydrated. The cycle continues for lunch and dinner every day of your life. Nicotine is classified as a stimulant. This means that it will make people feel wired. Consequently, you will have a difficult time getting enough sleep at night. So you wake up tired, stressed-out, hungry, irritable, unable to focus, and craving a smoke. Day in and day out you are running your body and soul into the ground, grinding out a torturous life minute by minute. Depriving your body of nutrition and sleep is asking for an early grave. By continuing to smoke, you are missing out on the quality life has to offer. Despite the devastating effects smoking cigarettes creates, people still smoke them habitually. This is because they are addicted to a drug. I realize this may sound harsh to most people; however, realizing I was addicted to a drug that was ruining my life was the first step towards successfully quitting. Contrary to the popular cliché, you must UNDERSTAND you have a problem before you can admit it. If you don't understand how your life is being destroyed, then you most likely won't be able to put up a fight. ~~~~The Hook~~~~ One thing to recognize that will increase your chances of quitting is you are a different person now then when you became hooked. How old were you when you started smoking? I’m pretty sure I was sixteen. At that age, like everyone else, I desperately wanted to be cool. I thought smoking would make me stand out, and I associated with others who felt the same way. I also thought the world was rough on me, as if I was the only person facing problems. Anytime things became difficult or I was scared, I could always rely on a cigarette to make me "feel" better. I even thought they helped me relax and understand schoolwork. Looking back, I realize I was basically a child when I started smoking. I suffered from low self-esteem and let other people hurt my feelings. When it came to problems I had to face, I was a scared little boy who wanted to run and hide. I had no real responsibilities. I was a naïve young man hooked on an addictive drug, and as soon as I turned eighteen, I was smoking a pack a day. There are worse stories out there. More six-year-olds are addicted to nicotine then you think. I know from working in day-cares there are many children who are exposed to second-hand smoke since before they were born. These children grow up in houses where one or both parents smoke indoors, and even as babies, they breathe in nicotine on an hourly basis. It’s not uncommon for these kids to be smoking a pack of cigarettes every day by the time they are fifteen or sixteen-years-old. The reason why these children start smoking is unfair, and they have an incredibly tough time quitting. However, I believe they have the inner strength to quit. That’s why I am writing this book. The point I am trying to make in this section is many smokers become addicted to cigarettes at a very early age when they are extremely vulnerable. Consider it may not have been your choice to start in the first place. As you seek to grow and develop to become stronger, it helps to realize you are a different person then when you first started smoking. You are strong now. You aren’t scared of challenges, and you don’t need cheap thrills like cigarettes to make you feel better. A great exercise you can do to help you quit is ask yourself the following questions: How old were you when you started smoking?; Why did you start smoking?; Are you the same person as when you started smoking, or are you different?; And in what ways are you different? Write those questions down on a piece of paper. Tell yourself the answers throughout the day. Remember them when you're craving a cigarette. ~~~~Part II: Fighting Strategies~~~~ ~~~~Intrinsic Value~~~~ One of the most important things you can do to help quit smoking is to seek a job that offers intrinsic value. In other words, try to find a job you love and makes you happy. The word intrinsic means inner or internal. Do not work a job just because of the money (extrinsic value) it offers. For instance, I decided to earn a degree in elementary education because I loved helping children learn. That was the motivation that guided me through four years of tests, essay papers, and field work. I didn’t care about the money I would make or the social recognition I would receive. I didn’t care about the holidays I would have off or the summer vacations. I wanted to be a teacher because it meant the world to me to help a youngster understand something. I wanted to help them as much as possible. Being a teacher was a dream of mine for a long time. It provided a lot of motivation because of intrinsic joy. The reason finding a job you love is important has to do with your health. If you love your job, you will want to be as healthy as possible, so you can accomplish as much as possible. And by love I mean the job you dream of. You will realize how cigarettes are holding you back, and you will want to forget about them as quickly as possible. If you work a job you absolutely hate or could care less about, the urge to preserve your health may not be strong enough to resist the temptations of cigarettes on a daily (or hourly) basis. You may even be a successful worker making a ton of money at your present job. In that case, you have two options: Grind it out with a job that doesn’t offer much excitement, or pursue another career that offers you joy every single day of your life. In this crazy world, one thing is for sure: The life you’re currently living will end. Don’t waste it thinking about what could be... even if you are a millionaire. Do what you need to do to get by. If you have to take things very slowly going step by step, that's fine. Start paving a different path. Intrinsic joy will provide you with extra strength and motivation to beat the crap out of cigarettes. Another example of intrinsic value would be writing this book. I want to help people quit smoking. I find so much intrinsic value that I am sacrificing camping trips, movie nights, and professional baseball games to finish writing and publishing this book. I am even ignoring phone calls from friends. I am also making sure that I am staying as healthy as possible. That means eating a high calorie diet, sleeping eight-hours a night, and working-out everyday. It feels so good to be nicotine free, and I want others to experience that feeling as well. If I could help one person quit smoking, it would provide me with an incredible amount of intrinsic joy. Start seeking things that make you happy. ~~~~The Voices in Your Head~~~~ When it comes to smoking cigarettes, you probably have two different voices in your head. One is saying: “Have a cig; it’s no big deal.” You probably hear this voice a lot. What the nicotine is doing is “faking out” your body and mind by pretending to relieve stress and anxiety when you smoke. When you hear this voice, it is essential to think of it as the “nicotine voice.” When you hear it, say to yourself, “This is just the nicotine talking. I don’t need a cigarette.” The nicotine is playing a trick on your brain. It pretends to make you feel better when in reality it isn‘t. Your body doesn’t actually “feel” good after smoking. The nicotine is affecting your brain in a way that makes you think you enjoy smoking. That’s why it’s addictive. But it’s just tricking you. You must understand that point clearly. The relief you get from smoking a cigarette is a false sense of feeling. It also tells your brain that cigarettes taste good. That's a bunch of bull! Cigarettes taste god-awful. If you want to know what a cigarette really tastes like, go lick an ashtray. The nicotine is making you brain register a pleasant taste to cigarette smoke. It doesn't taste good; it's the drug telling you it tastes good. You can smoke a nicotine-free cigarette to see how they really taste. You must realize that nicotine is playing tricks on you all the time. Many people who smoke die of lung cancer. They are not getting better from smoking. So when you hear the “nicotine voice,” just remember that it is the addictive substance playing a trick on your brain. The other voice you hear is saying, “Don’t smoke that cigarette. In fact, you need to quit all together. No more cigarettes.” I consider this to be the soul. That voice is there more than you think. You must listen for it. It can be hard to hear because the cravings are internally louder therefore masking the soul. The soul wants what’s best for you. Listen to your soul, always. Don’t ever betray it, for you will need your soul to conquer the world. ~~~~People Watching~~~~ After graduating college, I took a job at a gas station to make ends meet (I smoked then). I probably saw about 300 customers a day. Many of them were there to buy cigarettes and beer. Day after day and customer after customer, I couldn’t help but notice the people buying cigarettes usually smelled bad; looked grimy; had hair issues and gross skin; were effected by weight problems; lacked muscle; and had horrible teeth. Some of them had a tough time just walking, and there overall health seemed miserable. This wasn’t the case for every person buying cigarettes, but it was for many of them. And on the other side of the coin were people buying protein or health bars and water. Their appearance was usually quite opposite of smokers. After a while, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I realized if I kept smoking, I was on track to becoming one of the gross customers I noticed everyday. Please note that although many of these people were visually unappealing, it had nothing to do with their personalities. Most of them were very nice people (to me at least). How nice a person was had nothing to do with whether or not they smoked. There were most likely other factors contributing to these people's appearance. Also, there are plenty of people who look unappealing who don’t smoke. However, smoking cigarettes was a common trait I usually noticed between most of these people. What I always suggest to people as a quitting tactic is to park their car in front of a very busy gas station. Stay in your car and watch people coming out of the store with cigarettes and beer. Look at them. Look at their greasy hair; nasty, dried up, flaky skin; and overweight, drooping bodies. Ask yourself if that’s what you want to be like in the future. These people are nasty looking because they are dying. They have given up and are letting an addictive drug completely destroy their life. They aren’t even putting up a fight. If you feel that cigarettes are destroying you, then realize this: YOU CAN QUIT! I SWEAR, IT'S NOT THAT HARD! I KNOW YOU CAN QUIT! EMBRACE LIFE! I BELIEVE IN YOURSELF! Also, while watching people, don't pay attention to the younger smokers. Their bodies haven't been affected too much from smoking. Look for people at least in their 30s. After working at the gas station, I noticed people are usually sitting down or standing down when smoking. They probably don’t have any energy. Most guys are scruffy, pale, and tired. Although it is difficult to tell if a woman is pale because of makeup, they too generally look “droopish” while smoking. Smokers look tired and rundown. You can’t enjoy life when you’re rundown. Look at people smoking every chance you get. Ask yourself if they look happy. Remind yourself of these people when you are craving. You can also do something similar to this if you are trying to quit fast food. Go to a fast food joint and sit down inside. Sit close to a window where you can see the drive-thru. Most likely, about 90% of the people going through the drive-thru will be heavily overweight. When you do this for about an hour everyday and see 100-or-so overweight people, you start to associate fast food with weight problems. Those people aren’t far from a heart attack. Many of them too will die at an early age. They are robbing themselves of a long life. I am not stating the “early grave” business lightly. I am very serious. For a period of time during college breaks, I worked as a landscaper. The company I worked for did some labor for a local cemetery. While in a cemetery for 10-hours-a-day, I couldn't help but notice some things. One was the lifespan on most tombstones. The average was around 50-years for men and about 60-years for women. If you don’t believe me, go take a stroll through the nearest general cemetery (general as opposed to military). You need to be conscious of all these things when getting cornered by a big, nasty craving (for cigarettes and fast-food). The cravings will destroy you if you can't out-maneuver them with these tactics. Constantly being conscious of people watching, the voices in your head, and intrinsic joy will help defend yourself from cravings. ~~~~Part III: Becoming A Legend~~~~ ~~~~The People in Your Corner~~~~ Talk to people who have successfully quit smoking cigarettes. Ask them how they did it. Chances are, you will find they quit cold turkey. I haven’t met anyone successfully quitting otherwise. Most people I know who have used the patch or gum or whatever else there is out there end up relapsing (start smoking again). You must surround yourself with people who have quit long-term. Otherwise, you will be surrounded by people saying things like, “I can’t quit. Screw it. I wish I could quit, but I’m too weak.” Those type of people are soft. They won’t help your cause at all. You’ll find yourself giving in to temptations of the “nicotine voice.” You need to be rock-solid. With that being said, you are going to have an extremely tough time quitting if anyone in your home smokes. Not that it can’t be done, but it will be very difficult. There will always be the lingering smell of smoke to remind you of what you are missing (after three weeks of going without a cigarette, the smell of a lit cigarette is AMAZING - that amazing smells goes sour after about two months though). There will always be a cigarette box lying around tempting you to smoke. And worst of all, there probably will be second-hand smoke that you will breath. This will make it difficult to completely rid your body of nicotine. Thus you will ALWAYS be craving a cigarette. I strongly recommend some kind of support group or mentor outside of your immediate family and friends. Find inspiring people who talk about the importance of accepting challenges and overcoming them rather than giving up because of failure. You want to find a supporter who drills these notions. Surround yourself with positive media. Your playlists should be upbeat and inspiring, so should the movies you watch. If T.V. shows are degrading to certain characters, don't watch them. Finally, if there is a person in your environment who constantly abuses you verbally or physically, then pack your bags and leave. There's no need to spend your life being a victim of abuse. Pay particular attention if you suspect someone is abusing you or taking advantage. Sometimes, it's not so obvious. ~~~~The Rounds~~~~ Round one is what I consider the first five or six days of quitting and lasts through the first month. It’s going to be very difficult to not have a cigarette. You are going to feel the withdrawal of nicotine all throughout your body. This is what I mean by “craving.” You must listen to your soul. Do not listen to the nicotine voice, for it will be telling you all sorts of garbage about how it’s okay to light one up. Be careful when it says you should reward yourself with a cigarette. Remember this is the nicotine talking, not you. During round one, withdrawal will hit you like a ton of bricks. There will be cravings that seem to last forever. During the cravings, you will not be able to think of anything except having a cigarette. You may physically feel the withdrawal throughout your body too. You must realize these cravings will pass. They will eventually go away after a few minutes. They will occur frequently throughout the day, but they will eventually go away and happen less often. I promise you, the cravings will disappear. When you’re having a craving, try to think of something else. Try to daydream about being a superstar. Put a good movie on. Call a friend. Eat ice-cream. Have sex with your lover. Try to forget about it. Before long, you will not be craving. Right around day five was the hardest for me. The withdrawals lasted about twenty minutes at a time, and they occurred all day long. But after day five, they happened less often and weren’t nearly as strong. Here’s what not to do during round one: Don’t go to a bar. Too many people smoke at bars. You will be tempted. Don’t drink alcohol. People tend not to care about important things when they get drunk. Plus, for some reason, alcohol and cigarettes go hand in hand together. I wouldn’t drink booze for the first five months of quitting (I stopped drinking for the first 6 months of quitting smoking). If you get drunk or tipsy, you will more likely say, “screw it, give me a cig!” I actually recommend to stop drinking all together. Remember, alcohol is addictive, so if you drink it regularly you will have an alcohol voice telling you it’s okay to drink. The problem with alcohol is after years of drinking, even moderately, it really does a number on your memory and personality. Usually, after 10 years of habitually drinking in moderate measures, people typically "blackout" when drinking. It's not good. It also affects your mood and personality. Trust me, quit alcohol too. It's a really nasty addiction that can cause a lot of trouble in your life. As drinkers, we tend to forget that after 10, 15, or 20 plus years, drinking will and does take its toll. It's also EXTREMELY difficult to quit. Quitting cigarettes was WAY EASIER than quitting alcohol. Take my advice: when you stop smoking, stop drinking - period. For at least four months of round one, don’t have your regular morning drink that you usually have with a cigarette; otherwise, you will want a cigarette. Do not listen to sad music or watch sad movies, for you will want to comfort yourself with a smoke. Round two is what I consider the fifth week of quitting (these times may very from person to person). You must be extremely cautious about the nicotine voice during this time. Because you haven’t had a cigarette in a month, your body starts to feel a lot better. You won’t be coughing as much. Your nose won’t be running. You will have been eating more food and sleeping regularly. Everything starts to feel really good. This is when it is easy to relapse and have a cigarette. You feel so good that the nicotine voice says something like, “Have a cigarette! Don’t worry, you aren’t addicted anymore. Look, you can have a cigarette. It’s all okay.” That happened to me, and I relapsed. I thought I could have just a couple. Eventually, I was hooked again. After a month of smoking, I started feeling the effects of cigarettes. I was congested. I couldn’t eat much food. I was drinking a lot of sugar. I had no energy etc. It took a few months for me to quit again. Don’t let round two dupe you. For rounds one and two there is a tactic I will advise. I don’t like this idea, and it should be used sparingly because it's extremely dangerous - like playing with fire and being soaked in gasoline. If you find yourself craving like a crazy person, and you think you are going to give in, there is one thing you can do. Get a cigarette and put it in our mouth. Don’t light it, but pretend to light and smoke it. Go through the motions of inhaling it. Again, I don’t like this idea, but it helped me get through a couple of really nasty cravings. Please be careful; having a loaded cigarette in your mouth can be deadly. Also, until you have made it to round three, don't go on any car ride longer then an hour. You know how music, car rides, and cigarettes go together. Round three is what I consider the third month of quitting and anything after that. It becomes easy to not have a cigarette. You only have a couple of cravings a day, and they are very weak cravings. Right around month six is when I finally realized I wasn’t addicted to nicotine any longer. It’s such a beautiful feeling. I don’t think you will ever completely stop wanting a cigarette. The people who have quit for more than a few years all say the same thing: Cravings never go away. However, the withdrawals become weaker. It's not that big of a fight. I know you can win. Knock nicotine out forever! ~~~~The Life of A Champ~~~~ I strongly recommend you start your new lifestyle by working-out five days a week. Prior to this, you should seek a medical professional's opinion. I take no responsibility for anything that happens to you as a result of reading this book. If you have children and don’t have time to go to the gym, consider investing in a home-gym and treadmill. If you do have time, then find a fitness center near you. You must make exercise a part of your life. Going now and then doesn’t cut it. It must be a lifestyle. Here are a few tips: Calories are good for you, and carbohydrates are too. Don’t listen to the 0 carb/0 calorie diets. Calories are a measurement of energy, and you need energy to survive. Carbohydrates are a source of clean calories as opposed to calories from fried food and saturated fats. You need to stay away from saturated fat as much as possible. Don’t eat fried food. When you eat fried food meals, you usually consume about 3000 to 6000 calories. The average person shouldn’t be consuming more than 3000 calories per day. That’s why people who eat fast food put on so much weight. You will want to do aerobic exercise three to five times per week. This involves running, swimming, or biking, or jumping jacks!. During these exercises, you are continuously replenishing your muscles with oxygen. If you get tired quickly, it’s because your muscles aren’t getting adequate amounts of oxygen from your lungs. Let’s say you are playing basketball. And three minutes into the game, you are huffing and puffing and want to pass-out. Well, if you don’t do cardiovascular/aerobic workouts on a regular basis, your body is very bad at moving oxygen from your lungs to your heart to your muscles. When you do start to do cardio workouts regularly, your body becomes more efficient at delivering oxygen to every single muscle in your body (through the blood stream). Before when you were out-of-shape, you were only getting one oxygen cell per second to your muscles. Well, now that you’re in shape, you’re getting four or five oxygen cells per second (I made those numbers up, but you get the point). Thus, your muscles don’t tire-out as easily. In order to be healthy, you need to exercise aerobically three times a week for at least 30 minutes at a time. I shoot for at least five days a week. Go find your max heart rate for your age-group on the internet. The target heart rate should be 60% of your max heart rate. You shouldn't be doing more than 60% unless you are training professionally. Get a device that measures your heart rate and use it while running (or any other aerobic exercise). To make this clear, you want to be running at 60% of your max heart rate for 30 minutes at least three times a week. You will also want to do anaerobic exercises such as weight lifting. During anaerobic exercise, you are depleting all the oxygen from your muscles. When you lift, you are doing sets and repetitions. For every set, you do so many repetitions. If you are working your chest, maybe you bench press three sets of five repetitions. That means you’d be bench pressing 15 times total. Now, when you’re on the last repetition (rep), and you can’t push anymore for the life of you, you have depleted all the oxygen from your chest muscles (well, basically all of the oxygen). Anaerobic is fundamentally different than aerobic. For aerobic, you are continuously supplying oxygen to your muscles, and for anaerobic, you are depleting it all. Without oxygen, your muscles cramp up and don’t function. When you are lifting (using resistance), you are actually ripping or tearing the fibers of your muscles. Protein is used to rebuild the muscle. Hence the reason weight lifters are always eating protein supplements. The protein gets turned into a patch to seal those tears, but the patches become part of the muscle as well. Thus, the muscle gets bigger and can hold more blood and oxygen. Therefore, you develop more stamina and get stronger and bigger. You want to do both anaerobic and aerobic exercises. You want your muscles to get bigger and stronger, and you also want your body to be able to efficiently deliver adequate amounts of oxygen to those muscles. If you're overweight, try three sets of 15 repetitions. That's called “low weight high repetition.” This will tone you up. Then you can bulk-up after you lose all that fat. If you want to bulk-up, do three sets of five repetitions. That’s called “high weight low reps.” Make a spread sheet and bring it with you to chart your progress. As for calibrating the weight, you want to be squeezing every ounce of energy to hit that last rep of each set. If you're hitting that last rep with ease, you need more weight. If you're not coming close to that last rep, loose some weight. There is a famous saying for exercise: No pain, no gain. You have to push yourself if you want results. If you want to be that amazing person that is deep inside of you, then you have to push yourself. If you are new to working-out, then I recommend not lifting much weight for the first week or two. Just go through the motions. Don’t push it. If you push it, you will be extremely sore. A lot of people probably stop working-out because it can be too painful, and this is almost understandable. It may affect their work or home-life. So just take it easy the first time you workout a muscle group. The following week, you can start to really lift a lot of weight. Also during the first one or two weeks of initial workout, you might want to consider working-out two hours before bedtime. Soon after exercise, you will become very, very tired and not be able to fight off the grogginess. I mention this because it may affect your work or home-life. I know many people stop exercising because of this. But after the first or second week, I recommend exercising first thing after you wake up. It will give you a lot of energy for the day. It takes a lot of endurance to do a full workout and make it through an entire day without being sleepy. Most people don’t have the inner strangth to do both. Here’s another tip… GET YOUR YOU KNOW WHAT OUTTAH BED AND GET TO THE GYM!!!!!!!!!!!!! As soon as I’m in the gym and hit that first rep, dang I feel good. So don’t listen to that voice that tells you to stay in bed where it’s warm and comfortable, for it doesn't want the pain. I must remind you that you need to make exercise a part of your life. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from what it offers. Exercise is not about looks; it's about growing stronger and healthier. If you are going to conquer the world, you need to be strong, healthy, and fit. Always, always, always stretch out your muscles AFTER working out. Always, always, always do a warm-up set with low weight. I wish you the best of luck with your new lifestyle. I know you can do it. Quitting is easier than you think. Don’t listen or even be around people who say quitting is too hard. I have quit, and it isn’t tough. Once you recognize you are no longer addicted to nicotine, it gets very easy to stay cigarette free. Good luck conquering the world. Keep your dreams alive. - Marlow Doyle