Hi my name is Julie I am 39 years of age. I started smoking when I was 9 years of age. Wow I know that is young isn’t it. I grew up in a small mining town with little to do. Smoking seemed like the next step at 9, I had done everything you could do in a small mining town.
Of course the reasoning of an "I want to be all grown up 9 year old". Well I went from smoking maybe one or two cigs a day to a packet (25 pkt) a day by the time I reached 14 years of age. Progressively smoking more and more till reaching 40 a day when I was about 25. At 37 years of age I told myself and everyone I knew, I was in a 5-year plan to quit smoking. My husband had informed me that it took me 5 years to become a packet a day smoker so it may take 5 years to reverse it. I started by changing my filter cigs to rollies,
cutting out the chemicals. I truly believe that has played an enormous Plus
in my quitting.
I am also a believer that if you don’t invite good and healthy things into your life then the actual urge to stop smoking may never appear. So in advance I often meditated not about smoking in particular but about health and picturing a healthy body and so on. Then you are naturally drawn down the path of quitting sort of subconsciously and one day you realize you have become a non-smoker. Well my girlfriend and I stopped together we both read Allen Carrs Easy ways to stop smoking which is brilliant.
It is not that easy but it is a life decision and it is a choice of health and freedom. I love not being controlled by tobacco. That is definitely the single best thing there is to feel after becoming a non-smoker, the freedom. The difficult moments were always there anyway and by smoking just makes the difficult moments more difficult as you age.
We need our health to handle stress not poison to makes us sicker so stress is more difficult to deal with. A huge decision in life to respect yourself enough to choose to be healthy. So every day affirm your choice to be healthy, I do.
