Smoking Cessation Part II: Day 3
By ben | June 12, 2008
Withdrawal symptoms can be quite a pain, especially when you have finals coming and your financial situation isn’t the most stable. Normally I’m a cynical guy, but over the past few days my world view has become slightly more deranged than usual. Hopefully this ends soon as the first phase of the withdrawal symptoms comes to a close. According to the American Cancer Society, withdrawal symptoms of nicotine include, irritability, dizziness, restlessness, anxiety, insomnia, tiredness, increased appetite, and depression. I’m pretty much feeling a combination of most all of those except for anxiety and dizziness, luckily those symptoms are only supposed to last for a day longer at the most.
The increased appetite thing is killing me. I literally went through an entire large pizza with a side of cheese bread all by myself the other day. I have my healthy food in the refrigerator that I’m going to be using for my diet but it never appeals to me. When I’ve been getting home from school the first thing I’ve wanted to do was order pizza or get a burger somewhere and watch movies. I’m pretty much chalking it all up to withdrawal induced depression and stress, I’m pretty sure it’ll all pass in a day or two, which is good cause I need to get my butt in gear for school finals. Not to mention the fact that I need to start the ole diet and exercise routine.
Speaking of which, I’ll start posting on a routine a diet that I came up with, using no weightlifting at all. We’ll give it 12 weeks and see how it goes. Also, I believe Jeremy is almost done with his 12 week foray in fitness, he should have his final writeup available within a few days.
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Smoking Cessation Part II: Day 2
By ben | June 11, 2008
So here I am again, on day 2 for the second time and from what I remember, it’s the same ole, same ole. It was hard getting to sleep last night, it seems that nicotine deprivation causes insomnia. Not to worry though, the worst of the nicotine withdrawals should pass in another couple days. Still, I’m agitated quite a bit, I’m also a week away from finals at school so my stress levels are through the roof. Choosing this time in particular to quit probably wasn’t too hot of an idea but for now I’m going to stand by my decision.
With all the stress and annoyance that comes with quitting, sometimes it’s hard to remember why I’m trying to stop in the first place. I’m 25 years old, not in the worst shape in the world, I eat relatively healthy and I get a decent amount of exercise. I’m not exactly in a health crisis. If I told you I was stopping for health reasons it would be a bit of a lie. If anything, nicotine is a metabolism booster, smoking cigarettes can actually help you lose weight and get in shape. My reason for stopping is to test my fortitude, to see if I can really resist the urge and beat the addiction. I don’t like to be in controlled by anyone or anything, let alone a substance or a large corporate entity. Resisting for 6 months will help me prove to myself that I’m not entirely ruled by addiction.
With any luck I’ll be able to declare victory in another 6 months and then I’ll go from there to see if I remain nicotine free or hop back on the smokers bandwagon. At any rate, that’s it for now, I’ll let you all know tomorrow how everything is and I’ll try and post up some of the old info that I found from the last smoking cessation attempt.
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Smoking Cessation Part II: Day 1
By ben | June 10, 2008
Hello all! It’s been a while since I’ve last posted and as you can imagine from the title, this is part 2 of my attempt to quit smoking because part 1 ended in failure after 5 weeks. As for the rest of the site, we migrated everything onto one hosting account and failed to factor in that our blog is database driven and wiping out it’s original hosting account would also wipe out the database and every entry on it. So as it stands now, we’re just going to have to start from scratch and go from there.
If any of you had kept up on the last smoking cessation series, you would have read that I was having somewhat of an easy time with it. I was about 5 weeks in and didn’t feel any cravings whatsoever. I partied on weekends and hung out with smokers but I still never felt the urge to smoke, I thought I had this thing beat. Then one evening, I’m not even sure why, I smoked a couple. Perhaps I wasn’t ready yet, I had theorized earlier that my easy journey up to that point might have made me think that stopping smoking was no big deal. At any rate, within a period of a couple days I was back up to a pack a day, picking up right where I left off.
This time around I’m hoping that I won’t make the same mistake twice. I underestimated how easy it would be to pick the habit up again and lost sight of my overall goals. So once again I’ve gone a whole day without smoking and hopefully tomorrow will make it two. Day 1 was fairly painless, I had a few cravings but they passed quickly since it was a stress free day. I’ve got finals coming up so we’ll see how I handle the stress without nicotine. Tomorrow I’ll post up more on the reasons why I’m doing this as well as my synopsis of Day 2. I’ll try and find some of the old research stats and source material that I used in my last series and hopefully I’ll have some new stuff for everyone to take a look at too. Once again, the goal here is to go 6 months without smoking a cigarette and then from there I’ll decide whether I want to quit for good or not. I’ll post daily for the first 7 days then weekly for the first month, then monthly after that. Keep checking back for updates and enjoy.
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