meluhluh

Well I’ve lost 5 more pounds, but I haven’t been getting enough excercise. I hurt my knee about 3 weeks ago and although it is getting better it has made it hard to do a lot of things (I can’t do aerobics or bike, or even walk much!!). The up-side is, when I go back to the doc next week he is going to put me on a physical therapy schedule, so I’ll at least get used to the idea of going in to do exercises twice a week.

So I bought some diet software that lets me track everything I eat, and it has been rather eye-opening! Some of the stuff I thought was okay turns out to be very high in fat/calories (bagels), whereas other stuff turns out to have less calories than I thought (chocolate! yay!)

Somehow, over the past 10 days I’ve managed to drop 5 pounds! Maybe because I’ve been more aware of what I’m eating, maybe because I’ve gotten more exercise than usual because I’ve been doing some home reno with my hubby. Hey, whatever works!

But I finally succeeded. If you have the determination to quit, you can . . . but just as people who lose weight on a diet often go back to their old habits because they didn’t really want to give up their favorite foods, if you don’t really WANT to quit smoking you are going to keep relapsing. This is why quitting smoking for someone else’s sake (a partner, a job, etc.) almost never succeeds. You have to focus on why YOU want to quit.

I think this is why I failed the first two times I tried to quit. I didn’t have reasons for quitting that were compelling enough for ME to want to quit, reasons which sufficiently outweighed the enjoyment I got from smoking (in my mind, anyway.) For me, what finally did it was the realization that smoking was literally taking over my life: I wouldn’t go to places where I couldn’t smoke, and I actually considered quitting my job when I was reprimanded for taking too many smoke breaks (like, once an hour). I couldn’t go to sleep at night if I was out of cigarettes—I needed to be sure my “fix” would be there for me first thing when I got up. The last straw was when I found myself unable to focus and enjoy the last 30 minutes of a movie I had gone to see in a theater, because I was jonesing so bad for a smoke. I swore then that I was going to figure out how to quit for good.

Well, I won’t lie to you. It was nearly a year after this that I finally quit for good. But during that time I was adjusting my attitude toward cigarettes, breaking down all the “good” associations I used to have with smoking one by one. So when I finally smoked my last cigarette, I really was looking forward to being free of the need to smoke, rather than regretting losing something.