To Smoke or Not To Smoke

Who all saw "The View" when Whoopi decided to quit smoking? Who all saw the show Oprah did last week on quitting smoking? My hand goes in the air. "Pick me, pick me" I say.

Yes, I have been following Whoopi's progress and yes, I watched the Nation's top experts on Oprah show us why we should quit, and supposedly how. The main Dr. on the show worked with people in the audience and had some cutting edge technology for testing the damage smoking had already done to them. So here I am. A post-menopausal woman who has been a smoker for the last 40 yrs. Since leaving my brick and mortar business earlier this year, I have gained a ton of weight and doubled my pack-and-a-half-a-day habit.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know if I'm feeling like it's hard to breath and I get fatigued easy because of the increase in smoking or the increase in weight, or both. I have always been a huge advocate of smoking, especially when I personally paid for the whole EPA 1993, 526 page report on smoking and found out most of the propaganda the public was getting fed about second hand smoke was BS. In a more controlled study done by the World Health Organization after the EPA study, they showed second hand smoke was so insignificant, and actually children of smokers had 22% less episodes of lung cancer. (For those of you who want to see for yourselves, go here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9776409?dopt=Abstract).
I may feel it's in my best interest healthwise to quit, but I resent the hell out of the Government intruding in my life to tell me I have to.

I have been studying the different drugs, etc associated with smoking cessation. I really thought that Dr. Oz (that appeared on Oprah) had the magic answer, but he just gave the same old plan that has been around forever! I looked at the new drug Chantrix. I read quite a few of the 75 reviews on their site and it scares me more than smoking does! Wellbutrin or Zyban are supposed to be pretty easily tolerated, but there too, I'm not sure enough about my health to know if they would be safe for me. I've also been looking into NLP (a form of changing your behavior to stop old habits) and acupressure. They both seem a lot safer, just not sure how easy it will be or how well they work.

If your curious about NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) for quitting smoking, see the pagehere. Just scroll down the page to the guy lighting up a rolled dollar bill and click on it. It's a very interesting concept and once you learn how to use it, it's supposed to be good in so many other aspects of your life. Maybe I can quit smoking and lose weight! WOW.