after reading everybody's ideas, i just had to tell my success story about smoking. i'm 74 now, i started smoking when i was 16 in high school. i quit 3 years ago on June 8, 2008. i was fixing to have a very serious surgery on July 3 of 2008 (caused partly by smoking). I had blockage in my iliac arteries which almost cost me amputation of my right leg. i had tried quitting lots of times but to no avail. so i looked up everything i could about quitting smoking on line. finally i found a site that made sense. it said to set you a date ahead a month or a week or 2 weeks - however long you want to. then smoke more than you've ever smoked in your life. and keep telling yourself that as of such & such date i will be a non-smoker.
then just keep smoking more and more and as it gets closer to that date, just chain smoke - make yourself smoke till you're nauseated from it. my last 2 days of smoking, i smoked nearly a whole carton of cigarettes. but when that minute came that i had set, i smoked my last one in front of a mirror. it was so disgusting. it is more mental than addictive. when i went to bed, I prayed, telling God that i couldn't do this entirely on my own and that I needed His help. I asked Him to take away my desire for a cigarette!! the next morning when i got up, believe it or not, I absolutely had no desire for a cigarette and never have had since. i never tried the pill, patch, or gum. i've apologized to all my friends and especially my daughter for having smoked around them all my life nearly. but different strokes for different folks, not the same thing works for everybody, just try what you feel will work for you and I pray something works. by the way, I had aorto bi-femoral bypass surgery on 7-03- 08 and I still have both legs. in case you don't know what that is, they opened me up from right below the ribs to top of pelvic main incision and two other incisions one in each groin. used dacron tubing, sewed it into my aorta where it comes out of the diaphram and ran it past the iliac arteries and into the femoral arties at the groin going to each leg. it was NOT a fun surgery. the surgery lasted 5-1/2 hours, was in hospital 9 days, on a ventillator, had 3 blood transfusions and lots of complications & infections, so just hope my story will encourage some of you to quit before something serious happens to your body.
donna