DMIL´s constant nagging both of us about smoking in that querulous old-woman whiney voice doesn´t help there in the least. Whenever she gets started we both have to strive hard not to scream at her to STFU. The result of that nagging is even more resistance to quitting than we had before. Luckily we are not with her all the time, else there might be a serious quarrel. Quitting, when demanded in that kind of way, becomes synonymous to caving in.
But the medications and dietary changes haven´t brought down DH´s blood pressure far enough. He will have to quit or at least cut his smoking far, far down.
Which means that I, too, must stop smoking or else he´ll never manage.
Now I, apart the occasional cough, have not had any health problems related to smoking. My BP is normal to lowish, arteries were free the last time they checked, and genetically, there´s been no cardiovascular disease in my parents and just one case within the preceding generations, so I should by all accounts be a low-risk smoker. Which means that I have absolutely no reason to quit for my own health. I actually have several reasons not to quit, one of them being that I gained about fifty pounds within the year after quitting successfully for the last time, and the second being that soon after quitting, I began having serious panic attacks that left me incapacitated for days on end and disrupted my sleep. These took almost two years to go away.
Both of which I never again wish to experience. Becoming a morbidly obese nervous wreck again is not what I have in mind for my future.
Then again, I do have a better starting point today than I had back then.
I know now that it is entirely possible for me to work or socialize without smoking. The rules about smoking having changed, I am not allowed to smoke inside my office any more. Smoking in restaurants is banned, too, besides, I rarely go out any more anyway. And at home, we have a strict no-smoking-inside policy, too. Whoever of us wants to smoke has to go outside on the balcony.
Which means that some of the most powerful triggers for smoking I used to have before my first quit just aren´t being activated any more, and most situations of which I used to assume that I could not navigate them without a cigarette are actually still smoke-free.
The weight gaining part and the panic attacks were related to each other in that the medications I got against the panic attacks were causal for the weight gain, as proven by the fact that I didn´t gain further after going off the meds.
Besides, I have gone a long way towards healthier eating since then, and will have to go even further in the future.
And I do know today that while the meds definitely didn´t stop the panic attacks, what did stop them finally was something deceptively simple I read about in a book and tried out then. Namely, that smoking cessation may lower the dopamine levels in the body, and too low dopamine levels may cause panic attacks. So, to get rid of the panic I had to raise my dopamine levels. It was as simple as having a protein shake with a spoonful of honey and a dash of vitamin C powder every night before bed. In the beginning I also added some valerian pills, plus vitamin B complex for good measure. A week after I started on that regimen, the panic attacks were gone.
Having made that experience, I should be able to avoid any panic attacks this time.
Besides, back before my first quit I was regularly smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. Today I smoke half as much.
Even so, I am still addicted to nicotine, that is why I am still resisting quitting. And there are still some triggers I don´t really know how to deal with. Mostly, they concern situations where I go outside for a smoke to escape an unpleasant situation inside, whether it´s DH wanting to watch something on TV that I don´t want to see, or any unpleasant task that may either be put off for a few minutes by smoking first, or the doing of which is rewarded by having a cigarette afterwards. Then there is the regular after-meal cigarette. I´ll have to find something else to signal to me that I have to stop eating.
All of these I am still working on.
Quitting before christmas would mean saving myself several days of old crone whining and harping on the topic. And the money I´d save would sure come in handy.
Weight this morning: 196 pounds (89 kilos).
Still undecided,
Julia
