Trying to reduce the number of cigarettes – hardest thing ever

• 

The title it’s pretty self explanatory, isn’t it? There we go: a big part of my journey towards a healthier lifestyle includes my love/hate relationship with nicotine.

Spoiler alert: there is NOTHING healthy about smoking. Starting to smoke was possibly the worst decision of my life, after years and years where I’d even mock smokers. I simply was not able to understand why people would persevere with something that is nothing but damaging, both physically and financially, and would tell myself, ‘not to me, not today nor ever’.

Then, one day it started. I tried one, I realised that it made me as tipsy as if I just had three beers, it was kinda fun, like an easy way to get high without actually getting high. “I can control it”, I kept repeating myself; “I’m never going to become an addicted”.

No one wakes up and thinks, today I’m going to become a nicotine addicted, condemned to struggle the whole life with the physical need for something that will cost me hundreds of dollars per year and will potentially kill me. No one, trust me. No, we start with the curiosity to try, then we like the way it makes us feel, we like the social interaction among smokers, we like those five minutes of break where we shut down the world and only think to the bittersweet taste of burning tobacco down our mouths.

You have one every now and then, then you want one – just one – every day. It’s like the break between one part of the day and the other, where the other cannot start if you don’t stop five minutes and have a cigarette first. You start to NEED it, and tell yourself that you want it. The truth is, this was for me the very beginning of the addiction.

Things escalated slowly, that one per day became two, and so on and so forth. I’ve been a smoker for six years now, at the pace of one pack of cigarette every other day. Yeah, about 10 per day; some may say it’s not a lot, but to me it is; I can’t walk a ramp of stairs without running out of breath, my resistance when working out dramatically decreased, I constantly feel like there is something on my chest, I have troubles breathing when I sleep, and my lungs are totally weaker.

One cannot go through a fitness journey towards a better health without dealing with nicotine addiction. I am addicted now, totally dependent on cigarettes; I am writing this post in the attempt to distract myself and don’t think that yes, we’re past my usual smoke break at work. I don’t even have cigarettes with me now, and it’s making me feel even worst because I know that even if I wanted to, I could not smoke.

I know myself. I know I’ll never be able to quit smoking all together. I am trying to reduce the number of cigarettes I smoke daily now, from 10 to 6, and then hopefully to 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,0. Reducing one by one might not look like a big step, but other smokers out there will understand that even an extra hour without smoking has dramatic effects on our mood, focus, and irritability.

Today I only had three and a half cigarettes so far. I’d normally have smoked five or six by this time of the day. You can believe that I COMPLETELY feel the lack of nicotine in my system.

It’s hard. It’s going to be even harder. Especially when I’ll go out with friends, there is no night out without drinking, there is no drinking without smoking.

How can we balance the need for a social life with a healthy lifestyle? This is totally the topic for another post. Stay tuned for more!