Update

-I have lost one pair of pants to my insatiable desire for food.

-I may gain the pants back by way of a newly acquired stomach bug/general plague thing I've got going on right now.

-Being drunk and not absolutely dying for a cigarette feels bizarre. But healthier! Sort of.

-I'm saving a lot of money.

-I'm having trouble finding a blogging community for quitters that isn't terribly written.

-I find that blogs about quitting smoking make me want to smoke more.

Saint Tigerlily sent me an op-ed from the Times recently that helps explain why:

A key component of the Food and Drug Administration’s approach to smoking prevention is to warn about health dangers: Smoking causes fatal lung cancer; smoking causes emphysema; smoking while pregnant causes birth defects. Compared with warnings issued by other nations, these statements are low-key. From Canada to Thailand, Australia to Brazil, warnings on cigarette packs include vivid images of lung tumors, limbs turned gangrenous by peripheral vascular disease and open sores and deteriorating teeth caused by mouth and throat cancers. In October, Britain became the first European country to require similar gruesome images on packaging.

But such warnings don’t work.

[...]

A brain-imaging experiment I conducted in 2006 explains why antismoking scare tactics have been so futile.

[...]

We tested 32 people (from Britain, China, Germany, Japan and the United States), some of whom were social smokers and some of whom were two-pack-a-day addicts. Most of these subjects reported that cigarette warning labels reduced their craving for a cigarette, but their brains told us a different story.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Another friend of mine, One L, told me that a friend of hers quit successfully by reading a book called The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions who have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway Method.


Which you can purchase on Amazon for about eleven dollars. It seems a little too self-helpy book to me, but One L said her friend isn't into self help books either and it totally did the trick. So maybe I'll check it out.

But probably not. I'm really lazy.