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G’day NOPE .....Not One Puff Ever.... (replace Ever with Min,Hour, Day as required flame tree

NOPE

Nope

Been MIA all week. Bad news is.. My family all had a bad flu. Good news is...we all tested negative for covid. And best news.... I'm still smoke free and we're all feeling much better! Absolutely nope!

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@intoxicated yodaGood morning. That post shows a lot of dedication. The "easiest" way to resolve those issues would have been to smoke. Only to start all over again. I recall a lot of bloat in the first few times I tried and this time really focused on getting a handle on it (water, water, water) from the beginning. Blessings to you. It does get easier.

N o P e !

Nope!!!

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Quitting is a journey ....everyone's journey is different .... Some take the steady scenic route ....some take the fast Highway .... My sleep was disturbed for a while ....it will settle eventually.... Well done for not smoking today Yoda....youv,e stayed on the track .

Good evening my junkie and ex junkie friends...thought I would give you guys a little update on my current quit situation. First a little recap and definition of how severe things had gotten for me. The bloating I was experiencing had gotten to the point of being painful. The weight gain was concerning as hell since my worst fear of quitting was realized and then some. Getting fat as hell. Before quitting I stayed around 163 to 165. In less than 11 weeks I topped out at 199. YIKES!!!. I definitely pulled the pin on the fat grenade and blew the **** up! So I lost track of when I quit the coffee and started the kombucha tea but I believe it's been about 10 or 11 days. I was supposed to be drinking some apple cider vinegar and lemon juice before bed but I forget to do that most of the time. Been eating carnivore for the last 4 days and only eating one meal a day but I don't skimp on that meal. The results....drum roll please. Over the last 10 days I've dropped from a high weight of 199 to a low weight of 188. Meals exit with about the same frequency as they enter and the bloating is only after meals, mild and usually only lasts for about an hour or so. That tells me that my stomach acid is building back up to where it needs to be for proper digestion. I'm slowly retraining my brain to not have my hands shove everything in sight that looks like food down my pie hole in a neverending binge. Another side effect is the problems with my back, hips and shoulders seem to be getting better as well. I'm still hacking up phlegm. As far as the quit...well let me tell you, I still see myself lighting up in my minds eye but the cravings are not as severe. Ever since quitting the coffee the cig cravings have gotten much more tolerable so I don't know what sort of weird ass situation I've gotten myself into but at least it's manageable. I still feel like I need to keep the quit front and center in my mind so I don't wind up half way to the store when I'm going to the golf course (yeah, that happened today). Good sleep is still a luxury that eludes me but hopefully that will start to return over the next few days to weeks. Anyhow, if anybody been following that's had similar problems these are the things i've done that seems to help.

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G’day NOPE .....Not One Puff Ever.... (replace Ever with Min,Hour, Day as required Bush turkey

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Congratulations on ten years AMAZING!!!!

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Congratulations Sarge on 10 Amazing Quit free years

Congratulations Sarge, on this epic quit. Thanks for showing the rest us how easily this can be obtained with a little hard work.

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Huge Congratulations Johnny .. So happy to share this with you ....you bring so much to the board .... When ever I see your name ...I know it wil be a good read ....Thank you for all your support ....

Huge congratulations on your 7 years and counting quit and on your 7 years of being such a positive and supportive presence for other quitters on the boards.

Yes @AceWhite Women all over America are screaming your name. Everyone loves man who can dance his way through hard times

Present and accounted for.

Hello Addicts....I sincerely hope you are all doing well tonight. I'm still in the fight, although I've got to do something get this monkey off my back...pun intended. Thanks @Boo. I wasn't expecting to be the miracle child of quitting but I thought at the 10 week mark things would get substantially easier to deal with but lucky me...over the last few days just getting through the day has gotten harder. It feels more difficult now than it did the first week. This isn't some psychological thing happening either. These are still very real, very physical reactions. The bloat I experience at times is off the charts. Sometimes I worry that my skin will split up my spine cuz my gut has blown up so much. It's like I pull the pin on the fat grenade and blow the F**K up!!! . The only thing that may actually be showing any sign of improvement is my digestion. i've shit at least once a day for the last three days. I can hear y'all now..."damn, yoda. why you gotta go there?" Well,, it's a big damn deal for me. When you've had 6 or 7 dinners piled up in your colon and you gotta wear some strange flip flops you found to the walmart to buy shoes that don't need to be tied so you don't have to go barefoot cuz you can't bend over to tie your shoes, it's very meaningful. Read that last sentence over and get louder and louder so you are screaming by the time you get to the last word and that's my mood right now. I can at least wear socks again. There's one positive. But seriously, all the stuff I've read about the physical withdrawal being over in 3 to 5 days is utter bullshit. It may be like for some and I'm happy for you if it is...and jealous AF...but for me this shit is dragging out. I guess the reality is it hasn't been that long but like I said before, I know quitting has already made me live longer because the days just never end now. so tonight...I'm still Andy DuFresne, crawling through shit. But there is no turning back. There is only one way out and that way out is through the shit. Which takes me back to my very first post on this thread...The life I want is on the other side of the shit I don't want to do. Wow, this whole post kinda went to shit quick. Sorry about that. Yoda ain't feeling the force tonight and sleep is rare commodity these days. Anyway, I do love you all out there and pray for the supernatural spirit of your choice to bless you with the strength to endure whatever struggles you may be facing. Goodnight addicts and Yoda be praying for all of us.

I met this monkey this morning, one of the pups must have had a upset tummie in the night. I got out of bed dazed, walked to the den to turn on the TV and stepped in a big pile of S...then I had to hop one leg to kitchen to get paper towels. Mind you that is not easy for an old lady with a recent hip replacement. Blessed be that I got to make the hop on my good leg. Little girl dog came out, did a sniff and ran back to bed. So this morning I spent a good deal of time cleaning up after my little chunky monkey. (I realized it was him after I saw his butt, somebody had to have a bath) K

Some monkeys take more time than others... And if you're asking: Boo, did you just respond as an excuse to post this gif again? The answer is: yes.

Hello Addicts...it's story time again with yoda. It's funny how certain things can impact your perception. I spent the weekend trying to quit quitting for awhile and just be quit...you know, try it out and see how it goes. It didn't go that well. It wasn't terrible but it's still the dominating force in my life for now. And of course as always the darker it gets outside the more I feel the desire. Part of what story time with yoda does is keep me focused on the goal so I showed up here again to log my journey and hopefully entertain some of you as I stumble through my misery...but then my perception got changed. I bet you all thought I forgot about that statement. I saw a member had their 5 year anniversary today. There is something magical about that 5 year mark for me. There's no special reason for it other than the offhand comment I make to myself when I'm about to do something really stupid. This person, today, gets to do the thing that I keep telling myself, look back and be so glad that 5 years ago they quit and stuck with it. I put myself in that persons shoes for a few minutes tonight and ain't gonna lie, I got a little misty. I cannot describe the feelings of joy I have for this person and the level of hope it has given me. And there is the point. If I can feel like this for someone else to accomplish my thought, what will it feel like if I do it? I'll have to wait for that just like they did. But the trail has been blazed again. The groove has been worn in a little deeper so that should help all of us stay on course until we make it. And as the more of us make the journey the more it helps the others coming behind us. I'll tell you a little story about that. I believe it's called the 100th monkey syndrome. I could be wrong about the number but it does have to do with a population of monkeys and a syndrome. It might be the 99th or 45th monkey syndrome. It was years ago when I read about it but if you're interested in it you can google it. Anyhow, after world war 2 ended, the army was doing a lot of tests with nuclear bombs out on some remote islands in the pacific. On one of these islands they brought in some animal trainers to train the local monkey population to wash their food before they ate it to get the radioactive fall out off. Well, as they began working their way around and across the island, training these monkeys, they came across a troupe of monkeys that were already washing their food. None of the trainers had had any interaction with this troupe but yet they were washing their food just as if someone had taught them. The next day as they continued they realized that all the monkeys on the island were washing their food. They moved to a neighboring island to teach those monkeys and all of them were already doing it and there was no way they could have interacted with the monkeys on the first island to learn it from them and the trainers had only just arrived on that island. So the consensus was that once a certain percentage of the population started a new behavior it spontaneously propagated throughout the entire localized population. You see where I'm going with this...once enough people in our population quit it could trigger all the rest of the people to just spontaneously quit. Do I believe that will happen? Not really since we aren't monkeys but I do have hope. And it doesn't hurt me at all to be a link in that possible chain. But think about it, what if you quit and it was determined that you were monkey number 100. or 45 or whatever and literally kicked off a spontaneous quit across the globe? Something to mull over. Anyway addicts, time for me bring this to a close. As always, I love you all and I believe in you. We got this! And congrats to hope2nope for remaining undefeated with a record of 1826 and 0 and still kicking azzz!!

I love this tag phrase. Every smoker should see themselves desperate for their nicotine fix. I have heard so many smokers say I’m not addicted, I like smoking. Riiight, they like stopping the withdrawal that builds up between cigarettes

You may not be exactly where you want to be right now, but you're on the right path. With time and repetition, what feels weird today will become your new normal. Relentless forward progress...it is the only way.

Of course it makes sense, I suspect we all felt that way our first year so its normal. Once I was past my first year I remember thinking back as I read my posts through that year, that it really wasn't that bad. It was horrible while it was happening though. The time passes fast and the older we get the faster it seems lol. You really are doing great

To my knowledge there's no "common" length of time but from my experience the first month was the hardest of my hard first year. The addiction causes it intoxicated yoda. You need to remember and keep reminding yourself that we smoked for A LOT of years so there's no possible way to get through all those triggers we created in just a years time. The beauty with time quit though is that you've already been through the worst craves so you know and can remind yourself that this too shall pass. I used to tell myself that daily.

Good Evening addicts...it's story time again and yes, yoda is once again Andy DuFresne, belly crawling through a tube of shit towards freedom. Funny thing about being in a crap filled pipe where there is no light, no clean water and putrid smells, when you do get a whiff of fresh air it stands out and makes a mark on your psyche. And I did get a whiff of that fresh air today. It didn't last long but it was a good sign...a welcome sign, like Noah having a bird return with an olive branch in it's beak. I don't know where or how this part of the journey ends but I know the end is out there somewhere and I have more than just hope now. I just gotta keep crawling until I get to it. Which brings me to the point of this installment of Yoda's bed time story...does anyone know what the stats are on relapses as in what is the most common length of time someone quits then relapses? Is it 2 months, 6 months, a year? Just curious because even though we are all different we are all the same. If there is a common thread in a relapse tied to how long someone has been quit there may lie some answers not only about the addiction itself but also about the psyche of man. I figure if we are all going through this maybe we can do something even larger. Don't get me wrong, I do so love to piss and moan about the struggle of quitting and some of the references I make humor me to no end. (i write these posts for my own entertainment, if any of you enjoy them that's even better but when I write them they are for me.) The real reason is to analyze what is taking place in my own mind and the associated physical response. So, let's say someone has been quit for 6 months and doing quite well, then all of the sudden they get an attack of severe cravings. Five minutes goes by and the craving is still there. Hours and then days pass and the cravings just keep coming like the wave of a tsunami. What causes that? I has to be more than just mental or emotional. I mean, after 6 months the nicotine is gone and most of the neurological pathways should be repaired. Even after 2 months I have days that aren't so bad, like today, but I know by reading some of the posts on here that even 10 months or a year out people can get overwhelmed with a crave. So what is taking place? Why would the mind try to trick the body back into the trap? Or is it something from the body triggering the mind? I'm probably just overthinking this whole thing but I'm really wanting to be able at some point to quit quitting and start just being quit. I don't want to be the guy living in a constant state of denial. I want to be done with the demon sticks once and for all and right in this very moment I'm just not sure how to get there. Regardless, the goal is still to become a non smoker. Not just an ex smoker, but a new person that has never smoked. If I can make the memory of the old person disappear then the vices of that old person should disappear as well. I'll try and meditate on that this weekend, in the meantime I should probably try to not sleep to a marathon of Joe Dispenza videos. But that idea that you can reprogram yourself into whatever you want to be intrigues me and I don't see why there can't be a formula to reprogram the smoker right the hell out of all of us. And I'm not talking about cheating the system but understanding the system and using its full potential. Anyway, I've finally gotten around to asking the question to the universe and all of you who read this. I'll patiently wait for the answers I'm looking for and pray for wisdom to not reject the answers if they aren't what I want. I'm sorry for rambling so much and damn was I all over the place this evening. Good night addicts. I do love all of you here and appreciate the interactions.

Today has not been a good day!! Two doctors appointments and they never want to find the cause of the problem lets just add more medication I guess that's why they call it practicing medicine By the time I was done I wanted to smoke!!!! Didn't but it sure crossed my mind.Some day I hope that is not the first thing that crosses my mind when someone pisses me off. My rant for the night

Setting here at work, we were suppose to get the holiday schedule today but did not. what a hassle and now I am told because our normal day off is Thursday we do not get paid for it ? what a rip off. ERRRR this just pisses me off, how can you pay some but not the rest for a holiday like Thanks Giving what a load of crap. I m so disgruntled