Chrysalis

How are you doing, Evelyn? Are you feeling any better? Did you get your sandwich and a Netflix episode? (Both great ideas for getting past a crave! :) )

For reasons I do not understand, it is known that as we age it takes longer to increase our muscle strength. That's just the way it is. And it might take quite a while for the delayed onset muscle soreness you feel to go away, if it ever does. My personal experience (as a "mature" person although not an "endurance" person) is that my fitness improves faster and with less pain when I have frequent short exercise sessions rather than fewer longer sessions. At this point in your life, a single 4-hour session may be too much for you all at once. Try two 2-hour sessions a day. Or 2 hours every day rather than every other day. If that is not possible, do 2 hours of dog walking and gradually increase it to 4 hours. I think that stretching before dog walking is a great idea. I also think that 2 ibuprofen and a hot shower the morning after dog walking may ease your muscle soreness. But if you still have pain, try not pushing yourself so hard in the beginning. This level of effort may have been trivial for you 10 years ago, but now it is not. It is wise to accept reality and figure out ways to compensate for the inevitable changes to our bodies rather than needlessly hurting ourselves or risking serious injury.

rails

conductor

judgement

ROTFL!! :lol2: Score 1 for Action!!

Nice blog, Marti. I'm sorry about your broken engagement--that must have been a blow! But good for you for quitting again now and for really feeling it in your heart of hearts. You are really doing the right thing for yourself and especially for you girls. Good for you!

trip

safari

OK. That sounds good. A discussion of what, if anything, we could and should do for vapers.

I suggest that we discuss the requirement for patience. I think most people are prepared to battle their addiction for the first month. But after that they expect it to be fairly easy. And while quitting does get easier every day there are still days and situations where we have to hang on by our fingernails-- sometimes several months into a quit. A lot of people (including me) start to run out of patience with the effort it takes and begin to think, "Scr*w it! I'm tired of this battle!" So a discussion about seeing the challenges realistically (i.e., you don't really have to fight craves all day every day, even if it seems that way) and the importance of having just a little more patience would be very helpful.

I know that vaping is a controversial topic for various reasons. I really have no strong position on it one way or the other. But I can't recall any posts where people have said, "Help! I'm vaping nicotine and I can't quit!" That is where I would like to help, if necessary-- somebody who is addicted to e-cig nicotine and can't quit. Those who are addicted to e-cigs and are satisfied with that, or who are vaping without nicotine or who are using e-cigs but are using them to reduce their cigarettes down to zero and then stopping the e-cigs probably don't need our help. So who is it that you think we need to prepare ourselves to help?

I owe a lot of the inspiration for my quit to my husband's aunt and uncle. They're both in their mid-90's now. They live alone in an old farm house way out in the New Hampshire countryside. They both have had and continue to have a series of medical problems but they both pull through and just keep going and going and going. I realized the last time we visited them that they keep going because neither one wants to die and leave the other alone. They wouldn't mind dying itself, but leaving the other alone, sick, weak and lonely-- no way. So they fight and fight through every illness and difficulty. Who knows how long they can continue this way? I want to do that for my husband-- I don't want to die and leave him alone. I don't want to be sick and infirm and be unable to travel with him or have fun with him during our "golden years". I don't want him to have to care for and worry about me one minute sooner than necessary because I was selfish enough to indulge my smoking addiction. So Aunt Vida and Uncle Chip were my inspiration; my husband was my motivation. As for support and cheerleading, I credit 2 particular people at QSMB for being particularly warm and knowledgeable and helpful to me, especially during the first difficult month. I don't want to name them here because there were so many people at QSMB who were very, very helpful to me and I don't want anyone to feel slighted. Several newbies who were a few weeks or months behind me were especially helpful to me, too, because they made me feel as though I had something to offer other people-- that my suffering and the insights I gained had some larger purpose. And certainly Alan Carr's book and Joel Spitzer's videos were crucial to my success. It's true that to quit smoking permanently you have to educate yourself about the nature of nicotine addiction and how to overcome it. Alan and Joel do a great job. So I guess for me, it took a village to help me quit smoking and I "owe" my quit to all of them!

OK, now that I know what you mean by "decorate your profile page" I can vote in the poll. Thank you for the clarification. :)

apple

What does "decorate a profile" mean? Paint? Wallpaper? Cute sayings? Huge pictures in your signature? What do you mean?

whacky

Wendy, I think that you are going to be fine in the long run. It's been my observation that people who were going along in life with a stable, healthy weight will end up at a stable, healthy weight after they quit smoking. They may eat more food and gain some weight during the first month or two, but then "normal" reasserts itself. Especially if you feel good and are able to exercise more as a non-smoker. However, people (like me) who were constantly battling their weight as non-smokers, often smoke and eat for emotional reasons. When they quit smoking they turn exclusively to eating to ease their emotions. Those people need to be careful to not let things get out of hand or they really will gain a lot of weight. Gaining 5-7 pounds, even 10 pounds, is much less dangerous to your health than is smoking. Gaining 25 or 30 pounds is more problematic.

I'm not sure what you mean by "lightheaded". If you mean you feel faint, that is not normal and you should take that seriously. I worry about heart or blood pressure problems. On the other hand, I did notice that I had to teach myself to breathe deeply when I quit smoking. I think that my body was used to taking very deep breaths when I inhaled a cigarette. When I quit, I fell into a habit of only taking small, shallow breaths. Sometimes I would feel short of breath (i.e., short of oxygen) just sitting at my computer. Two or three deep breaths would fix me up. So try giving yourself more oxygen. If the lightheadedness doesn't go away, please see your doctor.

One of the most important things I learned from an online quit smoking forum is that everybody's quit is different. That really surprised me because we're all addicted to the same drug, right? So the process of quitting, the timing and intensity of the withdrawal symptoms, and the strategies we use to overcome our addiction forever should be the same for everyone. But as you watch many people tackle and overcome the beast you see that, indeed, there are a lot of different approaches that work. I firmly believe that if I ever again allowed myself to smoke a cigarette, I would soon be back to smoking full time. I've just seen too many people who had good, solid quits going but they let their guard down, smoked a cigarette, and within days were totally back to smoking. I can learn from others' mistakes. However, I do not tell myself "N.O.P.E." every day. I do not take the N.O.P.E. pledge every day. I know that a lot of people do; I know that it really helps them to focus on their priorities every day. And that's great. But that strategy didn't appeal to me. What really appealed to me and helped me keep my quit during the tough times was to have a very clear vision of how my life would be better when I no longer smoked. In particular, I imagined myself being fit and healthy enough to go mountain biking like I used to long ago. The phrase I would repeat to myself over and over when I was battling withdrawal was, "I would rather be able to ride my bike than smoke." Picturing myself biking along a county road in autumn was my equivalent of "N.O.P.E.". So while I understand and agree with NOPE, one is not REQUIRED to repeat that phrase to themselves or to take the NOPE pledge in order to quit smoking. The NOPE pledge is one way to do it, it is a very good way to do it. But there are other good ways to strengthen your commitment and help you hang on during the tough times. The important thing is to find a way that works for you to Keep The Quit!

Colleen (and whoever else was involved with this decision): I really like this idea! A banner headline highlighting a really great post. Then a link to the original thread so the viewer can read the responses. And if someone posts a new response, that "bumps" the thread up in the listings. Great! This is a great way to leverage our best threads and re-start discussion about some important topics. One thing I would recommend is that the the banner head only contain a few sentences or a short paragraph (like yours does today). What we really want is a "teaser" to get people to read the whole post, then read the replies, and hopefully write their own reply. So keep the text in the banner brief and the link to the rest of the post/thread could say "Read Full Entry" or something like that. By the way, congratulations on your improved breathing. That really is fantastic news. And as for COPD (which I have heard is irreversible) I have a friend with mild COPD who stopped smoking and 2 years later her lungs were back to normal for her age. So, indeed, the body's healing powers are remarkable.

damsel

chess

I don't feel qualified to vote because I've never played the Chicks and Sticks game-- I try not to participate in blood sports. :)

Oh, yeah?! Who cares what you think?! :P