Any one quit smoking successfully?...help!

I smoked for 40 years and at the end was up to a pack a day. I really wanted to quit, with the help of Chantix and support from my Doctor, Family and Friends - I got thru it. It has been since December 2011 and it is the best thing I could have ever done for my health and my skin. I started running - signed up for some 5 K races where I knew I had to train. Another thing that helped me was Google the images of smokers lungs and see what they look like. UGH - disgusting.

It changed my life for the Best!

Good Luck and Go for it! It is nice knowing that you are in control of yourself....

I'll be hitting the 10-year mark since my last cigarette this coming November.

I was a pack-a-day smoker for about 10 years, and at the time the decision to quit was an easy one. But, having seen friends and co-workers try to quit unsucessfully over the years by going cold turkey, I knew that wouldn't work for me, especially after reading that it takes the average smoker between 5-7 seperate attempts to successfully quit. Since I wanted this to be my ONLY attempt in doing so, I realized that if I wanted different results, I'd need to employ different methods.

The first thing I did was decide to keep things open-ended. In other words, I didn't give myself a timeframe or "quit date" to be done; rather, I knew this could take some time and I didn't need the pressure or stress of a deadline making this process any more difficult.

Secondlly, I took the steps to educate myself on smoking and why it's so addictive. In addition to the chemical dependency on nicotine, we also have a mental comfort level with the routine that comes with smoking. Having one after a meal, with beers, taking smoke breaks at work, etc- all of these mental associations need to be changed. Furthermore, there are additional mental associations with both the oral fixation and the taste of cigarettes as well, and these too would also need to be changed.

Third, while the patch and gum systems work using a gradual decline, they fail to address the aforementioned mental associations we have with the act of smoking. So, I decided that instead of using the patch to reduce my dependency on cigarettes, I'd simply scale back my smoking gradually over time.

So, when I started, I immediately went from a pack-a-day to 10 smokes per day. I also loaded up on lollipops and chewing gum, which helped with my cravings. After a week, I cut down to 8 per day, then 7, then 6 and so on until I was only down to one smoke per day.

After I smoked my final cigarette on a Sunday night before bed, I had planned to go on the patch, but because I never had any cravings of any sort, I never had to. It's been almost 10 years and I've not once had even any cravings of any sort.