Quitting

I’ve been a relapsed smoker for quite a while now. A year. Maybe more. It sucks. What started as an occasional smoke here and there has spiraled me back into my almost-a-pack-a-day habit. I tried vaping for a while, thinking that it might help me quit. NOPE. It made things A LOT worse because it allowed me to “smoke” in a lot more places, a lot more frequently. Plus I didn’t stink like a smoker, which incentivized it even more. But last week, I threw out all my vaping crap. And now, today, I try to begin again as an ex-smoker.

If you’ve never been addicted to tobacco, congrats on your healthy and uncool life. I’m not as fortunate and much cooler. And yes, obviously this was an addiction of my own making. Nobody made me light up. But now that I want to quit, acting on that choice is much harder. Why is it so easy to start things and so hard to stop them?

I have hypertension. I am overweight. My body is far from the temple it could be. And I’m not getting any younger. Years of drinking and smoking have left me entering my 40s in sub-optimal condition. When I was 23, I could shrug off anything. Surely, I would live forever. But now that some of my friends have been diagnosed with serious health conditions or suffered from heart attacks, the nagging worry that used to be a whisper in the back of my mind is now a fire alarm. I’m entering a point in my life where my body simply won’t bounce back. Losing a tooth and suffering a concussion recently have been good reminders of my temporary corporeal existence.

So, I have decided to quit smoking. This is step one in a “reclaim my health” plan that I hope to have in motion by the end of the summer. Step two, which actually pairs nicely with step one, will be to cut back, way back, on alcohol. After two decades of living like the rockstar I am not, my liver needs a break. It will also have the side benefit of hopefully reducing my waistline too. The last step, the hardest one for me I think, will be integrating exercise into a daily routine. Not pro-athlete levels of exercise, of course, more like the 8th fittest guy in the 65+ retirement community levels of activity. Brisk walks. The occasional jog a few days per week. Maybe some HIIT videos during the winter. My flat tummy is never coming back but there’s no reason for it to resemble the planet Mercury.

I’m not sure why I’m sharing all of this. I guess it’s two-fold. There’s a level of accountability built-in for me. If I still look the same, drink the same, and smoke the same, in 3 months, then it’ll be clear I haven’t accomplished my goal. But I also think maybe some of you are trying to shake off the pandemic weight gain and attempting to change your habits. If you are, let’s have a dialogue and share our experiences. I’ll be posting about this every now and then so feel free to chime in on social media or by emailing me.

There will be ups and downs on this journey. That’s OK. Nobody’s perfect. It’s not the falling that matters but the getting back up. Who’s with me?