Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [38]
SMOKER: Of course not.
ME: Do you bother to look both ways when you cross the road?
SMOKER: Of course I do.
Exactly. The smoker goes to a lot of trouble not to step under a bus, and the odds are hundreds of thousands to one against it happening. Yet the smoker risks the near certainty of being crippled by smoking and seems oblivious to the risks. Such is the power of the brainwashing.
I remember one famous British golfer who wouldn’t travel to the US to play because he was afraid of flying. Yet he would chain-smoke round the golf course. Isn’t it strange that if we felt there was the slightest fault in an aircraft, we wouldn’t go up in it, yet we accept the one-in-two odds that smoking will kill or disable us? And what is our reward for taking this truly staggering risk? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
Smoking is easily the biggest cause of preventable death in the world. It is estimated that every year around 5 million deaths are caused by smoking (including over 450,000 in the US). Sometimes it can be difficult to even begin to get our head around something on that scale. To give you a comparison, this is like having a September 11th every four hours, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.
Another common myth about smoking is the ‘smoker’s cough’. Many of the younger people who attend our seminars are not worried about their health because they do not have a smoker’s cough. Some say that smokers who don’t have a cough are the ones who should worry the most. A cough is one of nature’s fail-safe methods for expelling foreign matter and poisons from the lungs. The cough itself is not a disease; it is a symptom. When smokers cough it is because their lungs are trying to get rid of the cancer-triggering tars and irritants contained in tobacco smoke. When they don’t cough, the poison remains in their lungs, and this is when they can cause cancer and the many other horrendous diseases associated with smoking. Smokers tend to avoid exercise and get into the habit of shallow breathing in order not to cough. I used to believe that my smoker’s cough was going to kill me. In truth, by expelling much of the filth from my lungs, it probably added years to my life.
Just think of it this way. If you had a nice new car and allowed it to rust without bothering to do anything about it, that would be pretty stupid. It wouldn’t be the end of the world though; it is only a question of money and you could always buy another. Your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. You only get one. It’s a cliché that our health is our most valued asset. How true that is, as any sick millionaire will tell you. Who could conceive of a more ridiculous pastime than to spend a fortune for the privilege of poisoning the vehicle upon which your very life depends?
Wise up. You don’t have to smoke, and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU.
Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself, if you knew for certain that your next cigarette would be the one that triggered off the cancer in your body, whether you would actually smoke it. Forget the disease itself (it’s difficult to imagine something so painful) but imagine that you have to go to your local cancer hospital to suffer through the endless rounds of chemo. Now you are not planning the rest of your life. You are planning your death. What is going to happen to your family and loved ones? How would it feel to have your hopes and dreams smashed to a pulp in a single heartbeat? Your whole life snatched from you to be replaced by emptiness, terror and an excruciatingly painful and humiliating death? How would you even begin to explain it to your children?
The saddest part of my job is that I often see people to whom this has happened. Of course, they are just like you and me, they never thought it would happen to them either, but it does. The worst thing that happens isn’t even the disease itself; it’s the knowledge that they only have themselves to blame and the guilt they feel towards their innocent families. All our lives as smokers we say, ‘I’ll quit tomorrow