Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [43]
However, if you watch natural history programs, as I do, you will be aware that the first ‘rule’ of nature is survival and that the second is reproduction. Nature ensures that reproduction does not take place unless both partners are physically healthy and able to provide food, shelter and protection for the offspring. Man’s ingenuity has enabled him to bend these rules somewhat; however I know for a fact that smoking causes impotence. I can also assure you that when you feel fit and healthy, you’ll enjoy sex much more and more often.
The purpose of this chapter has not been to scare you into wanting to quit smoking. If scare tactics were going to work, they would have done so a long time ago. What I have attempted to do is to demonstrate that the brainwashing closes our minds to the true physical cost of smoking, and that life is so much more enjoyable without carrying this tremendous burden of fear around with you.
The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-story building is heard to say as he passes the fiftieth floor, ‘So far, so good!’ We think that as we have got away with it up until now, so one more cigarette won’t make the difference.
Try to see it another way: the ‘habit’ is a lifetime’s chain of fear, disease, misery and slavery, each cigarette creating the need for the next. When you start smoking you light a fuse. The trouble is, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LONG THE FUSE IS. Every time you light a cigarette you are one step nearer to the bomb exploding. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT’S THE NEXT ONE?
CHAPTER 18
ENERGY
Most smokers are aware of the effect that the process of clogging up and depriving the body of oxygen and nutrients has on their general health. However, they are not so aware of the effect it has on their energy levels.
One of the subtleties of the smoking trap is that the effects it has on us, both mental and physical, happen so gradually that the changes are almost imperceptible to us, and we consider them to be the normal signs of getting older.
It is very similar to the effects of poor eating habits. The pot-belly appears so gradually that it causes us no alarm.
But suppose it happened overnight. You went to bed trim, not an ounce of fat and a six-pack stomach. You awoke the following morning, thirty pounds heavier, with no muscle definition and a gut that puts your plans to go to the beach on hold indefinitely. Instead of waking up feeling fully rested and full of energy, you feel miserable and lethargic. If that happened you would be panic-stricken, wondering what awful disease you had contracted overnight. Yet the disease is the same. The fact it took twenty years to get there is irrelevant.
So it is with smoking. If I had a time machine that could transport you forward in time just three weeks to experience the mental and physical benefits of quitting, that is all I’d need to do to persuade you to quit. You would think: ‘Will I really look and feel that good?’ Actually, what it really amounts to is, ‘Have I really sunk this low?’ I emphasize that the benefits are not only physical; you will have tons more energy, confidence, courage and self-esteem. You’ll also be more able to relax, concentrate and handle stress.
As a teenager I remember rushing around just for the hell of it. I had so much energy. It was fantastic! Then for thirty-three years I was permanently tired and lethargic. I used to struggle to drag myself out of bed in the morning, and after my evening meal it was all I could do to lie on the sofa in front of the TV. I’d be asleep within minutes. Because my father used to be the same, I thought this behavior was normal. I thought that only young kids and teenagers