Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking - Allen Carr [66]
In those days I was thirty pounds heavier than I am today and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
When that ‘little monster’ leaves your body the feeling of insecurity leaves with it. Your confidence returns, together with a marvelous feeling of achievement and self-respect. You feel in control of your life, and you can use that control to determine not only your eating habits, but in a wide variety of wonderful ways. This is one of the many great advantages of being free from this awful weed.
As I have said, the weight myth is perpetuated by willpower quitters who substitute food for cigarettes during the withdrawal period, and then continue to overeat. Let’s be clear about this: stopping smoking does not lead to weight gain; overeating does. Food and any other substitutes make it harder to quit smoking, not easier, as I shall explain in Chapter 37.
Provided you follow all the instructions, weight gain should not be a problem for you. However, if you already have a weight problem, or you want more information to give you peace of mind, I would recommend that you read Allen Carr’s EASYWEIGH to Lose Weight which is based on the same principles as this book and makes weight control a pleasure.
CHAPTER 31
AVOID FALSE INCENTIVES
Many smokers, while trying to stop by using Willpower, try to increase their levels of motivation by providing themselves with false incentives.
There are many examples of this. A typical one is ‘My family and I can have a great vacation on the money I will save.’ This appears to be a logical and sensible approach, but in fact it is a false incentive because any smoker would rather smoke fifty-two weeks a year and not have a vacation. In a way, this approach can even heighten the sense of deprivation because the smoker now perceives that he has to abstain for fifty weeks to go on a vacation that he feels that he’ll never be able to enjoy without a cigarette anyway. This makes the cigarette even more precious in the smoker’s mind. Instead, you should focus on the other side of the equation: What am I getting out of the cigarette? Why do I need to smoke?
Another example: ‘I’ll be able to afford a better car.’ That’s true, and the incentive may help you abstain until you get that car, but what then? Once the novelty has gone you will feel deprived, and sooner or later you will fall for the trap again.
Another typical example is the office or family bet or pact. These sometimes have the advantage of helping to motivate you at certain times of the day, but they almost always end in failure. Why?
1. The incentive is false. Why should we want to stop just because other people are doing so? All this does is to create additional pressure, which increases the sense of deprivation and sacrifice. If you and a group of friends, family or colleagues want to quit together, and plan on supporting each other through the process, that’s great. But a pact tends to create additional pressure that can make it difficult for a group member to ask for help if they are struggling. This can turn participants into secret smokers, which increases the sense of deprivation and dependency even further.
2. The ‘Rotten Apple’ theory, or inter-dependence. With the Willpower Method of stopping, the smoker is a fragile creature undergoing a period of misery and torture while waiting for the urge to smoke to disappear. For reasons I have already discussed, using this method one or more participants are guaranteed to fail, and this failure will come sooner rather than later. This gives the other participants the excuse they have been waiting for. With the pact broken or the bet won, the other participant(s) have no motivation to stay stopped. It’s not their fault—they would have held out—it’s just that Bruce or Doug or Sharon let them down. The truth is that most of them have already been cheating themselves.
3. ‘Sharing the credit’ is the flip side of the ‘Rotten Apple’ theory. It’s true that the loss of face is not so bad when shared around, but who wants to fail in the first place? The problem is that if, against