Customer Reviews

Stop Smoking for Good: Forget the Patch, the Gum, and the Excuses with Dr. Prasad's Proven Program for

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This book was a stepping stone to actually quitting smoking. I can't say it was my sole motivation, but it did help get me in the right state of mind.

I do however feel that the questionairres in the book in helping you determine the depth of your addiction are inaccurate. For example, in completing them the book recommended that I would probably have a difficult and longish recovery time after I stopped smoking. It struck a bit of fear of quitting in me. I have since quit smoking and have felt great, the quit has been so easy...not long..hard or scary like the book led me to think it might be.

This book carries on the notion that if you actually pay attention to why you are smoking, you will realize that you don't like smoking at all...a popular way to view quitting ala Allen Carr.

I started smoking when I was 16 -- typical teenage rebellion thing, and wanted to fit in with the "cool" kids at work. I've smoked off and on for over 20 years. I've quit many times -- quite easily, the first few times -- and stayed away from the drug for months, even over a year. But I've smoked steadily for the past 10 years because my current "better half" as well as my previous one are both 1-pack+/day smokers. It's really, really hard to quit successfully when you live with someone who smokes... without resenting them, or eventually being turned off by them.

I needed to find a way to quit without ending up with these negative feelings. I wanted to quit, and be happy about it. I found this book browsing through the meager selection at a brick & mortar store before my recent surgery -- I knew I would not be smoking for several weeks after my surgery because it's so bad for the healing process, so it seemed like a good opportunity to kick the habit forever. I leafed through several books on smoking cessation, most of which were lecture-oriented: smoking's bad for you, you're a social pariah, you're weak, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we know it's bad. It doesn't help to know how bad, really. I needed something that would tackle the underlying addiction, and not in a way that would leave me yearning forever.

Dr. Prasad's book caught my eye with his term "comfortable nonsmoker". I browsed through the first few pages in the store, and realized right away that he understood what makes smoking so incredibly compelling. It's immensely pleasurable. The warm, velvety smoke, as he describes it, lingers in your mind and lures you back in months, even years, after you've tried to break away from it. The key to quitting, the book says, is to understand what compelled you start to begin with, and to acknowledge the fact that you will have to forgo this pleasure for the rest of your life -- and be happy about it. It's also extremely critical that you have reasons to quit that are *internal* -- things you want to do for yourself. You can't quit successfully because someone else wants you to. It just won't last.

One of my majors in college was psychology (with a focus on abnormal psych), so it made sense to me to read a book on addiction written by a psychiatrist. I was slightly uncomfortable at first with the categorizations that Prasad makes in his book -- identifying parts of the brain, for example, as the Intellectual Division, Emotional Division, and Instinctual Division. It smelled a little Freudian to me at first. But eventually I came to realize that he was using these categorizations to facilitate his communication, not necessarily to consider them absolute or definitive. In other words, in order for his book to progress, and for the pieces to come together in the end, he had to find ways of referring to more complex concepts by assigning names to them.

It's been almost a week now since I've touched a cigarette. I've barely even begun my life as a comfortable nonsmoker. I'm happy, though, and optimist about my chances of success -- and if you knew me, you would realize that this is a really unusual thing for me to say.

If you're trying to quit, and especially if you have already tried several times, this book is a great starting point -- and for some people, it may be enough to read this book and take control from there. Remember, it's all in your mind!