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Stop Smoking For Good.net Home | About Me | FAQ | Contact Me | How To Quit Smoking Articles How Can I Stop Smoking Without Cravings?Hi, Knowing how to deal with cravings when you stop smoking can really make or break your efforts. But if you´re like most smokers you probably haven´t put much effort into dealing with and preventing your cravings. The thought of being able to stop smoking without cravings has probably never occurred to you or is a distant dream. It´s an easy and common mistake to make. You decide that you want to stop smoking, you set a date and make your mind up that ´this is it´ you´re ´giving up smoking´. Then after only a few hours you´re going crazy and you can´t stop thinking about cigarettes. You miss them, you want them and you focus on the fact that you will never be able to have a cigarette again! And then you really get panicky, anxious and you want ´just one´ and you start to think that you´d kill someone for just one cigarette! If you´ve been here before or anywhere near this stage you know that cravings can end up ruining your attempt to stop smoking and make those first few days and weeks a living hell! And when you do decide to stop smoking, you know that this will most likely happen or other smokers will tell you about how terrible it is. Not a good start! Other people will tell you that you must accept, embrace, enjoy and live through cravings as they are a healthy sign that you are beating and breaking your addiction. And as much as this is true to, to a certain extent, it still doesn´t make those three to five minutes go by any quicker, make them any easier or make you want to jump up and shout out ´I feel good´, does it?!! Why Can't I stop smoking without cravings?The secret lies in knowing what cravings are and how they affect you. Then you can cut them out at the source. So rather than just accepting the problem, you are prepared for it and you are cutting it out before it arrives or are minimizing it. So what are cravings and how do they affect you?Well, the common belief is that your body is craving for nicotine, that´s why you feel nauseous, you get headaches and snap at people over the smallest things, to name a few feelings. However, in my humble opinion (and I´ve been helping people stop smoking for two years) your body is not craving nicotine at all. Yes I agree that you get cravings because of nicotine, but you get cravings because of the effect that nicotine has when it leaves your body. Not the effect that a lack of nicotine in your body has on your body! So in other words you and your body aren´t going crazy for nicotine, you are going crazy because of nicotine. Sound confusing? Let me explain. Nicotine suppresses your appetite, everyone knows this fact. The way it does it is that nicotine prevents the release of insulin in your body (insulin controls the release of food and sugar into your blood). So without insulin your blood is full of sugars and foods (that would normally be stored by your body) and you are fooled into believing that you are full. Your blood sugar levels are through the roof with nicotine in your system. Thirty minutes to an hour later the nicotine from your last cigarette is fully consumed by your body and insulin is re-released into your body. This means your body realizes that it needs food and you feel irritable – a sign that your body wants food. But you have a cigarette again and block the release of insulin and your blood is full of food again. So you think that your body wants the cigarette, when it actually wants food. When you have a cigarette, you are just fooling your body into thinking that you´ve eaten! The second major reason you get a craving is created in your mind. Throughout your day you have many different cues to smoke. From your fist cigarette when you get out of bed, have a shower of your drink, to your cigarette break time and your after meal cigarette. Each one of these situations or events is a cue to smoke. And when you encounter those situations again your mind reminds you that it is time to smoke again! So your mind creates the crave – fooling you into thinking you want a cigarette. When in fact it´s just a reminder that you used to have cigarettes at this time! I´ve already named a few of the ways in which you feel cravings and I´m sure you as a smoker know them better than I could tell you! There is also one major way I can further explain how it´s not your body craving nicotine, or making you feel this way because it wants nicotine. You know the craving feelings that you get. But have you thought about a real addictive drug and the cravings you get when your body doesn´t get it? I´m talking about heroin. When a heroin addict’s body needs nicotine, he will know about it. And I mean he will know about it! He´ll get hallucinations, suffer hot and cold sweats, experience involuntary kicking movements, his skin will begin to crawl, he´ll get diarrhea and he will feel like death! These are real feelings – true signs that his body wants the drug. Do you suffer these symptoms? Cigarette smokers crave food, not nicotine. So how do you stop smoking without cravings?Now that you know how and why you get these so called cravings you should prepare ways to deal with them. The first method is one that you probably would do anyway, and that is to eat! You eat a ton of food when you stop smoking because your body wants food and when you eat you feel better! But you can end up putting on weight. The best thing you can do is eat food with high concentrations of natural sugars and the vitamins and minerals that your body needs. For example, drink lots of fresh fruit juice, eat lots of fruits and good cooked meals, this ensures that your body has all the food that it needs. And that should help stop smoking without cravings for the most part! This is the thinking behind ´eat carrots and celery´, but those food just aren´t appealing or effective enough! You need to give your body a lot of the vitamins and minerals it needs. The second thing you can do is to break any associations you have to smoking, so that your mind is not reminded to smoke. So get out of the different side of the bed, have a different wake up routine, go to work another way, eat your meals somewhere else. Do anything you can do to disassociate smoking from your everyday activities and routines. This will also help you a ton. Another good thing to do is drink lots of sips of water to make yourself feel full and busy. Water will also help you to flush the toxins from cigarettes out of your system. Distraction and interruption is another key idea and strategy. You should have several prepared ways to distract yourself and interrupt those cravings. For example you could take a walk, ring a friend, drop what you are doing for five minutes and go somewhere else, do a crossword or play with a pen and keep your hands busy. Anything that will distract you from thinking about cigarettes for five minutes will do! So if you really want to stop smoking without cravings put the above strategies into action and remind yourself that these feelings are not caused because your body wants nicotine, but because your body wants food or your mind is thinking about cigarettes. So do what you can to prevent this! P.S. A good idea is to carry around a bottle of fresh orange or cranberry juice, as they both contain Vitamin C which will help remove nicotine and will give your body the vital sugars that it needs. 
Daniel Fargher
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