Your most recent attempt to quit was very likely a bust. I assume this only because I used to be the sort of chain smoker who swore off cigarettes once or twice a year, and I still remember my "withdrawal symptoms'* ruefully and vividly.

I COULD ALWAYS STOP FOR AN HOUR

Within an hour of my earnest decision never to smoke again, I began to itch for a smoke, and that powerful desire would never subside or fade. When the phone rang, when a visitor came to my office or home, when I ran into a momentary work problem, when I was at a party, even when I first opened my eyes in the morning—I thought of a cigarette. Contrary to the wonders promised to follow my emancipation from nicotine, I did not sleep better, my food did not taste better, my thoughts were not clearer, I did not feel more vigorous—I was, in essence, 165 pounds of body and mind almost exclusively devoted to thinking about the cigarette I wanted but could not have.

In the fine tradition of people who have given up smoking, I gained weight whenever I stopped. In order to substitute something for the cigarettes I craved, I chewed gum at the rate of about three packages a day (which, after all, added only 60 calories) and kept some gumdrops at my desk (but they're only 30 calories each). And as a substitute activity during moments at the dinner table that might otherwise have been occupied by tapping a cigarette from the pack, lighting it, puffing it, flicking ashes from it, putting it in and taking it from the ashtray, and finally stubbing it out, I ate a little more bread than usual at lunch and dinner. (But those extra rolls and slices of toast and even the larger-than-usual desserts didn't add more than 300 extra calories daily.)

HOW THOSE CALORIES ADD UP!

However, since it takes only 3,600 extra calories (whether in a day, a week or a year) to add one extra pound of fat, I gained. I gained, to be precise, at the rate of about two pounds a week. Soon the tailor had to open seams and shift buttons . . . and then when even my "expanded" wardrobe became uncomfortably tight, I simply started smoking again. "Anyone knows," I explained to myself in justification, "that it's worse for a man in his fifties to be heavy than it is for him to smoke/'

While all this was going on—the unfulfilled desire, the gaining of weight—I was neither a particularly endearing companion nor a productive co-worker. How could I be? If you tie the most rollicksome pup in the world just far enough from a bowl of food for him to see the dish but not taste its contents, hell rapidly become a barking, yapping, whining, snarling, jumping, lip-curling cur. Cigarettes were eternally on view for me—but, so to speak, "out of reach." So I barked and snarled and growled.

Not until the day you stop smoking do you realize that we live in a world of cigarettes. In our newspapers and magazines and on television we see strong young men and radiant girls smiling and smoking, dancing and smoking, skiing and smoking, finding sweet love at the seaside while smoking. In real Me, as we walk on streets and into rooms, we instantly detect the provocative tang of cigarette smoke. Posters, billboards, the movie screen, the stage, our radios, the advertising cards in our buses—these all remind us of the fun of lighting up and puffing. On planes, the passengers obediently light cigarettes on signal. So not only could I see and smell the cigarettes I denied myself—I was surrounded by them. I jittered and jangled—and I’ll bet that you did, too!

WHY GO THROUGH THE TORTURE?

Ridiculous! Really, this is ridiculous. If it's that painful to give up smoking, it's just not worth it. And I'm not being sarcastic. I mean it. Most of us have enough to worry us, enough pressures already on us, enough real and immediate knots to unravel about ourselves and our families and our work and our world so that it's just plain foolish to add one more enormous difficulty to our days and nights.

But suppose you could really give up cigarettes for the rest of your life without all that pain? Suppose you could find a way not to itch for the next cigarette, not to focus on tobacco and smoke, not to be whipped about emotionally by the incessant sight of smokers and smoking, not to gain extra pound after extra pound. Then it would be a good thing to stop, wouldn't it?