Quitting And Weight Gain

For people who are worried about quitting and weight gain,  my advice at Beautiful Quitters is to forget it.

 

Stop worrying. You will gain some weight. A survey of the literature bears this out.But never start thinking that you should put off quitting because you think you will gain weight and so quitting isn't such a priority. It is!  

Just decide to quit and make it a goal to relearn enjoying delicious foods, all the foods you never tasted much because smoking interfered with your appetite and taste buds.

 

Studies have been done on this issue too.

 

One researcher, Susan Veldheer, Project Manager in the Department of Public Health Sciences (Penn State) was concerned to find out how big of a problem previous quit-related weight gain really was, when it came to people’s willingness to go on another quit-program.

 

She found that the attempters who had previously gained weight were more likely than the other groups to “avoid treatment to help them quit”. 

She ended the study report by encouraging professionals to ask smokers if they had had a problem with weight gain on a previous quit-attempt. And then the idea is presumably, to encourage them not to be afraid to try again in spite of a possible few pounds more.

http://news.psu.edu/story/314223/2014/05/01/research/risk-weight-gain-deters-some-smokers-seeking-treatment-quit

 

So that’s it. Please decide to quit and as soon as you are able, start getting in touch with your new body little by little. If you are a successful quitter you will really enjoy doing this.

 

And in the process you will want to feel better in other ways, so the motivation is built in. That’s all I need say. Otherwise maybe you can check out my blogpost on diet on the best diet for quitters.

 

If you stay on this diet after quitting you will lose the weight back and especially if you get more into exercise…You will also start discovering that quitting and weight gain will not be an issue for you, even if you do put on a few pounds!

Farley AC, Hajek P, Lycett D, Aveyard P. Interventions for preventing weight gain after smoking cessation. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2012;1:CD006219.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22258966

blogpost here on “The Best Diet for Quitters”

1.      Allynsays:

August 25, 2015 at 11:28

Your site has great content and your willingness to help others is amazing, Avera. Personally, I have never smoked – never even desired to try one, probably because my eldest sister smoked as a teen as part of her “rebellion” and blew smoke in my face (she stopped smoking after that brief rebellion, by the way). I certainly have known a lot of people who have smoked and wanted to stop, however.

 

Of most interest to me was your description of how a telephone coach helped you stop. I’ve never heard of that type of “program” before but it certainly makes sense. So, I wish you success as you work to build your own help center.

 

Regarding this post on weight gain, I appreciate your encouragement to not worry about a few pounds. I particularly thought your point about weight gain not being as bad as what one does to their body by smoking was right on. All of us gain and lose weight. Extra pounds can be shed!

1.       

2.       

3.      Thank you Allyn.

You know it’s amazing to me how many people just can’t smell how bad the stuff is….when they first begin to smoke. It happened to me too…The allure of smoking and being “cool” seemed to override any bodily considerations. When I felt the buzz from the pollutants and less oxygen, I also didn’t take that as a warning. That’s how brainwashed I was, apparently. And yet it all seemed perfectly “normal” to become a smoker by just ignoring the danger signs. I guess that’s how strong my own unmet inner needs were. ASTOUNDING how a culture can do that to people.!!
You were very sharp in getting it though.

I appreciate the candor and the positive support. I quit way before there were any quit lines except those done charitably through certain churches. It was a total accident I found that one place because for sure they were not advertising. But my search for some real help was so urgent and I was so wonderfully rewarded when I accidentally found my own quitline… that I am now offering the same help to others.

For me the withdrawal symptoms were chiefly emotional…ie: I just went crazy and felt crazy for most of those 2 months and then struggled for long afterwards to master all such feelings of deprivation. And I knew if I never did another good thing in my life at least I could try to spare some other aspiring quitters the same anguish. Some say the addiction of nicotine is mostly like heroin. And we have all seen those movies of the cold turkey process. So that’s where I come in. It’s hard to get over an addiction but it can really make you feel as if you have a new life once you do!
Thanks again and be well always,
Avera

REPLY

1.      timsays:

August 23, 2015 at 09:09

Hey

You will not believe this but tomorrow is the first day of me quitting smoking. My partner has bought me a vapo stick, and I am going to give it a good shot.

I have been away from work a while and gained weight already so I’m expecting to struggle there. I wil chech out your diet for quitters.

Love the pic of weighing yourself btw. Very funny

Tim

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

August 23, 2015 at 18:07

Hey coconut Tim!
I think coconuts are one of the few healthiest foods in the world!! You could be a beautiful quitter FAST with food like that instead of the coffin nails, lol!
Yeah that picture is funny! But it’s not me. I haven’t yet found a way to tape the scale to the ceiling so it sticks, drat!
Good luck with the quitting and don’t hesitate to email me if you’d like some personal and free coaching from me.
Warmly,
Avera

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1.      Martysays:

August 23, 2015 at 09:05

A worthy cause. The the effects of smoking are devistating .I haven’t smoked in 45 years but I have seen it tear people up.

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

August 23, 2015 at 18:09

Thanks for that Marty.
Yeah, it’s hard to look at people who still don’t get it, and it’s hurting them and they don’t why they are hurting. Deep down they are still nursing unmet needs, and they can’t trust that the substance is only preventing them from getting their true needs addressed. I hope somehow they can find out the truth. I’m sure glad you did though ;=)

Janis, John and All Our Unmet Needs

JANIS SINGING HER COMPLETE WOODSTOCK SET

At Woodstock 1969 a genius was presenting herself already as a fading spirit. Her pain had already begun to overcome her genius and the cause of her early downfall was her unmet needs. When we listen to her I say we feel our unmet needs.

 

Her songs were not just ornaments for the stage-of-privilege, otherwise known as the “good life” in our sad world. Her songs were a cry for all our unmet needs and her own personal cry for love.  A crying out of all the senseless pain people have to endure in the mad, spirit-wrenching search for meaning and love.

 

She was all glitter and caricature and gypsy feathers and an astonishing combination of Delta-Black blues and brassy Chicago blues and  pre-feminist thirties & forties abused-female disempowerment-angst blues…only MUCH more soulful and gutsy.  Primal screaming musical Janovian (ie: Arthur Janov) blues. But underneath was her pathetic tragic unmet heaving gaping black-hole of a need for love.

http://www.arthurjanov.com/  

Her whole public persona howled out this truth. From what I read of her story Janis was aloof and artistic and  she was savagely bullied in school for the usual reasons: unconventionality, intelligence and creativity, and looks which did not flatter the opposite sex, but apparently challenged it in a no-fooling kind of way.

 

Today I say she would have been  a staunch feminist, contributing much with her music towards liberating other lonely creative women…and creative people.

 

But instead of confronting hers and our unmet needs, she succumbed to her addictions, alcohol and heroin. What an incalculable loss to the music world and humanity.

 

So please enjoy her Woodstock Full Concert, presented at the original Woodstock 1969 Festival in Bethel NY.

 

And when you hear Janis, please tune your ear to the everpresent overbearing cry for love, which comes out in everything she sang, and everything she did.

 

It’s trendy to disparage people with flaws as great as Janis’. 

But I say we shouldn’t yield to the temptation to offer negative judgment, as comfortable as that makes some people…It’s also not nice to beat someone when they are down especially when they already died from it.

 

Lets take a new look at Janis… a tragic genius who SHOWED us with her musical strains and almost over-the-top disturbing cries and histrionic overtones ….that pain we all conceal too well inside our polished- and-polite exteriors. The pain that SCREAMS out to be noticed.

 

The same screams coming from John Lennon when he sang the last lines from his song “Mother”:

 

“Mother, you had me
But I never had you
I wanted you
But you didn’t want me
So
I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye
Goodbye

Father, you left me
But I never left you
I needed you
But you didn’t need me
So
I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye
Goodbye

Children, don’t do
What I have done
I couldn’t walk
And I tried to run
So
I, I just got to tell you
Goodbye
Goodbye

Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home

Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home
Mama don’t go
Daddy come home

Mama don’t go
Daddy come home”

Songwriters
SWAN, SIERRA

Published by
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

Read more: John Lennon – Mother Lyrics | MetroLyrics

http://www.metrolyrics.com/mother-lyrics-john-lennon.html

1.      Jasonsays:

September 2, 2015 at 16:58

Hi Avera,

Another great post. I loved Janis and her music, which as you say was unconventional, challenged the norms and spoke of tragic pain.

It is a shame that people don’t see through these barriers we try to defend ourselves with. Anyone that resorts to drugs, while they will never admit it, is making a plea for help or just trying to block severe pain from their life. The issue is as much as we block, we don’t heal and we begin a further downward spiral of self loathing and negativity.

A great post which will open many eyes!

Jason

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

September 2, 2015 at 20:11

Hi Jason and thank you for the heads-up about this post. I still get misty when I hear that diva Janis, and you are right in my opinion about the connection between shutting out pain and a pseudo-normality which will always break down in the face of enough stress…..
I hope you are right about how much attention this site will get now ;=)
Warmly,
Avera

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1.      Laurettasays:

September 1, 2015 at 19:16

Oh my goodness! an amazing article dude. Thanks Nonetheless I am experiencing challenge with ur rss . Don’t know why Unable to subscribe to it. Is there anybody getting identical rss drawback? Anyone who is aware of kindly respond. Thnkx

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

September 1, 2015 at 20:18

Hi Lauretta,
No I never knew there was a problem with the RSS….I get the RSS-roll when I click on it and never hit the subscribe button myself. But I will check it now and try to fix whatever is keeping it from working. Thank you so much for you interest in my site… and obvious positive response ;=)
It’s people like you that make all this worthwhile! Stay in touch anyway you can…the project is growing…
Warmly,
Avera

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

September 9, 2015 at 02:12

Hi Lauretta,
The RSS is working now. Please do me the honor of being my first subscriber!!

Best to you always,
Avera

REPLY

1.      Lawrencesays:

August 30, 2015 at 23:36

Hey there
I like the lyrics of this song!
Always been a fan of Lennon as well.
i can see that a lot of passion and energy was put into this record.
Thanks
Lawrence

REPLY

1.      Avera Yugensays:

August 30, 2015 at 23:49

Hi Lawrence,
I recently saw a film about John Lennon, and he never really had anyone to care about him although his childhood was filled with bright promise. The adults were too busy with their own agenda and John constantly felt betrayed or used. And if anything he soft peddled that true history in his music. When it does come out it is startling and explosive. That album was filled with passion and tragedy, and I believe he was helped along the road to self-understanding by the therapist Janov. Unfortunately he needed much more help than what Janov could offer, but anyone could see in his music he was beginning to “get it”.

Warmly,
Avera

More on Attachments and Addictions

“I think most people are so entrapped in their minds, they don’t even know they are entrapped. If you think you are free no escape is possible..awakening is the recognition that you are in prison”.…    Gurdjieff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff

 

Before we have begun to awaken, we interpret transcendent experiences in terms of our prison. Once we begin to awaken we begin to have a little bit of leverage with which we can see our predicament.

 

One way we can help ourselves is to connect with other consciousnesses which can mirror for us the ways we are stuck. 

Such ways can include books, photos, and the community of the awakening. In such meetings we can ask for help and support in getting out of our predicaments and in moving beyond our comfort zone.

 

So seeing our attachments and addiction of mind encourages a readiness to let go of our hold on things. Most of our psychological structures were laid down during our emotional preverbal period…thus being hard to unlearn. But some things work well to this end.

 

You can cultivate the “witness”…a nonjudgmental position whereby you see where you have been. You can intentionally take on new models to dislodge the old ones. This becomes easier with practice You need structures and models but you must hold them lightly, so they can change or disappear if necessary.  You need not be attached to your preferences.  

An enlightened person chooses his/her path with heart and rejoices and sees and knows.  She sees that nothing is more important than anything else.

 

She begins to lighten his/her irrational attachment to things as she comes to understand that things are really all the same…in that they are all made of transient matter which will die.

 

She come to learn there is something eternal which imbues everything. And as she lives on she more deeply learns that sense of something more pervasive and authentic.

 

It is thereby increasingly more possible to withstand the slings and arrows of life, and finally after many false starts and struggles and inching ahead, a person can find  herself dropping her attachments and addictions and other compulsions and other evidence of living an inauthentic existence…

https://www.ramdass.org/

 

And I at Beautiful Quitters Telephone Coaching can help you build a frame of reference around issues like this and/or any others you may have around your momentous decision to quit.

 

Please contact me anytime at Averayugen@mail.com and tell me about your immediate and long term plans for becoming a non-smoker. If we can work together you will get my unique cell-number to use to contact me for coaching. A donations-only service.

 

I look forward to hearing from you!

Why You Should Quit Without Being Told

Here’s why you should quit without being told: In a nutshell you should do it because you just shouldn’t have to be told. In fact it would save society a lot of trouble and mistakes getting the message across!

 

The renowned social psychologist Eliot Aronson knows that negative advertising against smoking (for instance)  can create what is known as the “boomerang effect”.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.92.2.238

 

People subjected to overly-negative ads regarding, say, tooth hygiene or smoking…”tended to withdraw mental resources from processing the messages while simultaneously reducing the intensity of their emotional responses” says Glen Leschner et al. of PRIME (U of Missouri).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110822121721.htm

    

Martin Fishbein of the American Journal of Public Health (2002) has spearheaded a systemic study of the effects of negative public service ads and found that over half of them caused a “boomerang” effect…that is a moving away from interest in the message.

 

From 1952 to about 1975 such public service ads were too frequently based on fear.http://www.mnt.ee/public/Fear.pdf

 

And since around the mid sixties this effect has been noticed and studied. And it’s really true that opinion-change test subjects exposed to gruesome images of rotting mouths and such….were not as influenced by the ads as the test subjects who saw non-offensively designed (but also negative) ads.

 

The neutral ads didn’t do much.

 

And since then public service ads have become ever more sophisticated and informed by social psychology. Extreme fear is avoided and maximum self-efficacy is encouraged.

 

Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of divergence between what one really feels and what one thinks one SHOULD feel about an issue.

 

The idea is to manipulate the cognitive dissonance potential..as it were…to benefit the public by getting them to accept the message itself.  This is about public service ads after all. Reducing dissonance is what people will want to do and so the thing is to still make sure people want to do the right thing.

 

For instance if you devise a “contest” whereby people will feel “left out” if they don’t act more civically  minded on a community level, then they might shift their opinion to something more proactive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

 

And sometimes the whole thing will not even work. Professor Carol Tarvis says, “The people who don’t reduce dissonance enough suffer from regret and remorse, and it can be just as dysfunctional for them not to reduce dissonance as it is for other people to reduce dissonance too quickly, too mindlessly.”

 

She goes on to say, “What do we do to not just bury the dissonance—but to accept what we did because it can’t be undone? How can we understand what we did wrong, and not just make a superficial apology, but learn in some deep way from the harm that we caused, so that we don’t make the same mistake again? “ 

If people run from the truth because it is personally too painful then how can we as a caring community alter our message to make people pay attention? Other issues come to mind with this, including the crisis of climate change…or endless war for instance.

 

This article ties in to the whole Beautiful Quitters message of why you should quit, but the issue of getting-the-message out is obviously much larger.http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/an-interview-with-carol-tavris

 

And as I have said elsewhere on this site if you want a skilled and caring telephone coach to help you quit, please contact:  Averayugen@mail.com

The Former Winston Man on Big Tobacco & Big Government

In the original version of this blog I featured a vid by David Goerlitz, the former Winston Man, speaking about the head- pounding irony of what the supposed American anti smoking push of the eighties and nineties was all about. He also marvels at how the states became sellout-enablers with regard to the dysfunctional bedroom story of Big Tobacco and Big Government.

It is not uncommon knowledge that tobacco kills almost a half-million people a year. The numbers of people who begin smoking every day are equivalent to the number of people who die from smoking related causes!

 

But the grand nationwide cascading move to hold tobacco companies responsible for this unspeakable unnecessary death and disability …ended as disgracefully as honorably it began.

 

When the Mississippi Attorney General decided to sue the giant tobacco conglomerate for about 400 billion, it was from the start considered dead in the water…until the state won and the award became compromised from that moment.

 

When the other states jumped in it was decided that the conglomerate could pay out about 240 billion on the spot with no further dickering…but in exchange for this “settlement” the stipulation was no more lawsuits from any state and no banning of tobacco products.

 

So when the monies were finally disbursed to the contesting states  the whole spirit of the project had already been compromised severely. In California under Proposition 99, 25 cents per pack was supposed to go towards cessation/prevention services, but what really happened was that almost no money went toward cessation, and not much more toward prevention services. Other states followed suit.

 

Overall, quitlines now reach less than 5% of smokers on average (Schauer,Malarcher, Zhang, Engstrom, Zhu, 2013). This limited reach is largely a result of limited state funding to provide and promote quitline services.

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/quit_smoking/cessation/pdfs/1800quitnow_faq.pdf

When all this started in 1985, 52% of Californians were smoking. High statistics notwithstanding, the cessation services were just not emphasized.

 

Of the 14 other states involved in the Master Settlement, New York, New Jersey and Ohio were included.

 

New York actually outdid herself only with with regard to vaping prevention… possibly because vaping is less lucrative through taxation revenues.

 

So that requires an even more diligent personal effort to influence the health of those we love. We might have to invent more creative and engaging projects to keep our kids and our local schools involved in more pro health activities ensuring better choices.

 

We must also be open with our kids to prevent problems before they arise. What starts as copying ends up as rationalization. The crutch gets discovered through ineffective preventive efforts. When a teenager finally get hooked many stages were passed and overlooked first.

 

And quitlines need more people using them if any rationale exists for higher levels of funding. If you can find one that works I am glad for you. But if you need a coach in the middle of the night my service will provide, probably to the exclusion of any other.

 

And please remember  Beautiful Quitters smoking coaching is always here and waiting to assist you with skilled, compassionate coaching at your request. Donations only if you become a happy quitter.

 

So please write me at Averayugen@mail.com for information regarding signing up for coaching. It’s a great move and a great sign of strength and resolve. Hope to hear from you!