This is how I did it

A colleague and I decided to quit on World No Tobacco Day - 31 May this year. I've been smoking since I was 14 and I'm 55 now - a long time smoking, you do the maths! A friend had given me a starter kit of 'e-cigs' so we both decided to use those to help us quit.We decided to use the e-cigs in exactly the same way we used tobacco - we went outside to 'smoke' them when we went for a coffee, we pretended to light them, we pretended to stub them out.This all sounds rather silly, but maintaining our regular smoking patterns really helped, we weren't having to deal with not only stopping smoking, but all of the familiar rituals and associated habits that are as much a part of smoking as the actual putting the cig in your mouth and smoking it. It was by no means easy, but it was incredibly helpful to keep doing the familiar smoking things while not actually taking in any tobacco!It's been easier to quit this time than any of the (many) previous times I've tried to quit.I take my e-gigs with me almost everywhere, particularly when I know there are likely to be smokers around. I actually rather enjoy 'smoking' them - particularly as its harmless vapour not evil smoke that Im puffing away on!So, it's 11 August today - 73 days - and my colleague and I are both well and truly off the cigarettes - thank goodness!I've bought an iPad with what I've saved - yay! Best of all though, I don't think about real cigarettes at all, I just puff happily on my e-cig from time to time (some days I just don't even bother) and am just so very happy that I've finally put the stinky, anti-social, life-reducing habit behind me - FOREVER!