Dr. oz what kind of smoker are you

Or suck on a drinking straw. Keep your mind busy — Read a book or magazine, listen to some music you love, do a crossword or Sudoku puzzle, or play an online game. Keep your hands busy — Squeeze balls, pencils, or paper clips are good substitutes to satisfy that need for tactile stimulation. Brush your teeth — The just-brushed, clean feeling can help banish cigarette cravings.

Drink water — Slowly drink a large glass of water. Not only will it help the craving pass, but staying hydrated helps minimize the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal.

Light something else — Instead of lighting a cigarette, light a candle or some incense. Get active — Go for a walk, do some jumping jacks or pushups, try some yoga stretches, or run around the block. Try to relax — Do something that calms you down, such as taking a warm bath, meditating, reading a book, or practicing deep breathing exercises.

Go somewhere smoking is not permitted — Step into a public building, store, mall, coffee shop, or movie theatre, for example.

Smoking acts as an appetite suppressant, so gaining weight is a common concern for many of us when we decide to give up cigarettes. You may even be using it as a reason not to quit. However, gaining weight is NOT inevitable when you stop smoking. Smoking dampens your sense of smell and taste, so after you quit food will often seem more appealing. You may also gain weight if you replace the oral gratification of smoking with eating unhealthy comfort foods. Nurture yourself. Instead of turning to cigarettes or food when you feel stressed, anxious, or depressed, learn new ways to quickly soothe yourself.

Listen to uplifting music, play with a pet, or sip a cup of hot tea, for example. Eat healthy, varied meals. Eat plenty of fruit, vegetables, and healthy fats. Avoid sugary food , sodas, fried, and convenience food. Learn to eat mindfully. Emotional eating tends to be automatic and virtually mindless.

Are you really still hungry or eating for another reason? Drink lots of water. Drinking at least six to eight 8 oz. Water will also help flush toxins from your body. Take a walk. Not only will it help you burn calories and keep the weight off , but it will also help alleviate feelings of stress and frustration that accompany smoking withdrawal. Snack on guilt-free foods. Good choices include sugar-free gum, carrot and celery sticks, or sliced bell peppers or jicama.

There are many different methods that have successfully helped people to kick the smoking habit. Smoking cessation medications can ease withdrawal symptoms and reduce cravings. They are most effective when used as part of a comprehensive stop smoking program monitored by your physician. Talk to your doctor about your options and whether an anti-smoking medication is right for you. The U. Nicotine replacement therapy. It relieves some of the withdrawal symptoms by delivering small and steady doses of nicotine into your body without the tars and poisonous gases found in cigarettes.

This type of treatment helps you focus on breaking your psychological addiction and makes it easier to concentrate on learning new behaviors and coping skills.

Non-nicotine medication. These medications help you stop smoking by reducing cravings and withdrawal symptoms without the use of nicotine. Medications such as bupropion Zyban and varenicline Chantix, Champix are intended for short-term use only. While some people find that vaping can help them to stop smoking, the FDA has not approved vaping as a method of smoking cessation. And recent news reports have even linked vaping to severe lung disease, prompting many questions about the safety of vaping.

These include:. Hypnosis — This is a popular option that has produced good results for many smokers struggling to quit. Forget anything you may have seen from stage hypnotists, hypnosis works by getting you into a deeply relaxed state where you are open to suggestions that strengthen your resolve to stop smoking and increase your negative feelings toward cigarettes. Acupuncture — One of the oldest known medical techniques, acupuncture is believed to work by triggering the release of endorphins natural pain relievers that allow the body to relax.

As a smoking cessation aid, acupuncture can be helpful in managing smoking withdrawal symptoms. Behavioral Therapy — Nicotine addiction is related to the habitual behaviors or rituals involved in smoking. Behavior therapy focuses on learning new coping skills and breaking those habits. Motivational Therapies — Self-help books and websites can provide a number of ways to motivate yourself to give up smoking. One well known example is calculating the monetary savings. Some people have been able to find the motivation to quit just by calculating how much money they will save.

It may be enough to pay for a summer vacation. Smokeless tobacco, otherwise known as spit or chewing tobacco, is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes. It contains the same addictive chemical, nicotine, contained in cigarettes. In fact, the amount of nicotine absorbed from smokeless tobacco can be 3 to 4 times the amount delivered by a cigarette. Instead, turn the relapse into a rebound by learning from your mistake.

Analyze what happened right before you started smoking again, identify the triggers or trouble spots you ran into, and make a new stop-smoking plan that eliminates them. You can choose to learn from the slip and let it motivate you to try harder or you can use it as an excuse to go back to your smoking habit.

But the choice is yours. Throw out the rest of the pack. Look back at your quit log and feel good about the time you went without smoking. Find the trigger. Exactly what was it that made you smoke again? I told her I would clean it up. She's a big smoker. Oz said of my throw-up gimmick. Here's a good cigarette: from the second week: We were eating out. I'd ordered a light beer, a rib eye, and something called snazzy peas. My girlfriend was across from me, the two of us in one of our back-and-forths, laughing, delighting each other, speaking as characters, teasing out familiar jokes.

We never need company. The steak was nicely cooked, the peas -- snazzy. And as I pushed back the plate, I was struck for the first time in my life by a faint pinging sound in the center of my chest. It was a kind of tug, as if someone had wrapped a string around my rib, a string gently pulling me somewhere.

I laid a hand flat on my chest, and my girlfriend looked at me, vaguely alarmed. She didn't like my smoking any better now, but she accepted it and even allowed herself to enjoy it in moments like these.

Up and down the street, now blanketed by darkness, the streetlamps formed friendly circles of light, so it looked like a kind of orchard. People stood, one and two per light, out there smoking cigarettes, looking up quietly at the stars or the cars or the windows of houses and stores.

One Tuesday, I lit up in the Detroit airport. I wanted to smoke, but I also wanted to see what would happen. It seemed a dangerous act, yes, and quite possibly stupid, but something I could talk my way out of. Cigarettes gave me balls in situations like this. I even had a fleeting thought that I might make converts, start a mutiny right there near the Mediterranean Grill in concourse A.

I tucked myself into the deepest recess of a gate area -- thirty feet from any other passenger and even farther from anyone with the authority to shoot a blow dart into my neck and put me on the nonstop to Gitmo. Then I pulled out my lighter and coolly lit up a Virginia Slim, my brand that day. What happens when you light a cigarette in an airport -- because my advice is that you never try to find out yourself -- is that a series of reactions fall into place mechanically, like science fiction, as if the collective consciousness of the place were spread among everybody equally, allowing for one singular, zombified reaction.

Heads turn on the flick of the lighter, bodies move in your direction immediately. I took two heavy drags, because now a janitor had popped up out of nowhere and was coming up hard on my right.

A gate agent was fast-walking in the distance, and a woman holding a baby approached with a scowl. Two other men stood up for a look. I didn't know. The janitor pursed his lips. Thirty-five seconds had passed. Around the corner came airport security. I was surrounded. I looked at each of them. Four faces, five, each twisted in a twittering spasm of disbelief and discontent.

This is an airport! As a nonsmoker, I always figured cigarettes were an indulgence run amok. But there is something tangible about need, even when it's self-created. It feels good to need. There's the moral confusion -- do I need or do I want? And three weeks in, on a day when I smoked fourteen cigarettes, I realized that I could finally enjoy one following sex.

This was because I could finally enjoy a cigarette, period. It had ceased to become a chore or a challenge. I liked it. I liked smoking. I don't know. Didn't care. Just wanted a smoke.

I practically jumped out of bed. My girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and stood on her porch. The smoke filled my chest so that my body heated itself in a new way. We jabbered.

Winter approached. I coughed a little. But that's how it went with smoking. A cigarette amplified truth. If you were sad, you sounded sadder. But the cigarette notched everything upward, too.

Everything seemed more potent and brilliantly illuminated. The sex, the beer we were sharing, the apple I'd left at our bedside, even the cold breeze up under the blanket, tightening my scrotum.

I was a dopamine factory just then. It sounds bad. It can't be good. Another week and I would quit, I told her. Another week and she could go on hurting herself by her lonesome. Just like that. Or she could quit, too.

But now that I understood the supreme pain of that dependence, even in my shallow way, I wanted to be back where I didn't have a stake in this. Last spring, my older son admitted to me that he smokes. In my reflexive anger, I snorted, ranted, threatened privileges, but he persisted. I felt I'd been duped, that someone was working behind my back. Goddamn cigarette companies, goddamn Joe Camel. I tried to chase it out of his life -- banning it in the house, the car, on the grounds of the house -- to the very edges of the world I controlled for him.

I figured he might be just toying around with it, playing a part. But he kept on. And I realized that sometimes, or at least now, disapproval -- even of your own children's behavior -- is really not a command so much as an observation. My son smokes. I tried to deal. I watched him smoke as I stood with him outside restaurants and, when I relented, in my own yard. This was before I'd smoked a single cigarette myself.

I saw that smoking altered him just slightly, like a course correction at sea, one degree toward a new point on the horizon. His face grew softer as the cigarette seemed to dull the razor's edge of unhappiness that sometimes dragged through his life. I remember realizing that it really worked for him, thinking: That shit is inside him. It did something to him.

I was sad, pissed, and a little bit jealous. I told him he was a fool, once, but after that I bit my tongue. Make no mistake, smoker or not, it sucks to watch your son draw on a cigarette like it means something to him. That's when a smoke looks less like a casual comfort in a cold world and more like an abyss, a dark deception. I'm responsible for my own stupidity.

This is my boy, and in some way I can only bear witness to this. My boy, smoking like some barfly. That's when you feel like strangling a tobacco executive. Five great cigarettes: a Camel straight. The doorway to a church, me and two maintenance workers. We discuss steroids. A Pall Mall Menthol. A brassy blond on a smoke break, outside the casino in French Lick, Indiana. She hit a deer on the way to the casino. Driving my brother's SUV, on a black corridor of nighttime interstate outside Albany, listening to seventies radio on the satellite, tossing the cigarette, still lit, into that firecracker spin on the road behind me.

On Fifty-eighth Street, New York City, with an ex-smoker, in a drizzle, after happening upon a sushi bar that had a little table left outside with menus on it.

We put a coffee lid down for ashing. This guy hadn't smoked in eight years. His face grew softer, eyes wider, with each drag. A Winston Ultra-Light.

I kept telling myself: I won nothing. I won nothing. But I would, any minute. I saw my old friend Wade one day, rushing off to some meeting, carrying a sandwich in a plastic box.

I'd known him as a smoker for seventeen years. He looked a little stunned. I told him about my experiment, and that this was what I'd wanted from the get-go: that elemental, highly social, always surprising experience of taking the time to smoke with an old friend.

I don't have that many friends who still smoke, see. Wade is a biologist. He laughed and stuck his chin out at my shirt pocket, at the smokes there. I nodded and slipped my pack of Pall Malls back into my pocket. He looked right, then left. Cutting down? Come on, man. What the hell's a cigarette for? Sit here on the bench and have a fucking smoke. I know, I know. I'm a lousy, undermining guy. But he sat, and he stayed for fifteen minutes.

We smoked two cigarettes and talked about his daughter, about Richard Dawkins, about Wade's nosebleed seats at Colts games. Pretty soon, I looked at him and said, "You're late for your meeting. Wade looked in the direction he'd been heading, smiled a tight, muscled smile, and said, "Oh, man. They don't need me. He thanked me, genuinely, for stopping him, looked up at the sky, and shook his head.

I laughed and said maybe I would. One afternoon in New York, I got an education in some stuff I still wasn't clear on. Think about what you want to do when you have healthier, happier lungs. Your reasons for quitting might be breathing better, running faster, smelling better, energy to play with your kids or grandkids, creating a healthier environment for loved ones, fewer illnesses, etc.

If you are the non-smoking partner who wants to encourage their partner to quit, change how you approach the conversation about quitting with a partner. I'm going to support you in this and do whatever I can to help you as you start your stop. You can do it. The family and I are going to be here to support you every step of the way, and you can do this.

Why not plan ahead and consider embarking on a new way of eating to complement your quit, suggested Lamm. The secret to success is to replace the act of smoking and the nicotine with a different, healthier behavior. Eat carrots. Drink water. Practice Hand to Mouth. Take a walk. Play frisbee with the dog. Smoking can accelerate the natural aging process of your skin and cause premature wrinkles.

Think of all the other ways your looks will benefit when you quit smoking. And that can certainly improve your sex drive and life. How to Get Started Quitting Smoking. Want to know how to look marvelous without splurging so much?