You've got to be kidding me...

In the week when it is announced that after years of escaping oversight by any federal body, the tobacco industry is finally going to be regulated by the FDA, the LA Times has seen fit to publish an article about athletes who smoke. This is a link to the article: http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-he-smoking4-2008aug04,0,4646024.story

As you can imagine, it's a fairly short article.

It features five athletes: Rob McCool who after less than ten years of intermittent smoking notices diminished lung capacity, despite a gruelling training regime; Jeff Myers, who sees himself as a casual smoker, despite having smoked half-a-pack a day every single day for the past 13 years and who promised himself he would stop on his thirtieth birthday - five years ago; Simi Singer, who has smoked on and off for twenty-five years and is clearly desperate to quit. She seems embarrased by her smoking working, as she does, at Mt. Sinai; Jon Delaney, a self-described recovering addict for who intends to quit as soon as possible and Nicole Fitzpatrick, who wants to be a non-smoker but feels that she would be missing out on something so cannot quit and smokes 5 to 10 cigarettes a week.

The final sentence of the article reads "But for now, smoking and exercise continue to run in sync" but this doesn't make sense. 94% of the runners polled in the survey the author quotes do not smoke and one-third of those that do are so ashamed of it that they only smoke in secret. A detailed analysis of the five athletes mentioned indicates that four actively want to quit and the other wants to cut down dramatically.

The point of all this is simple. There are a very few athletes who smoke, but only because they don't know how to quit. Every single one of them would rather be a non-smoker.

Reading through the stories of these athletes is heartbreaking. They want to quit, but believe that smoking gives them some comfort or pleasure, or that it helps them manage their weight. So long as they believe these things they will have desire to smoke, and if they try to quit, they'll need to use willpower to overcome that desire to smoke. This is what makes quitting difficult using the willpower path.

Allen Carr's Easyway to Stop Smoking makes it easy to quit smoking by challenging the beliefs upon which the desire to smoke is based. By exposing these beliefs as illusory it is possible to completely change the way the smoker sees smoking and remove the desire to smoke. With no desire to smoke, it's easy not to.

If any of the athletes featured in this article want to quit smoking, they would be welcome to attend our next LA seminar free of charge.