Weighting To Exhale

If you make a wild and crazy suggestion to me, I’m compelled to say yes. That doesn’t guarantee that I will agree to your challenge, but I’ll consider it. You see, 2010 is my year of living dangerously, of taking risks and living a more ‘full-throttle’ life than I have so far.

Oddly enough for someone who (usually) blatantly refuses to take risks I’ve been doing the stupidest thing possible for the last 13 years: I’ve been a smoker.

Those of you keeping score at home may struggle with those figures but there’s no error, what you see is what you get: I have been smoking for half my life. Now admittedly I didn’t start on a pack a day or anything. As a too-cool-for-school youngster I was only smoking at blue-light discos so that the big kids would think I was awesome and would want to touch my doodle. Or something like that.

Of course, by the time I was 16 it was less of a 'social' thing and became a firmly regular part of my routine. It was about the same time The Motherload remarked that she and I smoked the same cigarettes, despite the fact she’d quit when I was about four years old and I can’t ever remember her smoking. She still took this as a positive symbol of our maternal bond. And yes, she is crazy, thanks for asking.

So, what changed all of this? Well a couple of things. For me the love affair was over, I was no longer smoking because it made me look all bass-ass and Johnny Depp-like, I was doing it because if I didn’t have a ciggy I started to wig-out and go all Anne Heche on people’s arses. Then there’s the convenience factor. Now that you can’t light up in a pub, bar, restaurant or even on the street in front of most buildings around Melbourne, there’s very little point fanging for a gasper only to be told to keep moving.

Now I’ve tried to quit before with obviously lame-arse results. Usually the pattern is the same, I decide that I want to quit so I look longingly at the last packet of durries in my pocket and work out how long the contents will last me, then I start informing myself that, ‘this is my third last fag, I’d better enjoy it. My second last… Savour the moment. My last cigarette – EVER! I really need to live in this moment because nothing will ever be as satisfying again for as long as I live!!!’

Of course, as you can imagine, that kind of mental conditioning is just setting myself up to fail. Luckily, this time around I did things differently, or rather fate intervened and set things up in a different way for me.

See I’d arranged a crazy-arse bet with a mate of mine that he couldn’t go for three months without shaving, and there’s one thousand dollars on the line, so the stakes aren’t exactly small. The next day he came to me with a counter offer – I could shirk paying the grand, provided I lasted the same three month period without having a puff.

Without a moment’s hesitation I shook on the deal and handed him what remained of my packet of Peter Jacksons. It wasn’t until later in the day I realised what I’d done, and what it could potentially mean for me and my fragile, soon to be nicotine-starved, mind. I think it was the lack of fanfare though that made this attempt so much easier. Usually one to two days into a quit-phase I’m scaling the walls for a ‘moke. This time around I only had the very slightest withdrawal symptoms, and only then because I didn’t know what to do with all the spare time I suddenly had on my hands.

Now at the halfway point of the challenge, I already find myself wondering what the fuck I ever took it up for in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t turned into one of those nazi-style reformed smokers, but I do appreciate the fact that my sense of smell is returning (that isn’t always a great thing in this city) and my aerobic ability seems to be every so slightly extending. Hoo-fucking-rah.

But of course it couldn’t all be that fine and dandy, could it? Not a fucking chance. At first I was all super vigilant about not replacing the cancer sticks with food, and I was successful. Water became my main staple and I became the king of self-distraction every time I found myself reaching for the deep-fried peanut butter M & Ms. Throwing myself at the mercy of the bathroom scales helped me monitor the damage as well and thus the fallout was minimal.

That was until I stopped torturing myself with the scales and plunged head-long into a binge eating festival that, after two weeks, shows no signs of ending. Of course by now, I’m not eating in place of smoking, I’m just eating because calorie counting is tedious, I can’t be fucked obsessing about my figure, and I’m hungry. So very, very hungry.

The end result? Well, my body dysmorphia tells me that I’ve ballooned out to a size not too dissimilar to that of a small Polynesian Island. You may not think so, but my man-boobs and the inability to see my own cock tell me otherwise. Of course stepping on the scales indicates that I’m scarcely 2 pounds heavier than my pre-quitting weight, however I can’t be satisfied with this, thus the starvation will resume, just as soon as I’ve polished off the last of this side of roast beef, and maybe that left over cheesecake in the fridge as well.

Because being a non-smoker is the healthy option, you see.