Do we really live in a world of cigarettes?

Within an hour of my earnest decision never to smoke again, I began to itch for a smoke, and that powerful desire would never subside or fade. When the phone rang, when a visitor came to my office or home, when I ran into a momentary work problem, when I was at a party, even when I first opened my eyes in the morning—I thought of a cigarette.

Contrary to the wonders promised to follow my emancipation from nicotine, I did not sleep better, my food did not taste better, my thoughts were not clearer, I did not feel more vigorous—I was, in essence, 165 pounds of body and mind almost exclusively devoted to thinking about the cigarette I wanted but could not have.

In the fine tradition of people who have given up smoking, I gained weight whenever I stopped. In order to substitute something for the cigarettes I craved, I chewed gum at the rate of about three packages a day (which, after all, added only 60 calories) and kept some gumdrops at my desk (but they're only 30 calories each).

And as a substitute activity during moments at the dinner table that might otherwise have been occupied by tapping a cigarette from the pack, lighting it, puffing it, flicking ashes from it, putting it in and taking it from the ashtray, and finally stubbing it out, I ate a little more bread than usual at lunch and dinner. (But those extra rolls and slices of toast and even the larger-than-usual desserts didn't add more than 300 extra calories daily.)

Calories adding up
However, since it takes only 3,600 extra calories (whether in a day, a week or a year) to add one extra pound of fat, I gained. I gained, to be precise, at the rate of about two pounds a week. Soon the tailor had to open seams and shift buttons . . . and then when even my "expanded" wardrobe became uncomfortably tight, I simply started smoking again. "Anyone knows," I explained to myself in justification, "that it's worse for a man in his fifties to be heavy than it is for him to smoke'

While all this was going on—the unfulfilled desire, the gaining of weight—I was neither a particularly endearing companion nor a productive co-worker. How could I be? If you tie the most rollicksome pup in the world just far enough from a bowl of food for him to see the dish but not taste its contents, he’ll rapidly become a barking, yapping, whining, snarling, jumping, lip-curling cur. Cigarettes were eternally on view for me—but, so to speak, "out of reach." So I barked and snarled and growled.

Not until the day you quit smoking do you realize that we live in a world of cigarettes.