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I’m a few days late with this update, but my no smoking conviction is still going strong. Eight months is another month away from being that smelly faghead I once was and that makes me feel brilliant. I got through the Christmas and New Year celebrations without being tempted to slide back and I honestly feel that this time I really have quit.

Unfortunately the reason that I was late with this update is because I’ve had a bad chest infection and felt too lousy to even use my laptop – that pleased my cat Sparky who regained my knee for  a week. It really is sods law, 40 years of smoking and I never had a chest infection – or a throat infection as I had in November. Stop smoking and the infections hit. It feels really crappy and unfair but if I have to walk on hot coals to stay stopped I will.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my method of quitting electronic cigarettes and will try to answer the main questions here.

Electronic cigarettes have got nicotine in them, nicotine is addictive, I don’t believe that you can quit with them so why do you say that you can?

Because I know that you can quit by using them from personal experience. Yes they mostly have nicotine in them, but patches and gum have nicotine in them and they are stop smoking aids.

I think that what happened with me was that because I smoked menthol cigarettes and ordered menthol ecigs they didn’t taste bad and my timing was right. I had banned smoking from every room in my house except the kitchen several years ago because I was fed up with painting over the tar stains. I’ve never been one for standing or sitting still for long so I rarely smoked a whole cigarette before my quit attempt. The only time that I did was when I went out of work for a cig break with a colleague.

Once I started on the ecigs I only wanted 2 or 3 drags and then I wanted to be on the go again. The cig breaks naturally occured less often and at home I would often go for full days without having one. That was more from bad management than anything else. I kept forgetting where my ecig was or forgetting to charge its battery. What I did notice was that as long as I kept busy I wasn’t feeling strong withdrawal symptoms.

I broke my spare battery on my first ecig and instead of replacing it and getting more menthol cartridges I bought a cheap and nasty tasting ecig that could never be addictive. It tasted so horrible that I smoked it less and less until one day I just stopped.

Have you ever been tempted to buy any tobacco cigarettes?

Only on a rare occasion and the temptation has been slight, more like a passing thought from the previous habit. I think that knowing I have a fully charged ecig in the drawer at home will always stop me from buying a pack no matter how stressful things get – I just don’t need to.

Don’t you think that e cigarettes are expensive?

No I don’t. My first electronic cigarette starter kit and cartridges cost about £50, my second about £20. During the last 8 months I would have spent £800 on tobacco cigarettes – go figure!!.

My total savings now taking into account the cost of patches and e-cigs is now at least £700. I’ve already used the savings to put towards a new Sony Viao laptop, it looks a lot better than a stack of cigarette packets that I would have gone through doesn’t it? I haven’t decided what I’m going to treat myself next with saved cigarette money. I’ve been thinking about getting a guitar and learning how to play it, or maybe even put it towards a holiday.

To view the rest of my giving up smoking diary click here