When different governments around the world have attempted to convince people to stop smoking, they always seem to go down the health route. It could be by showing a man who is dying of cancer for example.

I knew about all of the health risks that were involved with smoking but I still did it, I had a stuttering speech impediment and smoking was in my mind a good way to relax me.

I guess I smoked as a way of making me cope with things such as working at the DVD authoring company five days a week. Or maybe I smoked because my friends did. My best friend John who works for a business offering people an SEO copywriting service seemingly always has a fag in his mouth.

In my own mind any health problems were unlikely to really start affecting me for around thirty years. I used to say to myself that there is a good chance that I will not be alive in thirty years time and that I should live for today.

I really can not believe how much money it costs these days to buy a packet of 20 cigarettes in the UK. It is not that I can not afford to continue buying them, it is that I would rather spend the money on other things such as clothes or a holiday. It does not take a genius to work out that one could save over a grand per year if they could successfully quit smoking. I have to admit that this is a heck of a lot of money for me and this is what really helped me to fight off those nasty demonic voices in my head who used to tempt me into returning to those horrible and expensive cancer sticks.

There were of course other reasons why I wanted to stop smoking. These include the amount they make your clothes smell, the amount they make your house smell, the affect they have on your teeth, the fact that most women find smoking a turn off and the sheer dependency that one can get from cigarettes.

How many times have you attempted to stop smoking but have failed to do so? Yes I thought so – not good is it? No doubt – like many of the people who read this article I tried, and failed, numerous times to quit smoking before eventually managing to find a top quality stop smoking technique that worked for me.

I am speech therapy coach; I basically sell budget package holidays to achieve fluency. I am also involved with other projects including offering affordable external doors and providing training for foster carers.

As for my attempts to stop smoking; or my failed attempts. I would at times do quiet well before falling off the wagon, or is this saying solely in? Well who cares at the end of the day? I am confident that you understand what I mean here.

I would then have a voice in my head, what I call “my demons”, who would speak to me and would say something along the lines of:

“You are doing really well, why don’t you have just one cigarette for old times sake? You sure deserve it. Just smoking that one cigarette is normal; there is no reason that you will go back to smoking twenty a day.”

Now I have no idea why but for someone reason I would listen to this voice and would have that “one” cigarette. This of course was just wrong and this one cigarette would, without a doubt, always lead me to going back to my old bad habits.

So how did I eventually learn to stop smoking? Well a friend of mine, Tony, advised that I needed to focus on two things at the same time, not just quitting the fags. He stated that when you just concentrate on attempting to stop smoking your whole focus and thought process is always on “smoking”. He suggested that I should attempt to lose weight at the same time, this way I could be battling two fronts at the same time and would be therefore not just solely thinking of cigarettes all of the time.

I decided to give it a go and it worked like a dream. I now feel like I could run a marathon!