Surprisingly effective (Dr Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking)

Member Name: Biffa

Product:	Dr Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking
Date:	09/08/00 (758 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Works!

Disadvantages: Only if you have willpower, and expensive

****SEE END OF OP FOR UPDATE****

My husband and I are both heavy smokers (i.e. 30+ a day each) so when we saw an advert in our local paper offering half price sessions at an Allen Carr seminar, we were interested. Add to that the cast-iron guarantee or your money back, and we decided to give it a go.

It's not cheap - the session cost us £99 for the two of us, and that was on the half-price deal.

The amazing thing about this method is that they don;t appear to do anything. We sat in a room with a group of 10 other people, and all of us wrote down how many we smoked a day etc. Then the session began! We were allowed to smoke all the way through, although I had bronchitis at the time so couldn;t smoke as many as I would normally have done.

The reasons that we wanted to quit were as follows: to save money, to have better health and more importantly for the health of our then 6 month old daughter. We also suspected that we were pregnant again, so the time seemed right. Apparently, none of these reasons are good enough to quit - you have to want to quit and want it for yourself, not because of your wallet, friends, family, midwife etc etc.

It's difficult to describe the session as anything other than brainwashing - only with a difference. They explain to you WHY the tobacco companies want you to smoke, how they advertise their products aimed at kids to replace the vast numbers of smokers who are dying, and how they quite literally tell you that you're too weak to quit.

The session lasts for over 4 hours - so there's quite a lot of brainwashing! But they explain to you some little known facts (little known because that's how the tobacco companies want it). Did you know, that it takes only 15 minutes or so to get the nicotine out of your system? That's why smokers want to light up every 20 minutes or so. Also, instead of taking years and years to get all of the associated chemicals out
of your body takes only a week or so, and not years!

It was a truly amazing session, and if during the following 3 months you still smoked or wanted to, you could go back for an additional session at no extra cost. If, after having had 3 sessions and still smoking, you get your money back.

The only downside to this, as with all other forms of quitting, is that you need to have WILLPOWER, something that sadly my husband and I lack. Nevertheless, we managed to stay smoke free for 6 weeks, whereas before 6 minutes would have been impossible.

If you want to quit, then give it a go, but be prepared to put in the willpower, otherwise like us you'll be back to smoking like a trooper.

***UPDATE****

Last week at work, I had a phoen call from the Edinburgh branch of Allen Carr with some very sad news. Ann, who led the sessions at Bournemouth, died on New Years Eve from lung cancer. This was nearly 8 years after giving up smoking. A sobering thought indeed for the rest of us, and has pushed me to seriously consider giving another attempt at quitting.

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