Shaun's Success Story

Shaun started smoking when he was still in school. His dad smoked as did his 2 older brothers. When he was 15 he started hanging around in the evening with a group of friends and he wanted to look cool in front of one of the girls in the group who he was looking to ask out to be his girlfriend. She also smoked and together they hit it off pretty quick with their common interest centred around smoking.

Although they didn't stay together for very long as she was a year ahead of him in school and  moved away for college, Shaun was already pretty hooked and continued to smoke, even being allowed to smoke in the garage with his dad and brothers. His mum banished it from the house but they were happy to get together and have a good yarn over rollies and a few beers. 

Shaun didn't realise he had a problem with overeating until he was applying for his first real job in retail. At the interview the person interviewing him, although impressed with his CV, asked him if he was a smoker. Not wanting to lie and clearly having just had a cigarette to calm his nerves and smelling of smoke, he replied yes. 

That was his first experience of feeling uncomfortable and disappointed about his smoking as he hadn't been challenged like that before. He really wanted the job and needed the money as he was wanting to buy his first car, so he made the decision to quit before his next interview which he had lined up in just a couple of days in a suit store as an apprentice tailor. He knew with the kind of clientelle venturing into this shop and the close proximity to his customers there was no way he could continue smoking if he was to get the job.

This time he did impress and got the job, but he realised with the job being full-time he had to quit for good if he was to keep his job and achieve his goal of getting his 4 wheel freedom. It was okay for a while being a non-smoker and he was very busy learning the ropes that he had very little time to even think about cigarettes. However, what he did realise was he was eating more and feeling hungry a lot of the time. He put this down to just using a lot of energy in his job and hoped it would pass.

Shaun's snacking got progressively worst, especially since he worked in the city and lunch and break times enabled him to go out to eat. He was in the job a few weeks and realised that he knew the ropes and wasn't learning too much new but he was still craving food all the time. Now not only was he craving but he would act on his cravings and eat whatever was at hand to satisfy his appetite including venturing to the snack machine in the cafeteria at work.

He realised his clothes were feeling tight and in such a short time he had put on a quite a bit of weight already. A colleague at work had suggested that can happen since cigarettes act as an appetite suppressant and having a smoke can quelch the need to eat. Now he wasn't smoking he hoped this would settle but it wasn't happening as fast as he liked.

Shaun was deperate to keep his job so he decided he needed to get some help to curb his appetite to prevent him feeling the need to go back to smoking which was a good strategy it semed before. He had never had to do diets or fasts, infact when he was a smoker he never really ate very much. He would skip breakfast , got a liquid lunch and had a main meal in the evening, so food was never really on his radar.

Shaun realised he had to change the kind of food he was eating. A lot of what he was eating was fast food he could get on the fly and walk around with in the area where he worked. He started having a bigger breakfast before leaving for work and incorportating more fresh fruit and vegetables into his diet. He cut back on the high calorie dense foods with added fats and sugars that he tended to buy from the local stores and instead, because there was a fridge at work, he made a point of making some healthy salad sandwiches with wholemeal bread before he left for work, and took some whole fruit and sugar free cereal to eat as a snack inbetween fittings with his clients. 

As his diet changed, Shaun's body shape sharted to change, he was becoming leaner. Whilst he had never ventured into a gym before he signed up to the local gym near where he worked and made a point of spending time there with a colleague a few days a week after work. He realised that the exercise was helping to renergise and motivate him to keep interested in what he was eating and learning how to cook more healthily for himself at home. Interestingly he wasn't feeling hungry much of the time anymore and he as really liking the way his body was looking.