Book Review of: Cassius Cheong's Positively Quit Manual

The Thinking Person's Guide to Smoking Cessation

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Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, author of over 6,000 articles.

As someone who doesn't have a smoking addiction problem, I approached this book not from how it can help me quit smoking but how it can help me with the same kind of self-defeating self-talk that defeats smokers every day. I found the principles actually have wide application, though this book is squarely aimed at the self-selected victims of tobacco companies.

If you are a smoker, it means you are still enslaved by this killer habit. This book probably holds the keys that will set you free. Whatever you've tried thus far hasn't worked, so give this a try.

The principles in this book can help anyone with similar kinds of self-deceptive disorders, including overeating. Cheong helps the reader understand the nature of the self-deception and how to replace it with reality. Many smoking cessation programs merely substitute another form of self-deception, which feels wrong and leads the smoker to go back to the old, more comfortable one of smoking.

This book is thin, so it's no burden to read it. The burden comes in agreeing to let go of rationalizations, self-deception, and just plain dumb excuses. Once you do that, you can walk through the mental realignment process that Cheong provides so you see things clearly. Smoking does more than put a haze in the air, it puts a haze in your mind. When you agree to clear the air in both places, you can begin the process of actually doing so.

Cheong's method doesn't require buying expensive chemicals or getting expensive treatments. It doesn't involve making you and those around you miserable (in fact, he explains how to not do this). It's not about "giving up" smoking. It's about no longer being controlled by it.

If you now smoke, you have many concerns throughout the day. You can't go somewhere without bringing along enough cigarettes, for example. One reason you have these concerns is you see some things exactly backwards. You think smoking makes you feel better, but the reality is it fills a temporary hole created by the nicotine cycle. If you didn't smoke at all, that hole wouldn't exist.

Smoking is the number one cause of male impotence, so it's not a sexy thing for men to do. A woman with smoker's face and that stench filling any room she walks into isn't exactly sexy either. Any reason you can find for smoking is based on delusion. Part of Cheong's approach is to address those "reasons" that people use to continue smoking.

Basically, he provides a fresh perspective from which a smoker can look at smoking and then take positive steps to start breathing fresh air again. If you can think, you can use this approach. And if you use this approach, the chances are good you will no longer be a slave to cigarettes. You'll save yourself hundreds of dollars in purchase costs over the next year and many thousands of dollars in other costs (not just medical, but those too) over the remainder of your (now longer) life.

For the little bit of time and money you'll invest in this book, you really can't go wrong. If you smoke, buy one copy for yourself and another for a friend who smokes. If you don't smoke, get a copy for someone who does. Nobody deserves to die gasping for breath on a ventilator, despite what tobacco company executives seem to think about that.