I was desperate to give up smoking, I was tired of the same old thing day after day, I'd wake each morning and the first thought I'd have is to have a cigarette. If you wake in the middle of the night, you get up and have a fag, knowing full well that nicotine is a stimulant and will keep you awake for even longer. But how can I break the habit?

I grew up in a household where my mother smoked for years. She knew that the effects of smoking could kill. My father smoked, but he had a dreadful smoker's cough and so hid his cigarettes from my mother in an attempt to convince her that he'd given it up. My mother only gave up smoking when he fell ill with a very serious bout of 'flu one year and was bed-ridden for about 3 weeks. It was this illness that allowed her to give up smoking and has never touched a cigarette since. My father carried on smoking and carried on hiding it from my mother, but of course, like with all non smokers, they can smell it. No amount of mints can hide it. It was about 15 years later that my father decided to ditch the fags. Unfortunatley for him, it was too little too late. He was diagnosed with lung cancer about 5 years later in the October, and by the following May he sadly gave up his fight.

I gave up smoking because I wanted to for me, for financial reasons, my health, the way I smelt, and the way I felt I was always a slave to fags. The cigarettes dictated to me that I'd rather to a nightclub or a pub than a restaurant, if I went to a restaurant, I needed to sit in the smoking section. I realised I couldn't go on like this any longer. A long time ago I said to myself I'd give up smoking when fags reached a fiver and laughed to myself that it would never happen. Every year the Budget comes along and puts the tax up on cigarettes and now you pay over £5 for a packet of 20. Another reason I decided to give up was that I had recently formed a new relationship with someone who had taken my breath away, and he wasn't a smoker, I knew he hated it and if our relationship stood any chance of lasting for as long as I hoped it would, I needed to take some action now, whereas in a previous relationship, I used the cigarettes to completely annoy him as I knew, again that he hated it, but I knew it wound him up and I didn't care.

Giving up smoking is about putting things into perspective. I would urge anybody who wants to give up smoking to just do it, not wait until they have someone they love die or have a close call themselves. Please, for your own sake, give up now. I feel so much better than I did before, and I'm not the slave to nicotine I was before.

And do you want to know the funniest thing of all? Once you truly decide you want to give up and you make that decison and you're happy with it from within, it's actually so easy that you wondered why you hadn't done it before. In fact it made me mad that all the time I was smoking I could be a non-smoker, not realising it was so easy. What is difficult is the cravings, recognising the cravings and knowing how to deal with them. But once you realise that cravings come and go and the more often you let them pass the less often they come back.

Perseverance, dedication, determination and willpower are the only true products that guarantee 100% success.