That’s right, I have not had a cigarette in 3 weeks! For those of you who know me also know that amongst my other bad habits like drinking coffee all day long I have been a pack a day smoker for years and started smoking at the age of 13.

I have tried to quit on several occasions with almost every method known to man: cold turkey, gum, patch, inhaler, pills, acupuncture, and even hypnotism …

Suffice to say nothing lasted, I always ended up back on the nicotine train. Over the past year many things in my life have changed immensely, new job, new baby, new house, etc. I started to “really” realize how much I’m spending on killing myself slowly and how much control cigarettes had over my life – making the wife and kids wait for me in the car or at the mall, scheduling work around smoking, etc.

My wife quit smoking almost 3 years ago and has been on my case, in a good way, to kick the habit. I’ll be honest what really did it for me was when my oldest son, turning 3 in month, would say to me each time I went for a smoke “Daddy, that’s yucky” and waved his finger at me in a dismissing way, cute, but scary.

I realized one of the main reasons I started smoking was because I watched my father for years do it and as I grew older I thought it was cool. Not that I blame my father, we make our own choices in life, but I would hate to be one of the reasons why my son decided to pick up a deadly addiction, life is hard enough.

So, I made the decision to “try” again and decided to use a nicotine inhaler, it worked well enough for cravings, but the physical hand to mouth addiction was killing me. After a few days, and a rough week at work, it was getting really hard to stay straight. Then I remembered hearing about electric cigarettes, so I did some google’ing and spent a few days doing some research on them and was pretty amazed at what I found.

Yes, there is some controversy surrounding electric cigarettes, that’s expected – big tobacco companies and governments stand a lot to loose if smokers world wide start switching to this alternative, and guess what? They are!

I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of numbers and excerpts from studies, what I will say is that e-cigs are 99.9% safer than real cigarettes. They contain no chemicals, no tars, no carcinogens, and can come with or without nicotine, and are extremely cost effective. Most importantly they are not deadly and do no harm to those around you.

After much research and discussions with my wife I decided to purchase a starter kit from Forever Vapors, a well trusted and one of the first to market makers of e-cigs. I went with the Joye 510 T, which I learned about by watching many YouTube reviews, reading a few e-cig blogs, and digging through all the information on one of the largest e-cig forums online – ECF.

This is not a sales pitch or an affiliate post, and for those of you who follow me online know I would not deceive. This is simply my experience and I hope it helps other smokers make a positive decision in their life.

I feel amazing! Switching to an e-cig is the best thing I ever did for my health and I can honestly say that it has saved my life!

I’m proud to be a vapor!