Allen Carr's Book Did What Willpower Couldn't: How I Quit After 17 Years
Allen Carrās Book Did What Willpower Couldnāt: How I Quit After 17 Years
Iām Andre Thomas, Iām 40 years old, and I live in New Orleans, Louisiana. I smoked for seventeen years. I tried quitting three times with willpower, patches, and gum. What finally worked was a paperback book that cost me $12 on Amazon. That sounds like a punchline, but itās the truth.
New Orleans and Cigarettes
Let me set the scene. If youāve ever been to New Orleans, you know this city runs on excess. Rich food, strong drinks, late nights, and for a long time, cigarettes at every turn. I grew up in Gentilly, moved to Mid-City after college, and Iāve been in the service industry in some form since I was 19. Iāve been a line cook, a sous chef, a kitchen manager, and for the last six years Iāve been the executive chef at a restaurant in the Warehouse District.
Kitchens are pressure cookers, literally and figuratively. The pace during service is relentless. Orders firing, plates going out, timers going off, someone dropping a ramekin, the expo calling for a refire. The stress is constant and physical and loud. And for seventeen years, my release valve was stepping out the back door and lighting a Kool.
Yeah, Kools. Menthol. I started smoking them at 23 because a cook I worked with at my first real restaurant job smoked them, and he was the best cook I knew. I wanted to be like him. So I started bumming his Kools during service and buying my own within a month. Stupid reason to start an addiction, but most reasons are stupid when you look back at them.
I worked my way up to about eighteen cigarettes a day. Not quite a pack, but close enough that I was buying a pack every day and finishing it by the next morning. Some days during double shifts, Iād go through a full pack and crack into a second. The stress of a kitchen will do that.
Three Attempts That Didnāt Stick
I tried to quit for the first time at 30. My girlfriend at the time, Renee, was pregnant with my son Marcus. She said she didnāt want cigarette smoke anywhere near the baby. Fair enough. I tried cold turkey.
I made it six days. On day seven, I was prepping for a Friday night service and the walk-in cooler broke down. Half our proteins were in danger, I had to scramble to rearrange storage, the owner was on the phone yelling about cost, and I walked out the back door and bummed a cigarette from a dishwasher without even thinking about it. Renee found the pack in my jacket that night and didnāt speak to me for two days. We broke up a year later for other reasons, but the smoking was always a sore spot.
The second attempt was at 33. I used NicoDerm CQ patches, the step-down program. I got through the first four weeks on the 21mg patch and felt pretty good. The physical cravings were blunted. But then I went to Jazz Fest. If you donāt know what Jazz Fest is, imagine seventy thousand people spread across a fairground in the heat, eating crawfish bread and listening to the Meters, and at least a quarter of them are smoking something. I was surrounded. The sights, the smells, the social context. I took a cigarette from a stranger at the Congo Square stage and that was the end of attempt number two.
Third attempt, at 36. Nicotine gum, Nicorette 4mg cinnamon. I actually liked the gum. It kept my mouth busy, delivered enough nicotine to take the edge off, and I could use it in the kitchen. But I never committed to stopping the gum. I chewed it for about three months and then one night after a particularly rough service, I had a cigarette. Then I was doing both for a while. Eventually I dropped the gum and went back to cigarettes full-time. Another failure.
By 37, Iād accepted that I was a smoker. My identity was wrapped up in it. I was Andre, the chef who smokes. It was part of the persona, part of the kitchen-tough-guy image Iād built. Quitting felt like losing a piece of myself, and I wasnāt ready for that.
The Book
In January 2025, my sous chef Danny quit smoking. Just like that. One day heās out back puffing away during the lull between lunch and dinner, and the next day heās not. I asked him about it after a week because he didnāt seem to be struggling at all. No irritability, no gum-chewing, no patches visible on his arm. He just seemedā¦ fine.
He said heād read a book called āAllen Carrās Easy Way to Stop Smoking.ā He said it wasnāt a self-help book in the traditional sense. No motivational speeches, no scare tactics with pictures of black lungs. Instead, it systematically broke down every reason you think you need to smoke and showed you that none of them are real.
Iām not a big reader. I cook for a living and I spend my free time with my son or watching football. But Danny was so calm about the whole thing that I got curious. I ordered it on Amazon that night. It arrived two days later. I read it in three sittings over about a week, which for me is fast.
I donāt want to ruin the book for anyone because I think the experience of reading it yourself is part of what makes it work. But Iāll describe what it did to my thinking.
For seventeen years, I believed cigarettes gave me something. Stress relief. A break from pressure. A reward after a hard shift. A social bond with other smokers. The book dismantled every single one of those beliefs with calm, logical arguments that I couldnāt argue with.
The stress relief thing was the big one for me. Carrās argument is that cigarettes donāt relieve stress. They create the stress of nicotine withdrawal, and then they relieve that withdrawal, and your brain interprets that relief as relaxation. Youāre not calming down when you smoke. Youāre just returning to the baseline that non-smokers already live at all the time. Youāre taking a drug to feel normal, not to feel good.
That idea sat in my brain like a splinter. I couldnāt un-think it. Every time I lit a Kool after that, Iād notice: the āreliefā I felt was just the absence of the craving that had been building since my last cigarette. Non-smokers donāt have that craving. Theyāre already where I was trying to get to. I was paying $10 a pack to achieve a state that everyone else gets for free.
Quitting
Carr tells you in the book to smoke while you read and to have your final cigarette when you finish the last chapter. I did exactly that. I finished the book on a Sunday night in February 2025. I smoked my last Kool on the balcony, and I remember the book told me to pay attention to it, to really notice how it tasted and felt. It tasted bad. It always had. Iād just trained myself not to notice.
I put it out, threw the rest of the pack in the trash, and went to bed. No patch, no gum, no medication. Cold turkey, but it didnāt feel like cold turkey. It felt like Iād been released.
The first few days had some physical withdrawal. The book warns you about this and reframes it. Carr calls it āthe little monster dying.ā The physical withdrawal from nicotine is actually mild. Itās a slight, empty, restless feeling. Like hunger but not quite. The book had trained me to recognize that feeling for what it was: the last gasps of the addiction leaving my body. Instead of dreading it, I welcomed it. Every uncomfortable moment was evidence that the nicotine was clearing my system.
The bigger challenge was the behavioral side, what Carr calls āthe big monster.ā The mental conditioning. The habit patterns. This is where my previous attempts had failed. The triggers were everywhere in my life. After service. With coffee. With a drink. During a stressful moment. The book prepared me for this too. Carr says the key is not to feel deprived. If you believe youāre giving up something valuable, youāll feel like youāre sacrificing. But if you understand that cigarettes give you nothing, that they take your health, your money, your freedom, and give back only temporary relief from a withdrawal they themselves created, then thereās nothing to miss.
The Turning Point
About three weeks in, I was in the middle of a Saturday night service. We were slammed. Every table full, tickets backed up, one of my cooks was in the weeds on the saute station, and the printer was spitting out orders faster than we could read them. This was exactly the moment, in every previous attempt, where I would have cracked. Stepped out back. Lit up. Told myself Iād quit again tomorrow.
Instead, I called out the next ticket, moved to the saute station to bail out my cook, and worked through it. An hour later, service slowed, and I realized I hadnāt thought about a cigarette the entire time. The stress had been there, the pressure had been there, but the craving hadnāt. For the first time, I handled a high-stress situation as a non-smoker and came out the other side without feeling like Iād white-knuckled my way through it.
Thatās when I knew it was different this time. Not because the craving had been conquered through willpower, but because the craving hadnāt really been there. The book had changed the way my brain processed the connection between stress and cigarettes. The link was broken.
Life Now
Thirteen months smoke-free. Hereās whatās changed.
My palate is sharper than itās ever been. As a chef, this matters professionally. I can taste subtleties in a sauce that I was missing before. I adjusted the seasoning on half our menu in the months after quitting because I realized things were slightly off and I simply hadnāt been able to tell. One of my cooks said the food got noticeably better, and he didnāt know Iād quit smoking until I told him.
My stamina during service is better. I used to hit a wall around hour ten of a double shift where Iād feel gassed and need that cigarette break just to keep going. Now I push through the full shift without that dip. Iām not leaving the line every ninety minutes, which means Iām actually present for the whole service.
My son Marcus is ten now. He told me recently that he likes how I smell. Thatās not something a kid says if it doesnāt matter to him. I think about all the years I picked him up from school smelling like Kools and kitchen grease, and Iām grateful that chapter is closed.
Iāve saved about $4,500 in the past thirteen months. Kools werenāt cheap, especially in Louisiana where the cigarette tax keeps climbing. That money went toward a weekend trip I took Marcus on, down to Gulf Shores, just the two of us.
My morning cough is gone. My voice is clearer. I can take deep breaths without feeling a tightness in my chest. These changes happened gradually, week by week, and I didnāt fully appreciate them until I looked back at where Iād been.
To Someone Still Smoking
I know youāve probably heard people recommend Allen Carrās book before and thought it sounded like nonsense. A book that makes you quit smoking? Give me a break. I get it. I would have said the same thing at 35.
But hereās the thing. I tried patches. I tried gum. I tried cold turkey willpower. All of them treated smoking as something I was giving up, something I had to resist, something I was deprived of. And as long as I believed that, I was always one bad day away from relapse. The book didnāt give me willpower. It removed the need for it by changing what I believed about cigarettes.
It wonāt work for everyone. I know that. Some people need medication, some need therapy, some need a combination. But if youāve tried the other methods and they havenāt stuck, spend the twelve bucks. Read it cover to cover. Follow the instructions, even the ones that feel dumb. Smoke while you read it, just like it tells you.
The worst that happens is you lose a few hours reading a book. The best that happens is you lose an addiction.
You are not alone. There are millions of people who thought they could never quit and then did. I was one of them. A chef in New Orleans who smoked Kools for seventeen years and couldnāt imagine life without them. Now I canāt imagine going back.
Pick up the book. Read it. See what happens.