Mary from Gogglebox ‘cures’ vape addiction after 160 puffs a day and stops overnight
After becoming hooked on vapes and left 'unable to concentrate' without them, Gogglebox star Mary Killen has explained how she kicked her habit.
The etiquette expert, who appears on the hit Channel 4 show alongside her husband Giles Wood, revealed she was puffing on one up to 160 times a day at the height of her addiction.
Despite never smoking a cigarette in her life, she quickly became dependent on vapes in her sixties - but now, she says she does not 'even want to' have another blast of one.
The TV star explained that like a lot of folks, she considered vaping to be a better alternative to smoking, that didn't come with 'the danger or the disgustingness'.
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But as a host of health experts have long been warning, this is not the case. Although the long-term impacts are still being explored, studies suggest that vapers will likely run into consequences similar to those that smokers face.
Thankfully, Mary came to this realisation all by herself and decided to stop. She's now three weeks clean.
The Gogglebox alum revealed last year that vaping had become her vice, saying that she picked up the habit 'a couple of years ago'.
After having a go of a Juul that was offered to her by one of her friend's 22-year-old son's, she soon became obsessed with e-cigarettes and found herself buying 'replacement pods'.
At the time, she said she was 'wasting about £14 a week' on these - and realised vaping had become a 'problem' when she became 'self-pitying and argumentative' when her supply ran out.
Mary realised that she would likely 'turn into a monster in front of her family by detoxing at home', so decided to seek external help to wean her off vapes.
Explaining what encouraged her to take the plunge and quit, she told the Daily Mail: "If I ran out of cartridges I would feel irritable and unable to concentrate until I got some more."
She'd apparently upped the vaping ante just beforehand too, as she added: "It was costing about £20 a week and ‘barcode’ lines were forming between mouth and nose."
Mary said she took inspiration from accountant turned author Allen Carr, who notoriously managed to stop smoking despite formerly chugging on up to 100 cigarettes a day.
How Mary quit vaping
"Carr cured thousands who signed up for his one-day seminars, and sold millions of books outlining his methods," she said. "He left behind a network of clinics that help people quit smoking – and now vaping. Why didn’t I try one?"
Mary said she stumped up £379 to take part in a day-long course, which comes with the safety net of a 'money-back guarantee' if it doesn't work.
"I was fairly sure it wouldn’t work for me, being the sort of person I am, wanting to give myself little treats on demand throughout the day," she admitted.
The mum-of-two said she and fellow attendees all comically got their last puffs in before the course began, before they then tuned into the words of wisdom offered by their 'teacher' Colleen.
Recalling what went down, Mary said: "[She] told us she would talk for 50 minutes and then we could go downstairs to smoke and vape again. Relieved, we reclined and began listening.
"She began by making very cogent points about our addiction. As children we hadn’t needed nicotine to be happy. Nicotine was not relieving our stress, it was creating it by causing the need for the relief in the first place.
"She talked about her life as a smoker, how she had made cigarettes her priority, even during weddings, funerals and school prize days.
"Her cigarettes meant the world to her and yet one day she quit," Mary went on. "And when she looked back, she saw that the cigarettes had taken much more from her than they had given.
"It had all been a tender trap and the big tobacco companies had tricked her into it, just as they were tricking us. ‘Because they want what’s in your wallets!’"
Mary said the group still 'vaped and smoked' at the intervals during the day, but 'less frantically than before'.
The course then wrapped up with a 40-minute hypnotherapy session conducted by Colleen, Mary said - and she has no recollection of what happened during it.
"The ten of us just lay back, eyes shut, in our recliners," she said. "All I know is that, three weeks on, I have not vaped, or even wanted to. The key points that lodged in my head were how wonderful it would be to be free, like we were as children, and how our need for nicotine had not been a choice but a trap. Now I know to respond to the urge by brushing it aside, as if it were fluff on my coat.
"I have stuffed myself with chewing gum and Fisherman’s Friends but I have not vaped. Reader, I don’t want to."
Who else fancies taking a leaf out of Mary's book then?
Olivia Burke