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| Proud To Be A Quitter
Tonya Guess ’01, the “Mary” of D.C.’s recent Mary Quits campaign, kicks the smoking habit in a very public way By Steve Daniel |
She was the Mary of the Mary Quits campaign launched Sept. 27 by the D.C.-based American Legacy Foundation, an organization “dedicated to building a world where young people reject tobacco and anyone can quit.” The foundation was created in 1998 thanks to large state lawsuit settlements against the tobacco industry.
Guess’ face appeared in newspaper ads and television commercials, stared out at commuters at Metro stations and adorned city bus shelters. The ads carried the ominous-sounding message, “Watch Mary End It All,” and included the www.MaryQuits.com Web address where people could follow short, daily video clips documenting Guess’ struggles and successes in her attempt to kick the smoking habit for good.
The $1.5 million project came on the heels of the successful Bob Quits campaign in New York City and Washington, in February 2004 and June 2004, respectively. Playing on the popularity of reality television programming, Mary was the “everywoman” others could be inspired by and identify with as they, too, tried to end their addiction to tobacco.
A smoker since her sophomore year at Old Dominion, Guess, 27, was hooked by the time she graduated and landed a job with the Business Higher Education Forum in Washington, where she currently is the operations and conference manager. In fact, it was while she was taking a smoke break one afternoon outside her office that she was approached by a casting agent associated with American Legacy.
“She wanted to know if I’d ever thought about quitting, and I told her, ‘Every day of my life,’ and it was true,” Guess said. “I’d been praying about it, especially after the three times I’d tried to quit before.”
The woman then made Guess an offer: Agree to have a film crew follow her around during the month of August, recording the daily challenges she would face in trying to give up her Misty Menthol Light 120s. In return, she could take full advantage of American Legacy’s support, ranging from counseling and a smoking cessation plan to free nicotine patches and a two-month-trial gym membership.
Guess also had to consider the following question posed by American Legacy: If you were asked to face one of the most important challenges of your life in front of millions of people, knowing the odds are against you, would you do it? After a week’s deliberation, it was an offer she ultimately decided that she couldn’t refuse.
“I started to look at this as something meant to be. A lady just walks up to me out of the blue, so it was kind of like, ‘I’ve got to do this.’ I now look back and perceive her as an angel.”
The film crew followed her everywhere – at home, on her commute from her Germantown, Md., apartment to her job at Dupont Circle, on various outings with her fiance, Andrae Boone (a nonsmoker, whom she has since married), and on visits to the doctor and dentist. The daily video clips, or blogs – generally about a minute to three minutes long – revealed both triumphs and pitfalls, including her confession to “slipping up” on Days 11 and 13, when she took a few puffs, and on Day 17, when she smoked an entire cigarette to help her relieve the stress of preparations for an office relocation.
The compelling online series of clips, which can still be accessed, begins with a “prep week,” during which Guess prepares herself for the challenge ahead, followed by three “quit weeks” – 28 days in all. In the first clip, she is shown smoking on the balcony of her apartment before heading off to work. (At home, she does her smoking there or in the bathroom to keep the smoke away from her fiance.) “It’s all about the cigarette in the morning,” she says. We learn that she will light up two more times before going to work.
On Day 2, she describes the struggle to quit her pack-a-day habit as an internal war. “The smoker in me always wins.”
Guess, whose smoking addiction is complicated by the fact that she has asthma, is shown at the doctor’s office on Day 3. After giving her a breathing test, the doctor tells her she has the lung capacity of a 45-year-old.
One of her main motivations to give up smoking is her impending marriage. On Day 6, she says, “I don’t want to be smoking when we start a family.”
And, on the final prep day, the camera rolls as she sits in her bathroom smoking her last cigarette. “So what happens tomorrow when I don’t have this?” she wonders aloud. “I am scared. All I can say is I wish I never started.”
In her three weeks of “quit days” Guess continues to find out more about herself and, in the process, offers inspiration to others who are trying to break the habit:
Day 24, during a cooking class with Andrae: “Slowly, but surely, I’m becoming a different person.”
Day 26, on a dinner cruise with her fiance: “Me being a nonsmoker brings us closer together.”
Day 28, her final video journal entry, working out: “If I was still smoking, I would not be in the middle of D.C. on a rainy afternoon at the gym, feeling good like this.”
A month later, once the Web site had gone live and the Mary Quits campaign had been launched, Guess got quite a surprise one morning in a crowded Metro car on her way to work. “It was the second day of the launch, and I’m on the Metro reading the Express (a free daily published by The Washington Post). I flip to the back and I see my face covering the whole back page. Then I look up and see my face throughout the whole Metro. I still haven’t found the words to describe that feeling.”
If that weren’t enough to give her pause, when she arrived at Metro Center, Guess again saw her face in poster-size advertisements at one of D.C.’s most heavily trafficked stations. “Literally, I just backed into a wall with my mouth open. ‘Oh, my God!’” Even after the campaign had begun to run its course, she recalls getting on a bus and having people start clapping.
During the course of the campaign, MaryQuits.com averaged 15,000 separate visitors a week and Guess experienced, if briefly, the life of a celebrity. “Every day, people would come up and just hug me and say they quit with me, or that their sister quit or, ‘You go, girl. Keep up the good work.’ I was hearing that every single day.”
Three months after she has quit, Guess is still feeling good about herself, but agrees that it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. “The hardest part for me was breaking the habit of smoking rather than the physical addiction, though I had the patches to help me with that. I had carved out all of these different pieces of my day just to accommodate this habit.”
And what has been the best thing about quitting?
“Everything,” she exclaimed. “And everything is cleaner. I don’t feel dirty any more, I don’t have to move away from anybody in the elevator because I feel like they’re going to smell it on me. And I get more done. I think maybe that’s the biggest reward. Smoking really takes up a lot of your time. You may think those 15 minutes don’t count for anything, but they do. They add up.”
Aside from the overall message of her video journal, Guess offers the following advice to others who are trying to kick the habit: “If you’re not one of those people who can do it cold turkey, and you know that you can’t, don’t try to do it that way, don’t try to do it alone. And don’t think that it’s all about the amount of discipline that you have. Try to come up with a plan and be prepared.”
She strongly recommends calling American Legacy Foundation’s toll-free number to speak with a counselor.
According to American Legacy, Guess’ struggle to quit is representative of the nation’s 70 percent of adult smokers who want to quit but who may lack the tools, support and know-how to quit successfully. While her story was aimed at the estimated 1 million smokers in the Washington area – approximately 20 percent of the population – the foundation plans to reach out in similar fashion to other areas of the country in the coming years.
Chris Cullen, American Legacy Foundation’s executive vice president for marketing and communications, says the Mary Quits campaign was extremely successful in generating what it calls “informed quit attempts.”
“People succeed in their quit attempt when their plan reflects the complexity of the addiction itself,” Cullen explained. “Your plan needs to include strategies to combat, one, the physical addiction; two, to anticipate the behavioral triggers; and three, to overcome the psychological challenges that will be an ongoing aspect of your quit attempt. When people are not successful, it’s because they fail to accommodate one of these major areas.”
Helping people achieve a smoke-free life, of course, is what American Legacy is all about, and though the process may be a bit complex, the message is simple: If Mary can do it, you can too.
| Some Tips For Kicking The Habit
Form your own circle of friends and family for support. You’ll increase your chance of success by 50 percent if you’re surrounded by people who support you. |