The Ripa Center for Women's Health & Wellness at Cooper

Quit Smoking Without Gaining Weight

The promotion of wellness and a healthy lifestyle is an important component of treatment at Cooper. As part of this effort, we created the Smoking Cessation Program under the Department of Behavioral Medicine. The Department of Behavioral Medicine is staffed by licensed clinical psychologists and doctoral students who have specialized training in the promotion of health and lifestyle changes.

FEEL GREAT! LOOK GREAT!
Cancer. Heart disease. Emphysema. Smoking damages nearly every organ in the human body and causes one in five deaths and millions of illnesses every year in the United States. Research shows that one of the main reasons women don’t want to quit smoking is because they are afraid of gaining weight. Because weight concerns are important to many women, we developed a program that helps women quit smoking while also learning to manage their weight effectively.

The "Feel Great / Look Great" program at Cooper provides a six-week group or individual program geared toward helping women quit smoking for good, while learning how to manage their weight successfully.

SMOKING CESSATION
One of the many services provided by the Behavioral Medicine Department is a research-based treatment for smoking cessation. In this program patients learn strategies to help them quit smoking and enhance their confidence to never start again. Both group and individual therapy are available through Cooper for Women, together with the Cooper Cancer Institute, in Camden and Voorhees. Whether you choose to participate in a group or have private sessions, you will meet with a trained counselor once per week for at least six weeks.

The program used by therapists at Cooper is based on research that has demonstrated that counseling, in combination with medication prescribed by your physician and Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT), can be the most effective intervention to help people quit smoking. We incorporate the use of NRT into treatment to decrease the physical withdrawal that is so uncomfortable for smokers and so often causes them to go back to smoking. However, patients do not have to use NRT. We also use confidence-building cognitive and behavioral strategies to help break the psychological addiction of smoking cigarettes which sometimes can be much more difficult to overcome than the physical addiction.

For class dates, locations and information on scheduling individual appointments, please call us toll-free at 1-877-662-CARE (1-877-662-2273).