Cigaretts and Food

When one mentions smoking, there is an onslaught of people citing the hazards of smoking and citing instances of people who died from smoking. But if one mentions overeating or fat people, they are criticized for being insensitive or always waiting to attack the overweight person.

Anyone who has never smoked can’t understand the smoker. Anyone who never had a weight problem can’t understand the person who struggles to keep their weight down.
With smoking, they simply say, “Stop smoking!”
One could say to the overweight person, “Stop eating so much!”

When I smoked heavily, my overweight (obese) friends kept telling me how bad it was for my health, as they sat stuffing their mouths with food. Most of them are now dead. Heart attacks, strokes and other problems like high blood - all related to the over consumption food, or the wrong foods.
A person walking down the street with a cigarette in his mouth or hand, is looked upon with distain, yet a person waddling down the street, bursting at the seams while chomping on food, is accepted as the norm.
I don’t care if people want to kill themselves from overeating or from smoking. It is none of my business. But before criticizing another person, we need to look into the mirror and criticize that person, if there is any criticism to be made.

Don,
you read things well.

Abe,

I never smoked and was never overweight, and I've had serious illness twice. My brother died two years ago from lung cancer. He said smoking didn't cause his particular form of lung cancer, and that people always blamed him for it because he was a smoker.

He would say, "The researchers spend too much money on breast cancer and not enough on lung cancer because they think we should just stop smoking."

With that last statement we learned to end our conversation. Ironically I have a new breast cancer and my life is being saved by that research he spoke of bitterly. My brother's family never calls, or comes by. It is very sad that resentment of smoking and money for research and my brother's life not being able to be saved but mine is, have caused more sadness.

Carol

Carol,
It's sad that you have suffered from this illness. You continue to fight and that speaks volumes.

I was born overweight. I got skinny once, and it almost killed me.

I also smoke. However I have tapered from 40-60 a day down to 10. The Dr. congratulated me instead of just saying "Well just stop." He also said my lungs are clear. That kind of encouragement works well on me. I'm going to try shooting for 5 now. When I am weaned, I shall aim at the weight!

I have been blessed with a good constitution and no medical problems.(other than my stupid ankle!)

I think as I think I'm reading you Abe. What someone else does is their business not mine. As long as people aren't hurting others they should be allowed to do what they want to themselves. It doesn't matter if it is something we might not do, it is their given right to live their life as they see fit.

What I am really bad about is exercise. I hate to work out, run, or play sports of any kind.

I agree with you Zada. Preaching and simple strategies don't work with me. I need encouragement. I have a new doctor and he is just plain encouraging. The old one always came up with stuff I should do, like taking vitamins or running or walking etc.

The new one sat with us at our grandson's hockey game, just being friendly.

One time I was with a friend and a doctor I knew well just walked by and didn't say a word. My friend said, "Maybe he doesn't recognize you with your clothes on."

Carol

I started smoking when I was fourteen or fifteen, but never smoked much for the next ten years or so because I was always playing one kind of ball or another, and I needed my wind to run. Smoked much more for about the last ten years, until a massive heart attack nearly nailed me. The doctor at that time suggested I stop smoking, so I did. Haven't slipped even once in all this time, and that was some 24 years ago. I've always tended to be slim rather than overweight, and for the past ten years or so I've stayed somewhere between 175 and 185, which is a good weight for me, because I stand an even six feet tall.

I knew many people from my younger days that smoked, and the fact is that I know very few who seemed to have health problems due to smoking. I did know a few who died with cancer, but I don't recall their families saying it was the result of smoking, and I never knew anyone who sued a tobacco company.

I have a very low tolerance for anti-smokers, and I'm sure it's because of the way things used to be. I saw people smoke inside all of the time, and I knew there were some people there that didn't smoke, but they got along just fine. It would have been a major insult to ask someone to go out of your house to smoke, unless, or course, someone in the room was on a ventilator. When someone was that sick, most people just didn't smoke around them, and everybody also got along just fine with that. I believe that some people don't like smoke, and I understand that, but I just don't underestand the vicious way they attack anyone and everyone over a cigarette. I think it's more of a control thing than a health issue for a lot of people. I do remember, back when I smoked, I was in a restraurant once and a couple came in. I was smoking, which was quite legal at that time, and yet the couple kept on giving me hard looks. The guy actually held his nose at one point in time. So I did the courteous thing, I put out my cigarette. I put it out in his glass of beer, but I think he was so glad that it was out that he didn't want to say anything. I don't think it was anything I said, which of course, may have been a few hasty words.

We had friends that smoked as much as my wife and I did, and sometime in the 90's, well after I'd stopped smoking, they both stopped. Now, they were not native Tennesseans, and as such didn't know a lot about the courtesy that we grew up with, and one night when my wife and I went to their house for dinner, they asked her to step outside to have a cigarette after we'd eaten. It was raw March outside, with a blowing wind filled with stinging sleet. We'd been to their home hundreds of times, as they had to ours, and I thought it was a bit uncalled for to ask her to stop outside in the weather to smoke. However, she did step outside, so did I, and we walked through the sleet to our car and drove home. Never went back. Some things I will not abide. Oh, and another thing is taking off my shoes when I go into a house. I won't come in if my shoes are so dirty that they will mess up your carpets, but if they're not, I leave them on. We have some Japanese friends whose custom is to remove your shoes, and of course we do when we visit them, but for plain old everyday folks, I choose to leave my shoes on. By the way, I won't ask you to remove your shoes in my home, or to step outside to smoke, but I will offer you a drink and something to eat, and even a bed if you happen to need one for a night or two.

Sorry about the long post. Sometimes when I get started I don't know when to stop.

Don,

I disagree. I developed a chronic asthma condition over twenty years ago. Friends smoked. Family smoked. Clients I worked with smoked. I had to ask all those people not to smoke in my house, and the clients not to smoke at our clinic, and I stopped going to smoky bars to listen to my husband play harmonica or my sons play drums in bands they were in. I became healthier and have had few bouts with asthma since, except for bad air in planes, etc.

My son played for Caesar's house band in the Poconos until he got pollops on his vocal cords from singing and playing music in smoky bars.

My father died from smoking. My mother became very vocal about anti-smoking. She wasn't angry at those who smoked but those who sold the cigarettes in the first place, but when my brother got lung cancer he seldom would go to see her. It wasn't that she would preach to him, only he knew she was upset.

Smoking can be a sad thing for families. I love it that smoking is not allowed in public places. I don't let people smoke in my house. They can keep their shoes on however.

Carol

I have now been smoke-free for 10 years. But I remember being chastised in the same way that Abe does. But now, it seems to me that without smokers to harass, we've turned our attention to people with weight issues. There is so much we do not know about why some people gain weight more easily than others. There is no simple answer that will fit everybody, because every body is different, and what works for some won't work for others. Nothing gets me more than for someone to say, "just eat less and move more," like they know what that someone eats or how often the individual moves, or that the answer is that simple. I have had to study and work very hard, try many approaches that didn't work, some that made things worse, and I'm not talking about way out there approaches like living on grapefruit or whatever. I'm finally reaching a place where I'm experiencing some success, as we have talked about on Zada's thread, but it's been a long haul, and it could turn around tomorrow. And I have to work at it constantly.

There's an old song that I bet E Don knows: "Everybody's Gotta Have Somebody to Look Down On."

Like Abe says, maybe we should all take a good, hard, honest look at our own "flaws" before we criticize someone else.

Ann

I should add that as a non-smoker today, I think that the bans in public places are a good thing. I don't often have an urge to smoke now, partly bacause the smell makes me nausous, and as I get older, my allergies get worse. Add to that the chronic bronchitis that I still have vestiges of, I have a hard time being in close contact with smokers. So I see things a little differently from this side. Before I quit, I had stopped smoking in other peoples homes, unless they were smokers themselves, but still smoked at home, even if I had non-smoking guests, except for a few whom I knew had serious health problems, or were trying to quit and would be tempted.

It was the attitude that got to me. Some people just seem to enjoy acting holier-than-thou.

I can't imagine Carol, though, holding such an attitude.

Ann

All the women in my family were heavy at one time. I wouldn't say they had weight problems, because it didn't seem to bother any of them, except my mother. I once found a picture of her and my father. In the picture she looked sad and was very overweight. She said when she saw that picture she knew she had to do something about her life, lost weight, got a job and became much happier. I sort of followed in her footsteps except for the weight problem. My husband was a little worried when he married me that I would be heavy like the other women in my family.

What he should have been worried about is that I just wasn't into food that much, and indeed in the last six months I have been yelled at often for not eating. I get anorexic under stress, and at the best of times eat small amounts of food.

My husband loves to eat. About an hour ago he brought me about 20 little menu advertisements he got at the motel office for restaurants. Tonight it is Indian food, and indeed my daughter and husband will eat much more than I will, although my daughter is not overweight and my husband loves Indian food.

Carol

Way to go, Don - putting your cigarette out in the guy's beer. It does interest me that all the old friends who gave up smoking years ago are dead. It was the United States government that started me on serious smoking by providing us free cigarettes all the time I was in combat in WWII.
As for wearing shoes in houses, back in the 1950s when I was making TV service calls a woman in a cheap house stopped me at the door and told me to take off my shoes, which were clean. I turned and was walking back to the truck when she called me and said to come back and keep my shoes on. Whenever she called the shop after that she asked to have me come out. We always argued about something but got along fine.
But on another day I made a call at the mansion of one of Harvey Firestone's sons. The 40-foot long room with the TV had the whitest carpet I had ever seen. It intimidated me so I started to take off my shoes. The son's wife said, "What are you doing?"
I told her I didn't want to walk on the luxurious carpet. She said, "Put those shoes on. Carpets are meant to walk on."

Dick, that is my feelings exactly. Carpets and floors, for Gods sake, are carpets and floors, and were meant to walk on.

I agree with Ann about the attitude that a lot of non smokers have. We have always respected the wishes of others when there is a medical reason for not smoking. But just as I will not ask anyone to leave my house to smoke, I will not stay in someone's house that expects a smoker to go out, unless, as I have already said, someone in the house is on oxygen. Just because they don't like smoking or don't like the smell is not enough to be discourteous. I know about asthma however, and even when I smoked I had enough sense not to around someone who was subject to have an attack. But again, we know when those situations arise, and we know when someone is just trying to force their way of thinking on other people.

BTW, I have said before, and I believe it, that 99 out of 100 very vocal anti smokers who will go into a family restaurant and ask someone to put out their cigarette would not do the same thing if they walked into a Hell's Angels bar and everyone in the place had a cigarette lit. It's that old thing about discretion being the better part of valor, I suppose, but it also shows that some people don't really have the courage of their convictions.

You were both lucky with the smokers you know who stayed alive. My family didn't have that good fortune. My husband's mother died in her 40s and my husband feels it was because she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. We had one teenager who smoked in her room and my husband got so mad one day he took the door off her room. I have this mental picture of seeing my husband coming down the stairs carrying the door to her room! I told her about her father thinking his mother had died so young because she smoked. She said, "Why didn't he tell me that. I would have understood."

Carol

Well the good news is that smoking prevents Parknson's disease!
The nicotine acts as a neuro protector.

I did not smoke and probably should have.

My family was phobic about healthy living and it did me no good.
I exercised and did not drink , smoke or do drugs--it was a waste of time and energy.

Feeling superior to others is a waste also.

Too much healthy living will get you everytime.

Besides, don't the health nuts feel kind of stupid dying?
What do they die of anyway?

If they don't smoke-- no lung cancer
If they are thin, exercise and eat right--no heart trouble.


They must die just from sheer cussedness. No excuse for it!

You can do things to stay healthy, and I believe it is certainly a responsibility.

I have a friend who sends me all sorts of email messages about "why" people get cancer, like warming food in the microwave in plastic containers, using artificial sweeteners or lipstick. Being the researcher I am, and checking them out, they are all false.

I could sit and ask why forever regarding my medical condition. But for me there is no answer, and it would be a waste of needed energy. Some things just happen and perhaps in the next century researchers will find the answer, but now there is no answer.

There are those who preach about how we just need to have a good mental attitude, and when we get sick it is because that attitude was lacking and we should feel guilty and promise to change our ways.. (Some of us have known such a person on another messageboard.)

When it comes to the bottom line, I just enjoy life, thank God for the life I've had, and ask kindly if He'd give me a few more years of this life I love, and promise Him to do what I can to live well.

Love, Carol

Carol,

"You just have had an unfortunate medical history--not your fault." I was so glad when my doctor said that to me. If a doctor hasn't told you I will spread the news to you.

The good part is you are still alive. Stay that way.

Thanks,

Alice

Whenever some family medical history form asks about family history of breast cancer, I write "my mother." The next question is regarding "age of onset." Then I crack up as I write, "91."

Nice statement from your doctor Alice. I'll remember that.

Love, Carol

Carol,

You are back to the way I met yoo. I like all of your pictures.

There is an old saying, everything in moderation. I'm not good at it but it makes sense.

Overeating vs. smoking is a false dichotomy. It is churlish for anyone to lecture another on their smoking or eating habits. But unpleasant looks in a restaurant are sent one's way because cigarette smoke doesn't know to stay at the smoker's table. I'm not sure what a Hells Angels bar has to do with anything. If all the patrons of such a place smoke, it is inappropriate for a non-smoker to come in and glare. But what is inappropriate about expecting to eat at a family restaurant without smoke from the next booth wafting into your food?

It may be discourteous to ask a smoker to leave the house when lighting up, but it's even more discourteous to assume that the guest's prerogative includes soaking nicotine and other chemicals into the host's draperies and furniture.

If this makes me an anti-smoking zealot, I'm ok with that.