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Smoking — playing the odds ….

In a recent post, I off-handedly remarked that some people seem to play the odds with their health. “After all,” I remarked, “only 20% to 25% of smokers get lung cancer.”

No SmokingThis morning, as I reread my article, I realized that while that’s true to some extent, there are actually a couple of prevailing attitudes:

  • It can’t happen to me, so I’m not going to worry about it.
  • It will happen to me, so there’s nothing I can do about it.

It can’t happen to me
This attitude has merit. This people are playing the odds. They may be in a little bit of denial with the word “can’t”, but “probably won’t” is not outside the realm of rationality.

The problem is that, if you are pointing to individual ailments caused by smoking — heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes — well, sure, your chance of contracting one of those diseases is lower than not.

But I don’t want to play those odds, because we are talking about extremely deadly diseases.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC),

  • Smoking causes 20% of the deaths in the US. That’s 1 out of every 5 deaths — directly attributable to smoking.
  • Smoking causes about 90% of all lung cancer deaths in men, and 80% of all lung cancer deaths in women. 90% of all deaths from chronic obstructive lung disease are caused by smoking.
  • More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.

Per that same article, the CDC also states that smoking increases the risk of

  • Coronary heart disease by 2 to 4 times
  • Stroke by 2 to 4 times
  • Men developing lung cancer by 23 times
  • Women developing lung cancer by 13 times
  • Dying from chronic obstructive lung diseases (such as chronic bronchitis and emphysema) by 12 to 13 times

How do you like those odds?

Ultimately, though, I think what made me quit smoking 20 years ago was not any of that. I just got tired of (1) being addicted to cigarettes, (2) smelling like cigarette smoke, and (3)

When smokers quit — what are the benefits over time?

According to The American Cancer Society, here is a timetable for what happens in your body when you quit (with references).

20 minutes after quitting

  • Your heart rate and blood pressure drop.

(Effect of smoking on arterial stiffness and pulse pressure amplification, Mahmud A, Feely J. Hypertension. 2003:41:183)

12 hours after quitting

  • The carbon monoxide level in your blood drops to normal.

(US Surgeon General’s Report, 1988, p. 202)

2 weeks to 3 months after quitting

  • Your circulation improves and your lung function increases.

(US Surgeon General’s Report, 1990, pp.193, 194,196, 285, 323)

1 to 9 months after quitting

  • Coughing and shortness of breath decrease; cilia (tiny hair-like structures that move mucus out of the lungs) start to regain normal function in the lungs, increasing the ability to handle mucus, clean the lungs, and reduce the risk of infection.

(US Surgeon General’s Report, 1990, pp. 285-287, 304)

1 year after quitting

  • The excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a continuing smoker’s.

(US Surgeon General’s Report, 2010, p. 359)

5 years after quitting

  • Risk of cancer of the mouth, throat, esophagus, and bladder are cut in half. Cervical cancer risk falls to that of a non-smoker. Stroke risk can fall to that of a non-smoker after 2-5 years.

(A Report of the Surgeon General: How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease – The Biology and Behavioral Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease Fact Sheet, 2010; and Tobacco Control: Reversal of Risk After Quitting Smoking. IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention, Vol. 11. 2007, p 341)

10 years after quitting

  • The risk of dying from lung cancer is about half that of a person who is still smoking.
  • The risk of cancer of the larynx (voice box) and pancreas decreases.

(A Report of the Surgeon General: How Tobacco Smoke Causes Disease – The Biology and Behavioral Basis for Smoking-Attributable Disease Fact Sheet, 2010; and US Surgeon General’s Report, 1990, pp. vi, 155, 165)

15 years after quitting

  • The risk of coronary heart disease is that of a non-smoker’s.

(Tobacco Control: Reversal of Risk After Quitting Smoking. IARC Handbooks of Cancer Prevention, Vol. 11. 2007. p 11)

There are a lot of reasons to quit smoking. As a smoker, you can either continue to play the odds, or you can quit now and get your body on the road to recovery. Up to you.

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Pay yourself first — it applies to fitness, too

Financial advisors have been telling us for years to pay ourselves first. That just means that before we pay the bills and make purchases, we put some money away for our future.

Well, guess what — that advice works for fitness, too.

The biggest excuse I hear from people — and my biggest excuse for many years — is “I don’t have time to work out.” As Tony Horton would say, “Bull-loney.” (Yeah, his humor is corny, but I enjoy it.)

It’s trite but true that we all have the same amount of time and it’s just a matter of getting our priorities in line with our goals. Well, if you think about it, unless one of your goals is to set the Guinness record for sickest human, fitness can help you achieve every goal you have.

How’s that work? Take a look at some examples.

GOAL: Be a better parent or spouse. You can’t excel in those roles if you are always sick or unable to move properly.

GOAL: Get promoted. Plenty of studies show that attractive people get preferential treatment in every area of life. You know this intuitively. Isn’t your day just a little nicer if the cashier at the grocery is attractive? (I know it’s not just me.) If someone makes a dumb mistake, aren’t we more likely to overlook it, if we think the person is attractive? (Politicians bank on this.) Get fit to be more attractive and you are probably more likely to get that promotion.

GOAL: Be more mentally alert and nimble. Working out definitely helps keep your mind in shape. “Memory retention and learning functions are all about brain cells actually changing, growing, and working better together,” says John J. Ratey, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Exercise creates the best environment for that process to occur.”

GOAL: Reduce stress. Exercise helps tremendously with this not only by releasing endorphins, but also by giving you a break from the daily grind.

GOAL: Be healthy. Physical fitness — the ability to perform physical activity — is one thing, and it allows us to move around freely without assistance, but health — a state of being well and without disease — is another, and there is no question that being fit leads to being healthy by improving the heart and blood vessels, lowering cancer risk, building stronger bones, accelerating weight loss, keeping diabetes at bay, and more.

With all the ways that fitness impacts your life, with all the ways that fitness helps you achieve just about every other goal you may have, shouldn’t you find the time to prioritize your fitness? Pay yourself first.

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Being fat is not inevitable

Fitness is a lifelong struggle. It takes work. I tell young people all the time, “Develop a fitness habit now, because when you get older, it’s that much harder to get into the swing of things.”

How often do we not even try a fitness program, because we “know” beforehand that we will not be able to complete it? How many times has our prejudgement of the outcome caused us not to even attempt it in the first place?

We almost certainly base this attitude on past fitness failures.

You know, when we were young and saw the first signs of body bulge, we watched our calories or carbs and hit the gym. That lasted a little while, months or years even, but then our lives filled up, and fitness took a back seat.

A few years — and more than a few pounds — later, we decided that we have got to do something about all this weight we’ve gained. We joined a gym, tried to do the same routines we did back in the day, but it wasn’t so easy anymore, and, anyway, our lives kept interrupting. With our long hours at work, it was just impossible to eat right. The kids — the kids — were always needing a ride here or there. Oh, and then there was that morning we woke up and couldn’t move our neck for 2 weeks.

Now we are even older and fatter. We think about the gym — are we really still paying the monthly membership? — but we know that’s not going to work. We look around and we compare ourselves with others our age, and we come to the conclusion that, “Being fat is inevitable. Might as well get used to it.”

I was so there. That story is mine — well, without the kids — and it may be a lot like yours, too.

So what can you do? You have to do something? Or are you happy being overweight? You know that being overweight is the road to diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, so you would like to lose some pounds, but if your mindset is that the path to fatness is inevitable, then you will likely just accept that “fact” and take your chances. After all, not everyone dies of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, right?

Well, hell, go buy yourself a carton of cigarettes, then, if that’s your attitude. After all, only 20% or 25% of smokers get lung cancer.

The other day, a friend of mine was telling me that he knows he needs to find time for fitness, but he is just can’t work it into his schedule. Believe me, I get that.

Regardless of your reasons for not eating right, for not exercising, at some point, something will click. Something will change inside your brain that says, “You know what? I need to make time to get healthy and fit.”

I don’t know what it will be for you. I really don’t know what it was for me.

I mean, I know I was feeling weird pains. I know I was on medications that I didn’t want to be on. I know I was shopping for size 44 pants. I know I saw a photo of my fat self that jarred me. But I have no specific recollection of an epiphany. It just happened.

At some point, I knew I had to turn things around.

At some point I realized that being fat is not inevitable.

I hope that realization comes to you before it’s too late.

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The Easy Way to Get Healthy

I was recently disturbed by something I saw on Facebook. (I know I shouldn’t take things so seriously, but, honestly, some things are just disturbing.)

One of the people in my timeline had posted a status update about some fitness program he is doing, how he loves it, is losing weight, his cholesterol is going down, you know, the kind of weird post that only fitness fanatics can love.

In the comments section, the conversation went something like this:

  • Commenter: Wow, that sounds great, Original Poster. I have been looking for something like that myself.
  • Original Poster: It is great, Commenter.  You should give it a try!
  • Commenter: Maybe I’ll do that. Is it easy? It has to be easy, or I won’t do it.
  • Original Poster: It’s not easy, but anything worth doing isn’t easy.

And the Commenter was not heard from again.

Getting fit is definitely not easy. It takes hard work to build muscle, because the only way to build it is to tear it down first by lifting heavy objects.

But wait a minute.

Getting fit is one thing. Fitness involves building muscle and aerobic stamina. There is almost no way to make that easy. It takes time and effort, like one of the fitness programs in the ads on this page.

However, getting healthy is a different matter.

I mean, sure, they tend to go hand in hand, but, honestly, you can get healthy — e.g. get your blood pressure and cholesterol down, avoid heart disease, severely lower your risk of cancer — relatively easily. All you have to do is change the way you eat.

You are going to eat anyway, right? 75% to 80% of your body composition is determined by what you eat, right? So … why not just eat the right things? Assuming you don’t have access to some kind of magic wand, what can be easier than that?

Well, maybe it’s not so easy. After all, there are some things that make it difficult for people to change the way they eat.

  • Ingrained beliefs – We learn what is good and bad for us as children, and what we learned way back then tends to stick. We have a hard time overcoming those beliefs that were hammered into us all those years ago.
  • Disbelief – How can being healthy be as simple as changing what I put into my digestive tract?
  • Not wanting to stand out  – As humans living in society, we tend to be continually influenced by peer, family, and other social pressures, and many of us simply want to fit in. Why stand out from the crowd because we “eat weird”?
  • Playing the odds – That [insert ailment or disease here] won’t happen to me, right?

The funny thing is that most of those barriers to healthy eating go away once we suffer some kind of medical trauma, like a heart attack or stroke. Once that happens, oh, yeah, then we are ready to make a change.

That is kind of like installing the alarm after the burglary. Sure, you may help prevent future problems, but you are lucky that first incident didn’t put you under.

I prefer to take preventive measures to avoid the issue altogether, and the current route I am taking toward staying healthy is a plant-based diet. When I use the term “diet”, by the way, I am referring to a way of eating, not a short-term plan.

Why plant-based? Check out this short written interview with T. Colin Campbell for a quick rundown.

Plant-based is my choice, but yours might be different.

Whatever you choose, please know that you can be much more healthy if you simply change the way you eat! Be conscious of what you put into your mouth. Stay away from all that refined and processed food. Try to eat whole foods. If you include meat, try to get the good stuff without all the drugs and other gunk in it. Keep dietary fats low.

Eat to satisfy your hunger, not your emotions, and, while you won’t see the changes overnight, you may be surprised how quickly your health improves.

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Is being overweight some kind of joke?

I was on Facebook the other day — as I often am — and one of my friends, a person I know and like, not just some random Facebook “friend”, posted the following:

  • “Double-chocolate fudge brownie for breakfast! #thatiswhyimfat”

Cute, right?

A few people commented on the post, primarily laughing along with him, commenting on why they are fat themselves, offering up other desserts that might make good breakfasts, all with a few LOLs tossed into the mix.

As I said, I know this guy, and he’s a bit pudgy, but he’s not hugely obese, so maybe that’s why he jokes about it. He knows he needs to lose a few, but might never get around to it.

But why laugh about it?

A big part of the reason we laugh at being overweight is because, for most people under the age of 40, dropping pounds is more about looking good than feeling good, and everyone feels good when they’re young, right? So, maybe at some point, looking good is not a priority, which means there’s no real need to lose weight.

You know the story. Life takes over once we graduate from high school and college. We get a real job, find ourselves in a long-term relationship, have a kid or two, and, yeah, we gain a few pounds. No big deal, it happens to everyone. We just buy bigger clothes and accept the idea that as we age, we gain weight. Plus, we’re busy, so we don’t really have time to worry so much about how we look.

As we get older, though, we start to see the health implications of being fat. We have pain for no apparent reason. Our joints start to ache. Our doctor puts us on medications, and at that point many of us try to drop poundage to bring down our blood pressure, cholesterol, lower our risk of heart disease, and just to, overall, feel better.

Anyway, back to the Facebook comment, I can’t help but wonder if my friend would have received the same light-hearted responses to his status update, if his hashtag had been #thatiswhyillgetheartdisease or #thatiswhyillbediabetic or #thatiswhyilldieyoungerthanishould.

Not so cute now, right?

Excess fat on our bodies leads to a host of ills, including heart disease, diabetes, hypertension — this is well-documented. But still we joke about it, and our friends joke about it right along with us.

There is a point where we know it’s no longer a joke, though, right? We all know a super huge person or 2 (or 3 or 4 or 5 these days), and we don’t joke about that kind of obesity. That guy has a problem, not us. Many of us, though, do have a problem, and we don’t even know it.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 35% of the adults in the United States are obese, which is defined as a BMI (body mass index) of 30 or more. Are you part of the 35%?

The CDC provides an easy way for you to calculate your BMI here.

Even if you are not obese, are you overweight, with a BMI of 25 or higher? You have to be overweight before you’re obese, hint, hint.

The bottom line is that our excess body fat is killing us, so, come on, let’s stop joking about being fat and start doing something about it by getting our diets in line! And, trust me on this, if you start eating right when you are younger, you’ll be a whole lot better off when you’re older.

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