From a health standpoint, there's not much that I find more disturbing than seeing teens and young adults smoking. I grew up in a household where both parents smoked; in fact, before it became illegal for kids to buy cigarettes, I spent a lot of time running into convenience stores to buy cigarettes for my mother: "Two packs of Kent 100s, please" rolled easily off my tongue by the age of eight or so.
A horrible health example, for sure. But I also remember her repeatedly telling me, "If I'd known then what I know now about the dangers of smoking, I would have never started."
To her credit, my mom gave up smoking when I was in college (my dad also gave up the habit, although he smoked a pipe). It wasn't easy for her. She felt awful and, yes, she gained some weight. But she never smoked again. Still, the damage to her lungs was done. And in the end, it contributed to her failing health.
When I hear stories of girls and young women relying on cigarettes as a weight-control measure, it makes me sort of crazy. I've been thinking about all this because Temple University released a study last week that looked at the smoking habits and weight gain of women ages 18 to 24, and assigned the women to either a group exercise program or body image group counseling sessions. After eight weeks, according to the study, the body image counseling group showed a rate of smoking cessation that was more than double that of the exercise group. It was a small study, but the results seem to indicate that helping women deal with a very real fear of weight gain can help them make the choice not to smoke.
All of this begs the question of why women would choose to sacrifice health for a slimmer body. And it's not just smoking -- the same might be said of diets that focus on a certain food to the exclusion of others or excessive exercise to the point of bodily damage. What about a balanced, moderate approach to good health?
We all know there are no guarantees in life. People who've made all the "right" health choices still get sick, while some people who've made every questionable health choice you can imagine live to be 100. But consistently making poor choices to keep the number on the scale down seems a bit like playing with fire to me.
What do you think?
It's sad, but I think because the ill-effects of smoking don't show up for years -- and as teens their brains cannot yet grasp that long-term concept.
On the other hand: they see the effects of losing weight NOW. I'm not at all condoning it or saying it is right -- but I think that may be part of the reason why.
Definitely something that needs to change. Today, we don't hear so much about the dangers of smoking like we did as teenagers which is too bad.
Posted by: Dinneen-Eat Without Guilt | 04/27/2009 at 06:48 AM
I continue to be disturbed by the definition of 'healthy'. It continues to be associated with thinness more and more and less with what you eat and how active you are. Thin people are assumed to be healthy regardless of how they obtain/maintain their weight. I recently watched a video on youtube where a girl was, for all intensive purposes, starving herself and getting as more praise than concern because she had lost 80 pounds. Smoking is another weight loss method that we can add to a long list of the unhealthy things people do to achieve the picture of health.
Posted by: Natasha | 04/27/2009 at 09:39 AM
I have to agree with both of the above posts: kids, especially teens, care more about what other people think of them than they do about health or consequences later in life. When 40 seems a long way away, how can they even imagine being 80? And we continue to think of healthy as being thin. We llok at a model or celebrity and we envy her, not knowing that she subsists on coffee and cigarettes. (In fact, Janine Garafolo has lost a bunch of weight recently, and she says she is probably more unhealthy than she's ever been, and smoking more than ever).
We HAVE to stop rewarding this thin-at-all-cost mentality!
Posted by: Alyssa | 04/27/2009 at 12:11 PM
Gah, this bothers me so much too! We HAVE to think long term. I wish more people would really think about the consequences of their actions.
Posted by: Sagan | 04/29/2009 at 06:33 AM