No one tells smokers or people who drink too much alcohol that they're engaging in risky behavior
Posted Mar 7, 2018, 8:17 PM UTC
13685
This is always the dumbest argument.
I'm a smoker, and I don't think I've ever spent a significant amount of time in public without someone telling me that it's bad for me.
86
So how's your smoking cessation going?
This isn't a joke reply. I'm being serious. How's it going?
17
It's not, at the moment.
Quitting smoking is harder than any other drug I've dealt with.
20
That's exactly what Abbie Hoffman said in "Steal This Urine Test". It really gets its hooks into you. At the same time, in the last decade ex-smokers have outnumbered smokers in the US. It can be done. Failing a quitting effort is not a source of shame - nearly everyone fails the first time and many the second, third, fourth time. You just keep pushing forward.
In my mom's memory I wish you the best of luck.
24
Thanks! I do try. At one point I even thought I was done. I made it a week without a cigarette. That's the longest I could kick the habit, and I've tried quitting an honest 10 times in my 13 years of smoking. I've tried cold turkey, gum, Chantix, and even spent 300 dollars on hypnosis.
And I've successfully quit an opioid addiction. Cold turkey, 7 years now.
16
And in my mom's memory too. It's been over 20 years, and I still miss her.
2
New York seems to have done everything possible to discourage smokers. Cigarettes are expensive as hell, and if you want to smoke in the Winter you'll have to put on a coat and take your ass at least 10 feet from the building. We still have anti smoking PSAs running on tv regularly as well signs posted everywhere. It's to the point where I'm genuinely surprised when I see a person smoking now.
On the other hand, I remember maybe seeing a few signs about how obesity can lead to heart attacks on a train a few years ago.
8
Exactly, everytime I’m smoking in public someone tells me how deadly it is.
4
Every single time I have a cigarette or now vape in public, I inevitably have someone say something to me.
Meanwhile, when I gained 100 pounds at 20 and then 70 pounds in 40's, guess how many stranger ever said one word to me? Zero.
49
People actually question my eating behavior more now that I am NOT overweight.
34
Yup being skinny means fat people always talk to you about how fat they are without prompting and everyone talks about how skinny you are.
7
Yup. Same.
4
Same here. They were silent when I gained 30-some pounds in 3 months from binge eating. Same people, 2-3 years later and 40 pounds down, can't seem to help themselves from making asinine comments about my diet from the small portion of it they can see. Best part is I'm not eating any better and they still remark how "healthy" it is, lol.
2
To be fair, drinking will get you no comments, either.
5
That's true, but being a raging drunk or saying you go to the bar six nights a week past a certain age definitely is frowned upon. I mean, if you go to a restaurant and eat a normal portion, no one is going to look at you weird. If you eat enough food to feed three people, someone might say something. Same with drinking. Of course, it depends if all your friends are also heavy drinkers as well. But I'm guessing most people who are overweight with exclusively overweight friends don't get criticized for their food choices either.
4
Have they never seen those tragic anti-smoking commercials, or the advertisements for rehab centers for alcoholics/drug users?
Obesity is just as much of a gamble as any of those things. Not everyone who is obese has all of those health issues. Not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer. Not everyone who drinks dies from liver failure. But why deny that it's a gamble and definitely increases those risks?
23
The ones where people are talking through a trach scared the crap out if me & honestly played a role in encouraging me to quit smoking. Maybe we need commercials where diabetics lose their feet to wake up some of these people to the visible consequences of their poor choices.
3
I specifically remember one where the smoker smoked around their kid and the kid ended up in the hospital dying with the parent feeling obviously fucking horrible. Don't see any of those ads happening with obesity. And considering that most parents I know who are/were smokers pretty much drilled their kids about "do not smoke at all. Don't smoke, don't make my mistake" while a fat parent feeds their kid too large portions with no one commenting...Well, they really should be the one getting the "will you risk killing your kid from your bad habits?" ads and not the smokers.
2
How do they keep this fiction going? Everyone will tell you you shouldn't smoke or drink to excess. Both of those those things are also restricted by age and locale. There are tons of places you can neither smoke nor drink, at all. And you have to have attained a certain age to buy those products (in the US). That's how discouraged both those things are.
19
And doctors ALWAYS ask about them when you go.
3
None of the people in this thread are Sofia Hagen though they are discussing the same topic.
18
If you ask me
I’m so glad I asked her. O wait
14
So this person's argument is that it's bad that the known health detriments of being obese are well publicized? They're not even arguing against the claims. They're just saying nobody should know.
Disillusionment at its finest.
13
Their argument is that the CRUK campaign unfairly singles out obesity while ignoring much greater risks from tobacco and alcohol because of prejudice against fat people.
2
I do call my friends out who drink too much. And I bitch about my friends that smoke AND the vapers. I’m just an asshole tho.
10
It's a shame that people complain about vapers so much, since it's such a good option for people who try to quit cigarettes. But some people don't want to use them because of the stigma. :/
4
Studies I believe are showing they are just as bad but different and they are just another habit.
I still smoke hookah once in a while but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad for me.
3
Well they don't smell nearly as bad, so it's better for other people I guess? And, no tar?
2
Really? Most studies I've seen suggest they're bad, but not nearly as bad as cigarettes. Of course, that's a low bar to cross.
1
The US has a position dedicated to it, the Surgeon General of the United States. (I'm sure the position has a ton of other duties but at this point unless one pulls a Jocelyn Elders (can't remember what she actually did; just the media shitstorm) the public is going to think of it as the person responsible for all the tobacco warnings.)
9
As I recall, Jocelyn Elders said the teenagers masturbate, and that's OK, and no one should really worry about it. Also, that contraception to be available in schools, because teenagers also have sex with each other. And nearly the entire country instantly divided itself into two camps. One of which consisted of people saying, "no shit", and the other of people hysterically clutching their pearls and fainting. Then demanding that she take that back.
13
You don't have to live with the judgment. You could live longer and without the judgment by losing weight.
7
I get told constantly that smoking is bad for me. (I'm trying to quite so it's working) This person is so dense that they didn't even consider what these other people were saying, none of the others were even bashing fat people
7
I wish you the best of luck!!!! Quitting smoking for good was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was entirely worth it.
2
The US CDC actually put out a statement a couple of years advising all women of childbearing age to not drink at all unless they're using birth control because they might be pregnant. That's just one (American) example of health organizations targeting alcohol use. We constantly receive warnings about smoking & alcohol! There are warnings on bottles & cigarette packs. There are few equivalencies regarding the dangers of obesity.
7
This shit pisses me off so much. My gma was an alcholic and my dad and his siblings tried so fucking hard to help her. The only time I ever saw my dad cry was after he would get off the phone with his mother after begging her to come live with us and let him help her.
So yeah, alcoholics, smokers, and drug addicts all get shit for their vices. I switched to an ecig from normal cigarettes a few years ago and some people act like its fucking Zyclon B.
7
Eventually, covering your eyes and ears and yelling "I can't hear you!" while trying to run away from consequences will catch up to you. You may just run off a cliff...you'll run slowly, maybe even hurple, but you'll get there.
6
These people aren't running anywhere.
4
At least a smoker would just tell you to fuck off rather than make up phobias and fake science
6
"fat helps you survive cancer?" What the fuck?
4
I think they're referring to the weight loss many patients experience while going through chemo, which is where that whole myth about overweight being healthier than normal weight comes from.
3
Yes being slightly overweight increases your survival rate for a lot of diseases once you have them. Being obese doesn't. And it mostly matters for the very elderly, like 70+
3
Hmm. Well TIL
1
I'm currently 60 days smoke free. I still get more shit at work for having been a smoker than I ever have for being fat. Hell, the extremely obese guy here (whose desk is just piles of biscuits, crisps and energy drinks) doesn't get anything said to him, but the 5 smokers... you best believe they get told extremely regularly that their cough would ease if they quit smoking, or how the office reeks of smoke.
I'm a bit more annoyed by this than I probably should be... but that notorious advert about obesity has seeped onto my facebook feed, and I'm not engaging in any conversations about it, as I'm not part of the collective going "my fee-fees are hurt".
3
I'm not judging you for being obese.
I'm judging you for your strawman arguments and general ignorance.
3
Pipe doon hen
2
I increasingly feel like I live in an alternate reality from the people I am interacting with. In what world do we not tell smokers and alcoholics that they're engaging in deeply unhealthy behaviors? Have they seen the cigarette packs sold in the UK?
I wonder what kind of a FA meltdown/shitstorm we'd witness if sweets and junk food etc. started featuring packaging with the most dire & graphic consequences of obesity on it, just like cigarette packs in a lot of countries nowadays.
There wouldn't be enough popcorn In the world to last me through watching that meltdown.
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Which I find strange. If anything, I eat out and MORE fast food chains now that I realized certain menu items are far less in calories than I originally thought.
Having the knowledge of how many calories so I know how to fit it into my budget is way more freeing than not knowing.
Anorexics would be happy with that wouldn't they? Edit: Just realised you meant recovering.
Better yet, scroll down a page of them on an online shopping site.
Wikipedia has an article listing the warning messages on cigarette packages by country.
Can confirm, am a smoker. Anti-smoking ads are everywhere as they should be.
Australia is epic too: https://the-bruise-aesthetic.tumblr.com/post/171262993176/australian-cigarette-packaging
Right? If my wife started smoking around our son I literally might divorce her.
Who told these people that anybody tolerates (never mind "appreciates" or "celebrates") smokers?
Do they have pictures of diseased lungs or bodies in morgues like in Thailand?
Yes. And people with their teeth rotted to falling out and hugely inflamed throats and stuff. Stuff must be crazy addictive to look at that and keep going.
When I lived in Japan, I had this old guy who lived in the house next door who sounder like he was hacking up a lung on a daily basis. Guy still smoked though
Me and my friend used to collect the images like pokemon cards. Addiction is truly crazy.
We should put warning labels on highly caloric, unsatiating food