THE ORDEAL OF preparing my apartment for its quarterly premises inspection while I am afflicted by plantar fasciitis in my left foot – which means I'm much more crippled than usual – has stolen my writing time. This week's OAN is thus limited to material I've posted on other sites.
Coincidentally
– or perhaps not (because excess weight is among the chief causes of
plantar fasciitis) – one of those posts was about the methodically
suppressed connection between quitting smoking and inexplicable,
uncontrollable and frighteningly fast weight-gain. It is a condition
with which my post-smoking self is intimately, bitterly, god-cursingly
familiar. But the facts about it – especially the hideousness it
inescapably imposes on about 35 percent of former smokers, especially
males – are carefully concealed by USian doctors, lest the dreadful
knowledge encourage nicotine addicts to keep smoking.
Hence the following, an expanded version of the reply I posted two days ago on the comment thread of “5 Reasons Americans Are Getting Fatter: It's Not Just the Food,” an AlterNet report reprinted by Reader Supported News.
While
reporter Martha Rosenberg did an excellent job of rounding up the usual
obesity-epidemic suspects – the long litany of for-profit additives and
artificial sweeteners by which the capitalists poison our food – she
wrote not a single word about the plague of post-smoking weight-gain.
In this context it is important to understand the national quit-smoking campaign did not
originate from any real public health concern. What began it is a
condition unique to the USian Homeland: the fact the Ayn Rand doctrine
that is the basis of USian economic policy defines health care as a
privilege of wealth rather than a human right. The anti-smoking drive
was therefore launched in response to for-profit insurors' anger over
how tobacco-related deaths were reducing their obscene profits. In other
words, the USian war on tobacco smoking started as a manifestation of
capitalist greed – which is precisely why it has been conducted so
relentlessly and therefore with such success. Contrast the totality of
the USian anti-smoking effort with the USian effort to eradicate
communicable childhood diseases. The latter is a program increasingly abandoned,
with predictably catastrophic results, due to deliberately genocidal
neglect of the poor combined with the ailments spread by Christian
fanatics who are now granted theocratic exemptions that allow them to
legally ignore formerly mandatory inoculation requirements. The
difference between the anti-smoking and childhood-health programs
undoubtedly lies in the bottom-line: apparently payouts for smoking
deaths reduce insurors' profits far more than payouts for the deaths of
children.
Though
I intended my response to Rosenberg to be corrective rather than
confessional, my fury at the cosmic unfairness and sadism of my
post-smoking circumstances – the fact I quit smoking to get healthy but
instead got grotesquely fat – made parts of my contribution
uncomfortably Oprah-ish. Normally I would have deleted such lapses as
inappropriate emotionalism. But on second thought, it seemed the
disclosures might help others who, like myself, are now after quitting
smoking forever entrapped in the mortification inflicted by
balloon-sized flesh. Besides, I have nothing to lose: I am who I am, and
in this instance what I am – that is, horrendously obese – combines
with abject poverty, physical disability and age to ensure the female
gender will never again look at me with anything other than
indifference, if not outright disgust.
The
associated negative emotions – which slap me in the face whenever I
look in a mirror – are intensified by the fact USian doctors generally
insist you're cheating anytime you gain weight on post-smoking diets.
Whether calling you a liar is prompted by ignorance or is mandatory
protocol, the psychological devastation is the same. The only exception I
ever encountered amongst USian medical personnel was the nutritionist I
consulted through Washington state's Group Health Cooperative. She said
the stress of nicotine withdrawal – which is now recognized as the longest and most wrenching drug withdrawal known to humans – throws the body into what she called “concentration-camp mode.” Thus the body begins turning all
food into the fat essential to protect muscles and bones from
absorption during starvation. If this is indeed what happens – and the
explanation seems as good as any I've heard – the implication is that
nicotine withdrawal truly ends only at death, especially for those of us
who suffer the lifelong post-smoking tendency to become circus obese.
Unfortunately,
my case is typical. I weighed 158 pounds in 1985, when, at age 45,
rising blood pressure and occasional bouts of cardiac arrhythmia
prompted me to begin what became a ten-year fight to quit smoking. I was
in good shape, an attractive and reasonably successful middle-aged
journalist, the editor-in-chief of Art Direction, an
international advertising-industry trade journal. As a Manhattanite I
routinely walked five miles a day – Gotham-dwellers average more miles
afoot than any other USians – and my 158 pounds with its 31-inch
waistline was only 10 pounds and two inches more than my best condition
ever, this in the Regular Army c. 1962. But my first week off cigarettes
I gained 12 pounds, my first month a total of 24.5 pounds – gains I
would have dismissed as impossible but for the irrefutable testimony of
my trousers, which I could no longer button, and the corroborative
witness borne by my belt, which was soon extended to its maximum length.
Within
weeks I went back to smoking – mainly because I knew the
fast-encroaching ugliness would end my romantic and sexual prospects
forever. Then my blood pressure again soared, and I again tried
quitting. Once more I tried cold turkey; then I tried Smokers Anonymous
(which is where I first heard of the British studies linking nicotine
withdrawal to radical obesity). I tried hypnosis; I tried gradual
reduction of my daily cigarette-count; I tried various over-the-counter
medications that promised to help me quit. But it seemed nothing could
get the nicotine monkey off my back.
Meanwhile
I had discovered a new and even more formidable complex of barriers to
quitting: without nicotine, I could not function as a journalist. I
could still edit copy, but I could not converse intelligently, think
clearly or write a coherent sentence. I am dyslexic; soon I came to
realize it was nicotine's function as a neurotransmitter – and not any
innate talent – that had enabled all my intellectual acumen and indeed
my entire reporting career.
Of
my communication skills, only my photographic ability was enhanced by
not smoking – this because of the vast improvement in peripheral vision
and tonal sense that results from the absence of vaso-constricting
nicotine in one's bloodstream.
There
was no triumph in my gradually-winning battle against nicotine
addiction because it was equally a forever-losing battle against
becoming monstrously obese. I grew fat and fatter – ever uglier, ever
more embarrassed to be seen in public, ever more inescapably lonely. I
had gained weight even on the unspeakable misery of a two-week,
1000-calorie-per-day diet. Tests proved the gain was not related to
metabolic deficiencies. And the failure of that diet proved the weight
gain was so uncontrollable not even starvation would stop it.
When
I finally managed to quit smoking permanently – this via a combination
of nicotine patches and prescription medication – I was 55 years old. I
weighed 195 pounds. By then, I had learned to accept my post-smoking
obesity – repugnant though it was – with the same bitter resignation
with which one accepts other physical handicaps. Moreover, being grossly
fat was no longer the pivotal disaster of my life. My career had been
destroyed by the odium of the post-traumatic clinical depression that
eventually befell me after all my life's works were obliterated in a
1983 fire, and that alone left me too impoverished to ever again be
attractive to any woman. Thus my physical appearance no longer mattered –
precisely the realization that finally enabled me to swear off tobacco
permanently. My first day without cigarettes forever was 23 September
1995. I used my last nicotine patch sometime in January 1996. Since then
I have never had nicotine in any form. Within a year I had blubbered up
to 235 pounds.
It
would take me nearly a decade to teach myself to write again; I will
never be the fast, self-assured writer I was as a smoker. And it would
be a dozen years before I could again comfortably socialize.
But
even without the obesity, quitting smoking would have destroyed my
physical condition. For most of my adult life I worked out regularly:
jogging, walking, the long-distance hiking associated with back-country
trout fishing, the day-long exertion of upland bird hunting, various
self-administered physical training programs including nearly a decade
with the Royal Canadian Air Force Basic Exercise Program. Then after my
spine was permanently injured by one of Washington state's defiantly
habitual drunken drivers, I was prescribed a combination of physical
therapy and yoga that gave me enough flexibility to work a season as
engineer/deckhand on a commercial fishing vessel and kept me ambulatory
until – you guessed it – I began my quit-smoking effort.
Another
of the deliberately downplayed effects of nicotine withdrawal is total
disruption of sleep patterns, the result of which is a profound state of
exhaustion – precisely the condition that discourages exercise of any
kind. And in my case – as in many such cases (or so I am repeatedly
told) – the sleep disruption has never gone away. I used to sleep like
the proverbial log, but I have not gotten an uninterrupted night's sleep
since I smoked my last cigarette, and now after 18 years and six
months, it is obvious I will never know the comfort of a full night's
sleep again in this lifetime. Exhaustion – sometimes mild, more often
severe – is now my normal condition. With it comes a loathing of
unnecessary exertion so intense no amount of will power – at least none I
am able to muster – will overcome it enough to foster regular exercise.
I
know now that without cigarettes, I will always be fat – which is to
say I will always be ugly. In my years off nicotine, I've weighed as
much as 275 pounds. As a result I've come to regard food as my enemy, to
fear and despise it and hate myself for how it obsesses my mind and
deforms my body. By constant struggle, I (mostly) manage to keep my
weight in the vicinity of an (only) (moderately) repulsive 225. Like the
vampires of legend, I avoid mirrors; I go out in public only when I
have no choice, and never for pleasure. Such is my lot as a former
smoker.
***
The
documentation on the weight-gain/post-smoking connection, which I first
heard of through a British acquaintance in 1986, took me years to
ferret out. It surfaced, albeit in much later forms, via two papers
unearthed in 2010 by the skills of a talented reference librarian at the
Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, a woman I knew only as Sarah and that
only by telephone. In this instance she outdid even her colleagues at
the main (Fifth Avenue) branch of the New York City Public Library, who
repeatedly told me there was no such material, never mind NYPL is
ostensibly the finest such institution in the nation.
Here are the two references Sarah found for me:
“Smoke-Free and Fat: the Health Hazards of Kicking the Habit”; Kent Sepkowitz, Slate: 2008. Conclusion: quitting smoking makes you fat.
“Smoking
as a Modifable Risk Factor for Type 2 Diabetes in Middle-Aged Men”; S.
Goya Wannamethee, A. Gerald Shaper, Ivan J. Perry, Diabetes Care,
Sept. 2001 v24 i9 p1590. (No link available.) Conclusion: quitting
smoking makes you fat, thereby increasing your diabetes risk.
*****
Outside Agitation Elsewhere: It's All About the Ukrainian Crisis
Most
of this material is focused on the Ukrainian Crisis because of its
terrifying threat of a thermonuclear World War III. As I have said
before, to me it is scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis because in
1962 I trusted President John F. Kennedy. But now in 2014 I have learned
the hard way – that is, by voting for him twice – not to trust
President Barack Obama at all.
However,
thanks largely to an astute journalist named Robert Parry, the debate
is beginning to focus on whether Obama has been betrayed by his own
advisors or whether he is (once again) demonstrating his formidable
skills at deception and manipulation by minimizing his culpability in
provoking the crisis.
Predictably,
I argue for the latter – that Obama the Orator is merely showing
another aspect of his true Barack the Betrayer self, most likely to
improve the Democratic Party's abominable prospects in the November
elections. The relevant links – those on which I contributed to
discussion threads – are here and here.
Medea Benjamin's disturbing account of how she was savaged by the Egyptian secret police
– obviously on orders of someone in the USian government if not in the
White House itself – is also relevant. It, like the atrocities committed
against the Occupy Movement, shows us the true nature of the imperial
mind: all the more reason to fear the U.S. will escalate the Ukraine
Crisis into World War III.
LB/16 March 2014
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