The Tobacco Papers #4: The inevitable heaviness of being
Plus five, down five. Plus ten, down five. Plus twenty, down ten. Plus twenty, minus twenty. Plus ten, stable. Stable.
That’s not the sound of the stock market’s ever-undulating rivers of commerce. Negative would soon skip behind positive and the word ‘crash’ would feature more prominently if it were. No, the above digits represent the science of estimated weight gain following successful smoking cessation. Think fin-de-siècle phrenology, horoscopes or meterological standard precision: your head might resemble the Ripper’s, you could be entering a crucial equinox tomorrow, there’s an equal chance of rain or blizzard (they’re both precipitation, what’s your problem?) and you may or may not be able to fit into your pants if you give up smoking. Uncertainty isn’t enough to defer the crucial decision to end your love affair with the pack of twenty. However, the unbridled, yelping delight with which people will warn you of the inherent dangers of ex-smoker’s fat is enough to encourage you to roll up, light up and take it up full time in despair at schaudenfraude-laden foundations of humanity.
If you listen to the hypotheses – usually uttered as a breathless cackle just as easily located on the heath on the scout for Macbeth – punted about the correlation between ceasing roll-ups and gaining rolls, you’ll gain more weight if you’ve just given up smoking. Ask the same pundit before and there’s less reason to crush your fragile willpower and sense of achievement beyond a speculative ‘well, I suppose my friend did and she can still fit through her door’. Amusing that, given the dedication it takes to reject a poisonous, insanely addictive host of chemicals that wreck, ravage and kill that the hint of a plumper tummy area should strike anyone with apocalyptic, apoplectic fear.
Let’s be real here. Inhaling smoke through your mouth and into your lungs doesn’t safeguard against the spread of fat nodules that suddenly spring (or rather, gloop) into action the minute the last molecule of CO2 has receded from your bloodstream. Inventing new add-on heavy variants of the latte (make mine an enormous quadruple mocha with cheesecake syrup, strained Guernsey cream and caramelised white choc chunks thanks) and re-jigging the pie chart of the healthy eating wheel to include pie-as-food-group is likely to make your skinny jeans redundant. Disaster? Yes, if you want to be voted ‘Hot’ in Vice Magazine, not if you are a real person who exists regularly in three dimensions. Make denial your friend and call on three trusty strategies to help you ignore the – hopefully temporary – wobble: stop and go back, look and think.
Stop! Go Back! It’s 1995 inside the Beverley-hilled, bountiful world of ‘Clueless’ at the bit where Alicia Silverstone’s character explains why no-one should ever be attracted to skateboarders while Bowie’s ‘All the Young Dudes’ rides high over the non-diegetic sound, and roughshod over Cher’s assertions that skate ain’t sexy. At what point can you remember whether any one of the long-haired rapscallions with half-mast jeans and bum crack nearing full moon were overweight? Three reasons why you can’t. One, it was over ten years ago. Two, Bowie and a suitably sexy slow-mo shot ensure the viewer is prepped for the Travis/Tai storyline. Thirdly – and most importantly, the one lesson you can take from a 90’s remake of ‘Emma’ – baggy clothes hide wobbly tums. Put Route One back in business while your metabolism sorts itself and say you’re reviving the Tony Hawks era for retro posterity. Or just time-travel back to 1995, say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ and save yourself a lifetime of lung cancer and yo-yo dieting.
Look. While the harrowing ads that have made car crash death the sound of my commute are not relaxing, they have imparted one priceless knowledge nugget. Optical illusions are stock-in-trade of the brain. Therefore, the answer to denial is NOT looking. Wear glasses or contacts? Stop. That way you can’t see the damage to your midriff, nor whether anyone else has noticed it (don’t drive though – no more adverts, please). For smug 20/20 types who can’t escape the curvaceous truth, invest in reflective surfaces from your local hall of mirrors instead of Habitat.
Think. Ultimately, it’s all an attitude. Thinking your way out of the inevitable heavies involves equally weighty platitudes and re-framing reality on an industrial level. Here’s one to start you off: every pound you gain is a cigarette you didn’t smoke.
