Women Smokers -- Gambling With Their Lives (page 2 of 4)

Part-Time Habit

Laster's experience is all too familiar, says Tom Glynn, PhD, director of the Cancer Science and Trends division of the American Cancer Society. "Over the past decade, we don't see as much daily smoking as we used to. What we're seeing is more sporadic smokers. They don't define themselves as smokers, because they only smoke on the weekends or when they go to a bar. Young smokers say, 'I know you can get cancer and heart disease, but those are things older people get, and I'm not going to be smoking when I'm older, so I don't have to worry.'"

The problem with that, says Glynn, is twofold: Quitting isn't as easy as they think it will be, even for social smokers. And there are health effects that show up early. Young people who smoke, and women especially, are more susceptible to respiratory ailments such as bronchitis and emphysema. And they'll feel the effects of these problems sooner than they'll realize the potential for cancer or heart disease.

Today's young smokers aren't ignorant or naive about the effects of nicotine. "Sometimes I wish I were more of an idiot," says 29-year-old Victoria Tucker, an administrative specialist for a management consulting company in Atlanta. "I'm smart enough to know all the bad things smoking does to me, but still I do it." She notices an effect on her health (recently, after a day of heavy smoking, she lost her voice) but isn't always willing to admit it's due to her habit. "I can always find another thing that's a contributing factor." There's the beer she drank, her asthma and stress, to name a few.

Tucker had her first cigarette at a party when she was 16. A week later, she had another, and even though she swore she'd never become a smoker, that was the start of her pack-a-day habit. "You know all along that you need to quit," she says. She came close last year; with the help of a new drug, she was down to one cigarette a day. "But the minute you say, 'I'm not going to smoke anymore—this is killing me,' you start freaking out."

Fear Factor
In the past few years, Tucker lost her father, aunt and uncle, all to heart-related illnesses. "The mortality of my family has become very clear to me. Almost no one in my family has made it past 56 years old. We're dropping like flies, and I basically have about 25 years left to live if we're going by their numbers. I don't even know if I want to get married, but I want the shot."

So she's given herself a deadline: "I want to celebrate my 30th birthday and not smoke a cigarette on that day—or ever again." To do that, she's going back on the drug. But she'll do whatever else it takes: "If I had the opportunity, I'd go down to the morgue and look at the lungs of a smoker so I could see what mine look like. I am scaring myself into this."

Fear does play a role in quitting. "It's like the angel and the devil on your shoulder, and one of them's up there puffing away," Tucker says. "Your body is saying, 'What else is going to make you feel good like that?'"

For many, that search for something else leads to weight gain. Some people end up stuffing themselves with food to replace the cigarettes. "Many young women smoke because they want to maintain a certain body image or are afraid to stop because they'll gain weight," says Tom Glynn. The average weight gain for quitters, though, is less than ten pounds. "You don't want to gain five pounds, but you'd have to gain a whole lot more to make the weight gain do the same damage that continuing to smoke will do," he says.

Tucker recently lost 25 pounds, and while she would never have thought about the weight issue a few years ago, "now I'm terrified to quit, because if all the weight comes back in four weeks, I'm going to be really upset."

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