just don’t tell me you wanna be healthy

It’s a bit of a mind-bog for me but this is how it goes.

There is this place in Sanur, Bali, which has a restaurant which sells organic food (at a price) and conducts pilates and yoga classes. It is hell-bent on promoting healthy, wholesome living.

The irony is there are ash trays on the dining tables of this health food place. I have been there once, the food was good, but people are just….  people. Disappointing and infuriating.

Three western women all geared up for yoga drank their herbal tea at the next table and started smoking. Accompanying them was a dude (a boyfriend/husband minding a baby in a pram).  One of the women eventually tossed her still smoldering cigarette end/butt down a bit of grass by the side walk. Together, the cigarette-reeking threesome sashayed their way into their yoga class.

So what’s up with that, when you can’t forego smoking, in a health-food restaurant, with other patrons around having dinner, with a baby (presumably your offspring??) right next to you, right before your yoga class?

I have known people who claim they want to be healthy and go to yoga and eat organic food and yet, partake in nicotine addiction and polluting their bodies and air around their friends. Are they not shooting themselves in their feet. And some would go for expensive detox retreats, only to booze themselves away a weekend later.

Surely, there must be a bit of hypocrisy and self-deception, but really, who cares? And don’t get me wrong. I am not saying you can’t indulge in your cigarettes and then go to yoga for that bit of mind-muscle relaxation and stretching and all that “oooommmm shant shanti” and namaste. Probably heaps of people do, I can imagine. I know of yoga teachers who smoke half a pack right before they teach yoga and then some more after that.

Yeah. Go on smoking, do your yoga and eat organic food and do your ‘healthy’ living.

But really, I just don’t want to hear you tell me you wanna be healthy.

lungs….

yucks

The tobacco paradox in scuba diving
By Tatanka Katsuo

Smoking and scuba diving is a contentious topic and I believe my mentioning it would risk alienating fellow diving professionals (who smoke). Many of my dear friends and mentors are smokers. I adore them. But I must heed what Martin Luther King said about ‘our lives beginning to end if we keep silent about the things that matter.”

So does it matter? Is it not a lifestyle choice (or health choice)? Thousands of people smoke and dive and many of them are scuba instructors.

Dive Accident Network, the non-profit organization which manages dive accidents in particularly decompression illnesses (DCI) for the public, reported that those who smoke develop more severe symptoms of decompression illness (DCI) if they should develop DCI. DAN didn’t quite say that smoking predisposes you to DCI, but that if you were to develop DCI, you will suffer more severe forms of DCI if you are a smoker.

There are many other adverse effects of smoking especially pertaining to scuba activities. Just google ‘smoking and scuba diving’, and you have all the explanations of why you shouldn’t smoke and dive! I won’t scare you with the details here……

SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. That is the wonder of the invention of SCUBA – to be able to breathe in the aquatic realm. I always think that the essence of SCUBA is —air, breathe, lungs. You want clean, dry filtered air in your tank going to your regulator into your lungs. It makes sense you want to have glistening, pink, clean, moist and delicate alveoli — the thin air sacs in your lungs where gaseous exchange occurs in optimal condition with clean, dry filtered compressed air. You want optimal equipment and then, you want optimal lung function. Sounds profound?Smoking damages the surfactant-lined alveoli with soot and hundreds of other bad stuff from the cigarettes. So why bother with all the equipment, the costs, and the precautions with clean, filtered air in your tank if you were to smoke before you dive?

The paradox is that many of the recreational dive professionals (especially in South East Asia) are pretty heavy smokers, and yet they are really good divers with good air consumption (they really are!). So what do we make of it?

Probably, then, would you not say they might be even better with their air-consumption if they did not smoke? I think so. At least I think they might perform even better in one of those rare instances of inclement diving conditions such as unexpected down currents and rip tides when their students or their guests need their help to bail them out.

Many might then say life is short, enjoy it, as smoking is a personal life choice. I live by that adage too. Yet I also want to live happily while being healthy, and to be able to dive and do all the activities for as long as my body could maintain and I would hazard a guess smoking might adversely affect my ability to achieve that. (Why is it that the most pleasurable pursuits and habits are bad for us? That is another philosophical question!!!!)

Well, now the other thing I was told as a dive professional is to be a good role model for your students. It was drummed into us by our certifying body (mine is PADI ). I don’t know if smoking would label you as a bad role model. May be not. I know that smoking ban or restriction is happening in so many countries, and there is a huge drive to fight the tobacco lobby, it is irrefutable that smoking is just … bad for you…… It is also deemed not cool anymore to smoke, not to mention it also affects the health of those (non-smokers) who are around you. Do we also go with the times or do we fall behind?

I always often see it as a double-standard too. Many instructors, who hail from developed countries, would probably not have the liberties to light up so freely and easily while in their own countries. But then, when we come and work in the developing countries (in the countries within the wonderful coral triangle, where a lot of the people here smokes as it is encouraged so as to drive a large industry – tobacco – going and since cigarettes sales are dropping in America and Europe now we need other markets to sustain the industry…..), we light up as easily and as freely as we drink water (or beer). Do you see my point and dismay?

I hope my fellow smoking dive instructors would take my personal view in good spirit, and would agree to disagree, or see it as something to think about. My final thoughts – to smoke just right before you take your students for their first open water dives, after all that theory and the spew about healthy lifestyle in those chapters in our open water and divemaster manuals, and after passing the Instructor Exams – where there are questions about smoking being bad for scuba diving— would be at worst, outright hazardous, and if not, hypocritical.