4 of my friends who smoked 1-2 packs/day were able to transition to smoking alternatives, 2 went to nicotine pills, 4 Mg from Walmart, stayed on 2-3 of those/day from the morning. The other 2 went to suck-in inhalers. None of them went to visible cloud of smoke emitters.
They all eliminated their prior shortness of breath problem, when biking/jogging.
I never ever smoked, but I find the 4 Mg pills are good for appetite suppression when I occasionally pork-up - mainly in winter these days as Covid closed the gyms and weather makes some days times of no biking.
I used to be a bike courier in Toronto back in the 60's - could be 200+ miles/day - fits and starts type of riding, lots slower on weekends. All manner of bikes, mainly fixies (to non bikers = a fixed sprocket = no freewheel no gear changes, but some had Sturmey-Archer hubs they could change but they often were troublesome) Toronto is flat for most document work, so a fixie was fine and if you went up the Avenue road hill, you could quickly use a lower gear freewheel on the other side -(if you rotated to drive the other axle) Mostly delivering documents and small packages (food was not yet a thing). The midnight courier bike race is amazing, 100-200 bikers on an after 12 PM bike race on city streets - I do not know if it still runs - used to be every few months in the summer time. The police hated it as bikers stopped on no lights and the light traffic after 12 PM was the only saving aspect. There were so many back lanes etc in Toronto where the police cars could not go that they only grabbed people if there was a multi bike crash (often happened at the start) Quite the life and society, many are hard riders/drinkers/smokers/druggies, but the last 3 tend to get weeded out. Most leave in their 20's, got real jobs, I went to college = engineering, and it was a summer job after that - all cash based. One guy, Greg, was a real iron man - went to Australia with GF when he was 55 years old about 10 years ago and we lost contact, but he rode hard until he left.
I am 82 now, still bike a lot - mainly in warmer times. my 200 mile days are gone - my knees are worn out and limit my extreme behaviour. I meandered - sorry, but it was a true reminiscence.
thanks for sharing, I can relate a bit. I was a bike courier in San Francisco off and on for a few summers and it was a very fun/hard job. It was mostly legal docs going back and forth between the courthouses and the financial district. This was several years back. Anyways, I aspire to be riding my bike when I'm 82!
Much the same doc pattern here - legal and architectural/engineering drawings and small stuff - could even be drugs - I never looked?. Back in the day you carried pagers and they had a lookup book with a number to get a package at #86 - you look it up = go get -take there, give invoice copy - paid that stuff monthly. Some were get #58, $22 - go to 58 get package and prepaid $22 - take there. We speculated some of these were drugs, but we just carried and asked no questions -esp if a house/apt at each end
I aspire to be riding at 90...if I make it...
It never occurred to me to use nicotine pills as an appetite suppressant, though I don't doubt at all that it works. I wonder what other side effects it might have, aside from being potentially habit forming. Does it increase blood pressure? That's the main thing that keeps me from ever indulging in tobacco use.
Yes. [1][2] Most studies are on electronic cigarettes and gum but they show the effects are dose/absorption dependent with pure nicotine, so pills are extremely unlikely to behave differently.
Well, it does raise BP, and I am on BP medication and I only use them sparingly and I chart my BP and am fairly fit. They also have 2 mg, so get a Walmart BP tester -$40 or so. They have a wrist one, which I tried and found it a battery eater as it powers a small air pump that is the main power drain = eats a set a week and the NiMh have too low a voltage as well as need recharging after 2-3 days.
I personally cannot stand eating food if I'm about to engage in physical exercise, unless I'm legitimately seriously hungry. So if I have a random midday idea-of-food, I picture myself about to sprint to the nearest park, or about to swim a few km. Then I check my stomach again - how hungry is it now? I generally don't want anything at that point, but sometimes it does (begrudgingly) need fuel for the imagined activity - only then do I eat.
Mix up a cup of fiber supplement (I use BeneFiber) and drink it 10 min before you plan to eat. You will eat less and feel fuller for longer (eating slowly increases the effect). If you're already choosing healthy foods, portion control is the last barrier to conquering waistlines.
Many people don't get enough fiber in their diet anyway. Just be sure to start drinking more water to overcome the, err, digestive difficulties of higher fiber consumption.
First one is correct, you can even have a fixed / freewheel combo with one on each side. Gears have to be close in size to allow chain slack to be taken up by the axle slots.
Second one would only work on a few bicycles as generally the front hub is narrower tan the rear.
Yup (to the first). Fixie riders can achieve two 'gears' by mounting a sprocket on both sides of the rear wheel and flipping the wheel round if needed. More, as always, from Sheldon Brown: https://www.sheldonbrown.com/fixed-conversion.html#flip-flop
In my case (scroll back 35 years), I would ride a fixed gear around the city, but change to the single-speed freewheel for Toronto's legendary "Doughnut Ride" that left Laird & Eglinton every weekend rain or shine, snow, sleet, or hail.
In very olden times, riders would dismount and flip their wheels around in the middle of a Grand Tour before climbing the big mountain. But in contemporary riding, flip-flop hubs are just a convenience of sorts that make it easy to decide what gear you want to use for each ride, I have never flipped the wheel in the middle of a ride.
p.s. I still have one bike with a flip-flop hub: It's a 24" trials bike, and while I run an 18t freewheel on the cranks, the flip-flop lets me choose between a 15t for pure trials work or a 12t for goofing around and having a tall enough gear to ride places, like on my local double black-diamond MTB trails.
I have ridden as a courier in Toronto. For me, it was the 80s, and IIRC, I rode for Sunwheel Couriers, who had an old-school (even by the standards of the 80s) touring/randonneur culture. I was riding a bike very similar to what you describe: Flip-flop hub from a BMX bike with a fixed gear on one side and a freewheel on the other. Frame was an old CCM that weighed a ton.
What can I say, I idolized Nelson Vails!
The owners admonished me to get a bike with gears before I destroyed my knees. I did not listen, and perhaps that—or twenty years of Ultimate, or twenty-five years of rock climbing—did them in for me.
When I was riding most of the couriers I met were chain-smokers, often cruising the streets with a cigarette hanging from their mouths. Very insular counter-culture, very opinionated about bikes. And in my limited experience, very little overlap with the rest of cycling culture.
> The midnight courier bike race is amazing, 100-200 bikers on an after 12 PM bike race on city streets - I do not know if it still runs - used to be every few months in the summer time.
For the broader public, Bike R a v e and Bike P a r t y are the Toronto events that usually happen over summer. Usually starts a bit earlier (9PM?) with various stops in parks and blocking of intersections to keep the group together. obviously there’s zero chance of getting a permit. Fun times!
There’s also some alley cat events that are races.
Yes obviosly, as any smoker that was into vaping could and did tell you. I had the chance to follow the whole development of vaping from a niche scene to an industry and it really has been eye opening. How news and studies were deployed offensively to spread FUD and then regulated just enough that all the value created by innovators and communities could be captured by the big tobacco companies.
Both the incumbent tobacco companies and the state have a huge financial interest in ensuring that a) competition stays out or b) they get the right sized cut from any competitor.
The states scrambled to delay and regulate ecigs just enough to figure out how to tax it because they were afraid of losing revenue from cigarette taxes. They were not just haplessly corrupt but active in that effort.
> states scrambled to delay and regulate ecigs just enough to figure out how to tax it because they were afraid of losing revenue from cigarette taxes
I hear permutations of this theory mentioned a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it. The political incentives just aren't there on an individual level. It would require politicians on both sides of the aisle to be actively interested in budgetary policy. The reality is that there is a strong survival bias among politicians to be almost obsessively focused on party fund-raising and perpetual campaigning. It has become exceedingly rare for politicians to be bothered working on bi-partisan legislation that isn't culture war bullshit.
Because of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1996, states get money based on the smoking rate (units sold). When the smoking rate goes down, they get less money. Like it or not, states /pols are incentivized to keep smokers around.
Well the problem is it might originally have been about giving a better alternative for cigarette smokers, a habit that has been on a massively downward trajectory in the US, it quickly started gaining hard core usage amongst the youth who weren’t smoking. Flavors aimed at kids like bubblegum doesn’t help.
It’s not so black and white, and it’s definitely not niche anymore.
the ones about vaping, when tobacco money paid for the studies it was weird how they always found a lot of danger that people then had to be protected from ...
but when you would look at the data you would see they were using it in a way that noone actually used it (like using bad coils and completely overheating them) etc. Really a pure scam but because it's done in the form of 'science' its supposed to be more credible than people's experiences ...
The tobacco industry is making lots of money off of these and can sell them in flavors that were banned in cigarettes a long time ago (opening up the market to kids again).
No I can't it was some years ago, in the time when they didn't capture the market yet. You can easliy find them online, just go through related subreddits from around 2016, and watch for studies people are complaining about.
edit:
I have just written my comments in good faith. I don't know what distorted view of yourself you have, to expect people will prove something to you.
4 years ago I quit smoking. While the first week was hell because of the nikotin withdrawal. Getting rid of the habit itself took longer. Waiting outiside, after a meal etc. it is all habit.
What I did was buying a vape with nikotin free filling just to have something if my.mind craves the habit. This went on for 3 months reducing the amount I vaped linearly. By month 4 I stopped touching the vape and the only times I had a craving was while waiting for the bus with tons of smokers around. FYI location Berlin Germany.
But even this craving in such an environment stopped after a few more months.
I started with nicotine patches and after 2 weeks switched over to Wellbutrin (prescribed by psychiatrist). On Wellbutrin I had couple rough days but nothing too bad, I mostly used music for distracting myself from this hole that i felt. Now i'm 124 days clean and feel so happy to be free from this bullshit
I've quit nicotine more than once, but last time I quit with patches too. I switched from cigarettes to e-cig in 2018 and by late 2020 I was consuming way more nicotine than I did before - a JUUL pod or more per day.
I never smoked indoors so when I started e-cigs the habit only got worse and instead of a habit that required a break every hour or two to go outside and have a cigarette, I was just vaping all day throughout any activity.
I finally quit with patches ~10 months ago, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't still have cravings.
Well, i got into 30 cigs a day zone and started to realize this is not gonna end well. I had to draw a line in the sand and tell the damn cravings to fuck off and stick to my guns. Freedom is worth much more than some stinky stick that'll give you cancer.
The breaking point was when I decided to see an addiction specialist instead of trying to wage the war on my own
Nicotine in particular is a bitch to quit - I don't understand how a substance that addictive can be legal, especially considering how violent a withdrawl can feel. Breaking off a pot addiction or a heavy drinking stint seems like a cinch by comparison.
My advice is to buy some flavored toothpicks. I bought some minty ones from Amazon and they do a great job of satisfying any oral fixation you've got, and placating the habit of wanting to do something with your hands when you've got a free moment. It admittedly doesn't make quitting cold-turkey any more fun, but it certainly helps to trick your brain for a while.
>I don't understand how a substance that addictive can be legal, especially considering how violent a withdrawl can feel.
Because it was grandfathered in. If you ban it, you fuck up a ton of people hooked on it. I can't imagine what the assault / homicide / suicide rate would spike to for the next decade or two.
Some countries have proposed banning it from a threshold. I.e. ban it for people born after year X (which at time of introduction is e.g. 14 year olds)
The first time I quit smoking, I used an e-cig to help quit, and it was great.
But eventually I started smoking again, and so I tried to use an e-cig like the previous time. But circumstances were different, e-cigs were different (nicotine salts), and now I consume 2x the nicotine than I did from a pack of smokes.
It's too good. It's convenient, always on you, always ready to go. No unpleasant taste or smell. No need to go outside in the winter. And cheaper, despite the increased intake noted above.
There's a lot more we need to know, and for now I still believe that vaping is not as bad as cigarettes, but I'm sorry to see we once again hooked a generation on an addictive harmful substance.
> Are you assuming that the comment you are replying to is in regard to vaping indoors in public spaces?
We are because I cannot count the amount of times I've seen ignorant vape clouds billowing away from someone or smelling a fruity floral vape aroma in places where its not allowed. All vapes have done is make it easier for people to smoke where they shouldn't.
I'm not sure anyone is able to conclude one way or the other. I'd like to make the choice about what my lungs consume and not have some person decide because they are ignorant.
I tried vaping Juul aggressively for a few weeks to try to get addicted. I failed miserably. It just doesn't feel good enough. Zero desire to ever vape again. Very light effects, or more nauseous than anything if you have enough. It is somewhat baffling to me that anyone would find it addictive. I'm not willing to try actual cigarettes for health reasons.
Caffeine is very addictive for me though, and it gives physical withdrawals.
Ya it affects different people differently. I got hooked on nicotine when I was 12 and managed to quit cold turkey for 3 months twice and still started back up when life got stressful. I tried gum, Wellbutrin, cigars, regular vapes, chewing tobacco and nothing lasted. I never thought I would be able to quit, but Juul got me off of cigarettes, but I'm still hooked on nicotine. I drink coffee regularly but if I miss a day, it's not a big deal other than being groggy for the first hour.
On the other hand, some of my friends in college picked up smoking, then quit once they started working and they said it was pretty easy.
as a former pack/day smoker…i can’t not say this, and hope that perhaps it’ll benefit some other reader:
> I tried vaping Juul aggressively for a few weeks to try to get addicted
This is fucking moronic.
> Very light effects, or more nauseous than anything if you have enough
the nausea is most likely from nicotine poisoning. because going from no nicotine tolerance to aggressive vaping is a really bad idea.
> It is somewhat baffling to me that anyone would find it addictive
Most people start gradually, not in an aggressive attempt to form a dependence. There’s a reason why “sit down and smoke the whole pack” is often an effective punishment for teens caught smoking.
Please don't try again, I'm not trying to be condescending. If not for yourself, for the people you love. Nicotine addiction is particularly insidious.
Lots of people gave me this advice the few times I was addicted, I ignored them all and simply thought they were talking down to me ("of course, I know it's bad for you", "I can quit whenever I want") so I understand if you interpret it that way. Once you've seen yourself or a loved one go through it and survive (or worse) you have a different reaction, a bit like seeing someone standing on the tracks while a train is approaching. Wishing you good health.
It's kind of shocking to me the number of folks I've seen become hardcore vapers who either never smoked or had quit smoking for years (think decade+). At some point do we get to push the societal cost onto the companies selling these products? We had basically killed smoking for an entire generation of humans (at least in the US) once we finally banned smoking in bars and pretty much everywhere indoors, and now we're right back where we started with something that will be even more difficult to be rid of because it doesn't have nearly the obvious secondary annoyances (smelling horrible all the time, being forced outside in bad weather, etc).
I quit smoking some 15 years ago (after some 10 years of smoking) for about 3-4 years and then learned of e-cigarettes (pre-July) and, intrigued, got one, then, cautious of relapsing filled the cartridges with pure, unscented glycerin. In 2 weeks I was back to smoking real cigarettes at the good ole pack-a-day rate.
Took another 5 years to quit again. This time for good.
I have no idea what was the mechanism second time, but I “just quit”. Cold turkey. I have zero interest in even one drag now.
I sometimes would take a friend’s cigarette and hold it in my mouth, pretend-smoking, inhaling and exhaling, making all those sweet smoking lip maneuvers, as if I am making rings or pushing smoke through my nostrils. No desire to light it at all
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 59.8 ms ] threadYes. [1][2] Most studies are on electronic cigarettes and gum but they show the effects are dose/absorption dependent with pure nicotine, so pills are extremely unlikely to behave differently.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40138-020-00219-0
[2] https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1038/clpt.1...
Many people don't get enough fiber in their diet anyway. Just be sure to start drinking more water to overcome the, err, digestive difficulties of higher fiber consumption.
Wait, what? You had a sprocket on each side of your rear wheel and you flipped the wheel around to change gears?
Or did you exchange front/rear wheel, each having a different sprocket?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_hub
https://cyclistzone.com/what-is-a-flip-flop-hub/
In my case (scroll back 35 years), I would ride a fixed gear around the city, but change to the single-speed freewheel for Toronto's legendary "Doughnut Ride" that left Laird & Eglinton every weekend rain or shine, snow, sleet, or hail.
In very olden times, riders would dismount and flip their wheels around in the middle of a Grand Tour before climbing the big mountain. But in contemporary riding, flip-flop hubs are just a convenience of sorts that make it easy to decide what gear you want to use for each ride, I have never flipped the wheel in the middle of a ride.
p.s. I still have one bike with a flip-flop hub: It's a 24" trials bike, and while I run an 18t freewheel on the cranks, the flip-flop lets me choose between a 15t for pure trials work or a 12t for goofing around and having a tall enough gear to ride places, like on my local double black-diamond MTB trails.
What can I say, I idolized Nelson Vails!
The owners admonished me to get a bike with gears before I destroyed my knees. I did not listen, and perhaps that—or twenty years of Ultimate, or twenty-five years of rock climbing—did them in for me.
When I was riding most of the couriers I met were chain-smokers, often cruising the streets with a cigarette hanging from their mouths. Very insular counter-culture, very opinionated about bikes. And in my limited experience, very little overlap with the rest of cycling culture.
For the broader public, Bike R a v e and Bike P a r t y are the Toronto events that usually happen over summer. Usually starts a bit earlier (9PM?) with various stops in parks and blocking of intersections to keep the group together. obviously there’s zero chance of getting a permit. Fun times!
There’s also some alley cat events that are races.
I'm not sure if it's due to lawmaker/parent ignorance, or an actual plan by larger tobacco companies.
Probably a mix of both.
The states scrambled to delay and regulate ecigs just enough to figure out how to tax it because they were afraid of losing revenue from cigarette taxes. They were not just haplessly corrupt but active in that effort.
I hear permutations of this theory mentioned a lot, but I'm not sure I buy it. The political incentives just aren't there on an individual level. It would require politicians on both sides of the aisle to be actively interested in budgetary policy. The reality is that there is a strong survival bias among politicians to be almost obsessively focused on party fund-raising and perpetual campaigning. It has become exceedingly rare for politicians to be bothered working on bi-partisan legislation that isn't culture war bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
>It would require politicians on both sides of the aisle to be actively interested in budgetary policy.
They are much more so at the state level because states can't print money.
It’s not so black and white, and it’s definitely not niche anymore.
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2020-smoking...
E-cigarette aerosols vary greatly, as well as the temperatures that various devices heat them to.
> as any smoker that was into vaping could and did tell you
Anecdotal evidence may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.
The tobacco industry is making lots of money off of these and can sell them in flavors that were banned in cigarettes a long time ago (opening up the market to kids again).
https://tobaccotactics.org/wiki/e-cigarettes/
edit: I have just written my comments in good faith. I don't know what distorted view of yourself you have, to expect people will prove something to you.
> in the time when they didn't capture the market yet
Big Tobacco entered the market around 2012-2013.
But even this craving in such an environment stopped after a few more months.
I never smoked indoors so when I started e-cigs the habit only got worse and instead of a habit that required a break every hour or two to go outside and have a cigarette, I was just vaping all day throughout any activity.
I finally quit with patches ~10 months ago, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't still have cravings.
The breaking point was when I decided to see an addiction specialist instead of trying to wage the war on my own
My advice is to buy some flavored toothpicks. I bought some minty ones from Amazon and they do a great job of satisfying any oral fixation you've got, and placating the habit of wanting to do something with your hands when you've got a free moment. It admittedly doesn't make quitting cold-turkey any more fun, but it certainly helps to trick your brain for a while.
Because it was grandfathered in. If you ban it, you fuck up a ton of people hooked on it. I can't imagine what the assault / homicide / suicide rate would spike to for the next decade or two.
But eventually I started smoking again, and so I tried to use an e-cig like the previous time. But circumstances were different, e-cigs were different (nicotine salts), and now I consume 2x the nicotine than I did from a pack of smokes.
It's too good. It's convenient, always on you, always ready to go. No unpleasant taste or smell. No need to go outside in the winter. And cheaper, despite the increased intake noted above.
There's a lot more we need to know, and for now I still believe that vaping is not as bad as cigarettes, but I'm sorry to see we once again hooked a generation on an addictive harmful substance.
Smokers/vapers, stop giving the rest of society more reasons to dislike your habits.
And also, why conflate smoking with vaping? They are completely different in terms of immediate and lingering odor, as well as second hand effects.
We are because I cannot count the amount of times I've seen ignorant vape clouds billowing away from someone or smelling a fruity floral vape aroma in places where its not allowed. All vapes have done is make it easier for people to smoke where they shouldn't.
Caffeine is very addictive for me though, and it gives physical withdrawals.
On the other hand, some of my friends in college picked up smoking, then quit once they started working and they said it was pretty easy.
> I tried vaping Juul aggressively for a few weeks to try to get addicted
This is fucking moronic.
> Very light effects, or more nauseous than anything if you have enough
the nausea is most likely from nicotine poisoning. because going from no nicotine tolerance to aggressive vaping is a really bad idea.
> It is somewhat baffling to me that anyone would find it addictive
Most people start gradually, not in an aggressive attempt to form a dependence. There’s a reason why “sit down and smoke the whole pack” is often an effective punishment for teens caught smoking.
Why?
> more nauseous than anything if you have enough
Enough to poison yourself.
I’m just asking, not really familiar with vaping stuff.
Lots of people gave me this advice the few times I was addicted, I ignored them all and simply thought they were talking down to me ("of course, I know it's bad for you", "I can quit whenever I want") so I understand if you interpret it that way. Once you've seen yourself or a loved one go through it and survive (or worse) you have a different reaction, a bit like seeing someone standing on the tracks while a train is approaching. Wishing you good health.
Took another 5 years to quit again. This time for good.
I have no idea what was the mechanism second time, but I “just quit”. Cold turkey. I have zero interest in even one drag now.
I sometimes would take a friend’s cigarette and hold it in my mouth, pretend-smoking, inhaling and exhaling, making all those sweet smoking lip maneuvers, as if I am making rings or pushing smoke through my nostrils. No desire to light it at all