It’s hard to believe that six years ago I gave up drinking soda entirely, and yet over the last nine or ten months – basically since the twins were born – I’ve let that caffeinated addiction slowly creep back into my life again.
I blame a combination of stress and a lack of willpower.
Soda tastes good. It’s refreshing, and it puts a little spring in your step … to the point where you don’t even realize that you’re drinking a few hundred extra calories a day, which adds up over the course of almost a year.
I had originally started only grabbing the occasional soda when someplace had a Coke Freestyle machine because I think that Cherry Coke made with actual syrup tastes better. In fact, I was actually making them myself at home for a while until Publix stopped carrying the syrup that I liked and I couldn’t find anything to really match the flavor.
So that was bad enough – I wasn’t even drinking Coke Zero or anything, but regular Coke coupled with sugary syrup on top of that!
It was probably only a matter of time before I started settling for traditional fountain drinks and cans and bottles from the gas station, too. Most recently, I found myself going through a 2-liter bottle in a couple of days, and I knew that I really needed to cut back, but life was stressful and instead I told myself that I’d change when things calmed down a little…
Of course, it didn’t work like that!
Instead, the other day I started having mild chest pains. I actually think it was just a pulled muscle from running around at Disney World the day before, but it was enough to spook me into actual change because I know that my weight is getting out of control and all of those extra calories – as soothing as they are – weren’t helping the bigger picture.
The first couple of nights, I found myself with mild headaches – nothing terrible like the ones I got from caffeine years ago – so I took a Tylenol here and there and pushed forward, each day telling myself that it was my Nth day without a soda, so no sense in breaking the streak now!
Today it’s been a full week without one, and the aches are starting to go away, not to mention the cravings … at least to the point where I can turn soda down in favor of water again instead, which wasn’t exactly happening in the past because it had become the go to whenever I ate Chinese, and then pizza, and then just about anything that I was eating. 🙁
I know that there are still a lot of other changes that I need to make to benefit my health. I don’t like running out of breath carrying my sons around or having so many aches after a single day at a theme park. But this was an important first step and reducing my calorie intake by a few hundred each day should be a good start towards some of the more intensive efforts that eventually need to take place.
Going forward I think I’ll still let myself have the occasional drink as a mixer with alcohol because I tend to limit myself to just one or two and those are infrequent at best anyways, but aside from maybe the great soda fountain over at the Beach Club at Disney that not only makes Cherry Coke with the syrup but also includes real cherries in it, too, I think my soda days need to be over.
Again.