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Quitting the soda.
Descendant X
Skyrim is my god now.Outpost 31Registered User regular
Skyrim is my god now.Outpost 31Registered User regular
I've decided that I need to cut out my pop intake completely. I drink what is probably an average amount (2-3 500mL + 5-9 cans per week) but have been thinking about it for a while and have just come to the conclusion that it would be better if I stopped drinking ti at all. I would like to health benefits of quitting as well, such as weight loss.
The main issues here are a) what the fuck else to drink and 2) what to do with all the headaches I'm going to get from caffeine withdrawal. I drink coffee occasionally (without sugar) so I figure that will be a good caffeine delivery vehicle. But aside form copious amounts of water, can anyone suggest what I can drink when I'm craving a tasty beverage, particularly a fizzy one?
Please keep in mind that I am in Canada, so I probably don't have access to a lot of fancy drinks that you folks have in the States.
The main issues here are a) what the fuck else to drink and 2) what to do with all the headaches I'm going to get from caffeine withdrawal. I drink coffee occasionally (without sugar) so I figure that will be a good caffeine delivery vehicle. But aside form copious amounts of water, can anyone suggest what I can drink when I'm craving a tasty beverage, particularly a fizzy one?
Please keep in mind that I am in Canada, so I probably don't have access to a lot of fancy drinks that you folks have in the States.
Garry: I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time I'd rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!
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other than that, plain water, home made iced tea (i.e. brewed tea, not some mix), coffee (hot or cold), etc. works great.
Basically you need to stop thinking of liquid refreshment as something that's supposed to taste ridiculously sweet. Like the guy above said, juice is not a great alternative.
For the caffeine issue coffee/tea is fine.
Yeah, luckily for me I live in an area where the water tastes fantastic right out of the faucet. If I still lived in Vancouver there's no way I would be trying this, as the water is fucking horrible.
And I'm glad to hear that coffee is a suitable substitute. The last thing I need is to be dealing with caffeine headaches on a long weekend.
On the other hand, perhaps a long weekend is the perfect time to ride out the worst of it...
But I throw in tea bags first. Iced tea = awesome. It doesn't have to be generic 'tea' flavor like liptons. My favorite iced tea is Moroccan mint tea.
Also if you live in the south, say no to sweet tea. It has as much or more sugar than sodas. Which brings me to another thing - if you do start drinking lots of coffee, try to get used to drinking it black.
I can do coffee with milk, but there's no way that black coffee will ever work for me. Coffee with sugar is gross though.
This has always worked for me, but then, drinking coffee (that's my caffeinated beverage of choice) has always been tied to waking me up. So I feel the lack of caffeine much more strongly when I'm tired - that's why when I want to quit, I make sure it's over a weekend when I have plenty of time to sleep and rest and stuff.
The cutting back slowly over the preceding days is important though - it will make that cold turkey moment much much easier.
If you're ok with drinking coffee though, then that is probably the easiest way to go.
Personally, I drink coffee. But I also have caffeine pills (that I buy from a nutrition store along with my protein powder and omega 3 pills) so that if I don't have time to make coffee, or am too lazy, I just pop one. Each pill contains 200mg, which is the equivalent of about 2.5 cups of coffee.
That's an epidemiological study. Doesn't prove anything and definitely is not something you should base any decision on.
but then again there's no reason to avoid it. so yeah, drink coffee if you like it.
You'll be surprised how much you don't miss it once you get rolling and your body adapts.
Right, that's why I used the word "suggesting". It's not definitive, but there is at least a strong correlation there.
I also like to keep around fruit puree, Either by buying naked (expensive) or just making smoothies (yum)
/preemptive Take a real look at those "Aspartame causes cancer / X ailment" studies and realize they are all bunk or require dosages so high you would die of water poisoning first.
Black Desert: Family Name: Foolery. Characters: Tome & Beerserk.
(Retired) GW2 Characters (Fort Aspenwood): Roy Gee Biv
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
I used to think this, but I got over it with practice. Love my black coffee now (unless it's from Tim's). Try mixing a bit of salt in with the grounds when you brew it, it makes it less bitter.
EDIT: It depends on the soda, but I think they generally have a fair bit less caffeine in them than coffee does. You might not want to drink a full cup of coffee whenever you would've drunk soda.
As a side note I lost about five pounds over that period, probably from the soda intake a lone.
My wife and I (both hard-core WoW'ers) would easily polish off a 2L per night of WoW, more when she was raiding. She still pounds back the pop, but I've put myself on what I call the "one a day" challenge.
Basically as the above says I allow myself one soda a day. Right now as I am starting to decrease my consumption I don't limit it to a can, it could be a bottle, a big gulp or a glass, but I cut myself off at one.
If you want to change, then I will say that willpower is a big part of it. Remind yourself when your pouring that second (first?) glass hat you don't want this, it's not healthy for you.
It worked for me to quit smoking and so far it's done well for me with pop.
Are the diet/Zero versions better or not as bad?
Cause I drink those if I want soda. Other than that it's water all the way for me. Having nothing except for a pitcher of water in my fridge turned it from something I tried to do into something I just do.
Coffee with milk is great but caffeine addiction is not a good thing to have though. I would say you tackle one addiction at a time.
Soda is much much more worse for you than caffeine addiction though, so get rid of that first
Also, it hasn't been mentioned in this thread, but non-fat milk is a totally awesome drink in every sense. Abuse it.
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I'd put them in the "not as bad" category.
While the artificial sweeteners are safe from a health standpoint, there is some evidence that they cause moderate insulin spikes in some individuals when consumed. This means that those individuals will store more of what they eat as fat, especially if they are consuming those drinks with meals.
That being said, I wouldn't worry about it so much. They are definitely leaps and bounds better than regular soda in terms of health, and are a perfect substitute when you're trying to quit regular soda. But I firmly believe that the final goal should be water/tea/coffee with no sweeteners.
regular milk is good too.
Milk is not what's making you unhealthy
Make something easily available and healthy, like water, and make everything else much more difficult to obtain and you're good. Just walk past the soda aisle. I used to not drink water at all and now I do it nearly exclusively. I just got used to it.
Dr.Pepper was my favorite until I too quit. I started with Sweetened tea, which is just as bad as far as sugar and calories, but got me away from the fizzy carbonation, which was one of the main things that I was craving. I am actually in the process of switching from sweetened, to un-sweetened tea which was easier for me than switching straight to un-sweetened tea.
I have also started eating a little better, and smaller portions, and increased my exercise just a tiny bit and I have lost 10lb's in 2 months. I expect to lose more as I move fully to unsweetened tea, and exercise goes up more.
Good luck getting off the Pepper, I think it's the crack cocaine of the Soda world. It is the only thing that I have ever physically craved.
Unsubstantied at best.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/82/5/1011
Basically, the concentration of aspartame in soda is so low that you'll never suffer any effect from it. The anti-diet soda rhetoric is incredibly harmful. I've never even seen a single peer reviewed paper that shows any ill effect of aspartame anywhere close to realistic levels.
It's not like coffee or tea are magical pure substances either; their just whatever happen to be in beans and leaves. Anyone fretting about diet soda should be more concerned with that; at least everything in diet soda is designed to be in there.
Sorry I take a lot of heat for drinking a lot of Coke Zero. I'm sick of people chastising it for its "chemicals" only to turn around and see them pouring sugar and milk into a coffee or downing a regular soda. Like those 200 extra calories per serving + whatever else is in there are "better".
Black Desert: Family Name: Foolery. Characters: Tome & Beerserk.
(Retired) GW2 Characters (Fort Aspenwood): Roy Gee Biv
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
I found this study with a quick Google Scholar search.
Like I said, the response is different from person to person, which may be why your five-person study did not catch it.
I love it. It's basically just iced tea, but unlike most other bottled iced teas, which have way, way too much sugar for my taste, these ones are just barely sweetened. I bought one on a whim a few years ago, and since then I've barely even thought of drinking soda.
But others have up to half as much as other brands, and should be avoided.
Yes, but why settle for half when you can eliminate it completely, or at least substitute artificial sweeteners for it? The stuff (sugar) is absolutely terrible for your health, especially when consumed in liquids.
Un-sweet ice tea - sometimes I even add frozen fruit, peaches and raspberries rock.
Water with yogurt & frozen fruit (A turkish friend of mine turned me on to this. You can even use mint and other herbs and seltzer water as well. Its tasty.)
Water with lemon or lime
I very rarely touch juice, though I've found a frozen orange or frozen fruit can be a nice quencher too on a hot day. I do on an absolute rare occasion have a soda. However when I do I only drink the bottled mexican coke. Its made with purified water and sugar rather then HCFS. The bottles are also much smaller then an American bottle.
But frozen fruit in water, tea and seltzer rocks.
Your study is an older study with an unknown number of participants with a contaminated drink (chocolate vs. pure solutions) and unknown testing procedure (cause I'm not buying that PDF :P).
But I suppose I won't rule out that some people may have an incredibly mild (gasp, the same as sugar!) response to aspartame. But that shouldn't bring down condemnation on aspartame as a whole, and certainly shouldn't be used to justify drinking regular soda or sweetened tea/coffee instead.
For reference, checking about 12 other links from Google scholar, every other study that was actually relevant came to the same conclusion as the first one I found as an example. Which is what I expected since I've done this before.
Black Desert: Family Name: Foolery. Characters: Tome & Beerserk.
(Retired) GW2 Characters (Fort Aspenwood): Roy Gee Biv
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
This stuff is really, really terrible for you body, especially in the quanitites that we consume - it's in all kinds of stuff. When looking at an ingredient, if HCFS is in the first five ingredients, don't consume it. Natural sugar is far better for you that this stuff.
You can also sweeten things with raw honey.
Yeah HCFS is pretty nasty. I've pretty much cut it out of my diet. But I really just appreciate the soda so much more when its my like quarterly/bi-annual treat and its tasty real sugar Mexican coke goodness.
Agave nectar is also nice too as a sweetener. I love honey on biscuits myself. But yeah weaning yourself off the sweet stuff in general is a good idea. I appreciate tea so much more without sweetener added, you can taste the difference in tea types.
I'm actually working on decreasing salt now, which is actually a challenge I'm finding.
Those crystal light packages are what I do. Zero calories/zero sugar, so when I just can't stand plain water, that cuts my craving for something sweet to drink.
Hey we agree. The anti-salt crowd are another pet peeve of mine.
Black Desert: Family Name: Foolery. Characters: Tome & Beerserk.
(Retired) GW2 Characters (Fort Aspenwood): Roy Gee Biv
(Retired) Let's Play: Lone Wolf
I did say -decrease- salt, not drop salt. But there are plenty of studies showing potential negatives of TOO MUCH salt.
Most stuff in excess is bad.