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Quitting Soda/caffeine?
Dr. Chaos
Post nuclear nuisanceRegistered User regular
Post nuclear nuisanceRegistered User regular
I've recently cut sugary snacks out of my diet and its going well so far despite the occasional temptation but diet soda is probably my number one vice. Started drinking it at an early age and rarely drank an actual glass of water since. It has a grip on me and at age 29 knowing how addictive and unhealthy it can really be, I want to kick it more than anything.
Tried moderation and cutting it down abit and replacing it with flavored water day by day but that just made me want it more, Diet Dr. Pepper started to taste even better. I ended up giving up and going back to it.
Cold turkey is something I've wanted to try but full on caffeine withdrawal after about two decades of sucking it down sounds like an all around bad bad time. As someone who already had issues with depression in the past, losing energy and feeling bummed out by the experience worry me more than the Scanners head splitting headache I suspect I would get from it.
Want to feel better about myself but don't want to drag myself down through that to do it. Feels like kind of a catch-22.
I get anxiety thinking about it but its a goal I desperately want to acheive. Any successes anybody has had here with this that could relate their story/how they did it?
Tried moderation and cutting it down abit and replacing it with flavored water day by day but that just made me want it more, Diet Dr. Pepper started to taste even better. I ended up giving up and going back to it.
Cold turkey is something I've wanted to try but full on caffeine withdrawal after about two decades of sucking it down sounds like an all around bad bad time. As someone who already had issues with depression in the past, losing energy and feeling bummed out by the experience worry me more than the Scanners head splitting headache I suspect I would get from it.
Want to feel better about myself but don't want to drag myself down through that to do it. Feels like kind of a catch-22.
I get anxiety thinking about it but its a goal I desperately want to acheive. Any successes anybody has had here with this that could relate their story/how they did it?
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Once you stop drinking soda for a while - maybe a month? - it's not hard to stay off anymore. And once you've been off for a really long time (6mo to a year), soda begins to taste actually disgusting (like trying to drink syrup).
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
once you've quit , it will be literally painful to drink soda later on also, the sugar/fizz makes like your veins ache, helps keep you off once off.
Also try to find a good (healthy) drink replacement for it. And not just another sugary drink like Gatorade. I'm not much of a fan of flavored water, so milk ended up doing the trick for me. Having an actual water bottle that I took to work with me also helped.
...one of the primary ingredients of most pain relievers is caffeine, so you probably prolonged your withdrawal symptoms. 2-3 days of a light headache and lethargy and you should be okay for the most part.
Edit: I'm not saying don't take pain relief for your caffeine withdrawal, I'm just saying you may have to put up with an amount of discomfort to actually wean yourself off. If you replace 400mg of caffeine a day in soda/coffee energy drinks with 400mg daily in Tylenol, you wont be doing much good. Just be aware of the amount of caffeine in whatever pain relief you seek.
Also, a cup of black coffee should be enough to keep the headache gone and still substantially reduce your intake of sugar/caffeine.
I have numerous health benefits, including lower rates of Type 2 Diabetes, and decreased risk of dementia, parkinson's, and some form of cancer. I am basically calorie free and I still have that great cognitive helper caffeine.
Forget the juvenile popping of a can of fizz. You're 29, it's time to grow up and become sophisticated. Explore your adult palate with different roasts, grinds, and brewing options. French Press? AeroPress? Pour Over? Kopi Luwak?-yes that is the stuff a tree weasel poops out and it is fantastic.
Your friend,
Ethiopian Highland French Roast
If you count on having steady hits of energy from regular intake of a sugar/caffeine cocktail in the form of cola, it will be a bit harder to suddenly replace that. On the other hand, if you have soda here and coffee there, you can deal with the two separately.
The first important thing is to be well-hydrated and to develop habits around being well-hydrated. Water and your replacements for soda should always be on hand. Keeping around a big water bottle is a very good idea (instead of some dinky coffee mug), because when the water is conveniently available it becomes a go-to rather than a drink that you have to go out of your way to get. What's more, when you are well-hydrated, you won't feel the thirst-driven hankering for a drink of soda so often.
Tea is a good way to reduce your caffeine intake, and you have a lot of options for making your tea taste good. Tea is cheap. You can buy a bunch of different ones and discover ones that you like. The sheer variety that exists for tea I find is a good motivator for it simply because it puts into your head the desire to try more different kinds of tea, combinations that you like, variants of ones you like... simply put, tea is FUN. And once you've gotten a few cups of tea in you, you won't feel the need for more liquid. The fun element in tea can make it a lot more interesting than those artificial water-flavouring things (which you either are consciously or unconsciously aware of as a substitute for soda), and being able to engage your mind with it will help make it something you can want on its own merits.
It's perfectly okay to add sugar to your tea. Realize that tea can taste sweet with a lot less sugar than you need for soda, and that a lot of tea tastes really good unsweetened. It's something you get to experiment with, and you can totally find reliable go-to's. Discover that there exists really good, really refreshing iced tea you can make with a variety of different teas, all of which taste different and are delicious.
The caffeine concentration in tea is low enough that you can regularly drink it over the course of the day and not get hard caffeine crashes, which is a useful thing when trying to wean yourself off of dependence on caffeine.
I recommend getting some sort of permanent cup for water, either one of those insulated straw cups, or a water bottle. I prefer the straw cups because it also encourages you to sip, but basically your goal is to keep it full all day and drink that as soon as you feel thirsty, no matter how bad you want something else. Five sips of water at the right time can help reduce the craving for sugar.
Personally, I also stopped drinking caffeinated tea and cut out coffee. One I did it, I realized how bad caffeine interacted with my anxiety especially late at night. Some of my normal anxious patterns are now easier to deal with just because I'm not wired all the time.
Soda is super addictive, but it can feel super silly to take "quitting" it so seriously because binge drinking soda does not have immediately negative effects. I remember when I told my mom I was going to stop drinking pepsi, she gave me really good advice, which was to treat it like I was trying to get sober. I had one last 6 pack of pepsi and instead of throwing it out, she recommend I keep it where it was but vow not to drink it. It was basically a symbol of my will power rather than just trying to eliminate the temptation and letting myself lapse out of convenience. I really easy time to make excuses, for instance, is when you stock it for some house guests or a party. If you never have it in the house and then suddenly there's three left over cans, its much easier to convince yourself its fine to drink those.
It seemed dumb but it did really help remind me that I was in total control of this situation and myself. Soda is crazy available and crazy bad for you, its legit to refuse drinks and tell people you are cutting soda out to keep yourself accountable.
The nice thing about not being a daily caffeine user is you can use it sparingly (carefully!) on days where you really need it. I suffer from depression so if I'm having a day that is extra terrible I'll make some coffee that is about half caffeinated and it is surprisingly effective. I just have to be mindful to not have any for a while.
i wish this were my experience, but dropping caffeine for me leads to seemingly endless headaches. two weeks at least - I've never been able to push that boundary further, anyway. it's awful. i'm pretty sensitive to caffeine (and headaches) in general though
i second the recommendedation to switch to one good black coffee a day. decent light or medium roast beans, especially if freshly ground, make for a beautiful pourover with modest equipment. healthy and delicious.
Take a short vacation or time a 3-day weekend for a few days out after you start, and just deal with it. Once you get through it you'll be fine, but it can be extremely painful.
There are lots of websites out there on what to expect. Our school did a big study a few years back with some interesting results on what helped (the folks who took nothing reported faster recovery than those that took ibproperhine, etc.).
Yeah, I used to hate drinking water, especially with meals, unless I was super thirsty. I would prefer almost anything else. Several years ago I made a few lifestyle changes, including drinking black coffee every day at work and drinking water with lunch. I still would have soda or gatorade or sweet tea with dinner, or sometimes flavored water, until I got used to drinking it at lunch (maybe a couple of weeks). Then I switched to most dinners being water (with the occasional beer, rare lemonade or sweet tea, or very rare soda). Now I pretty much love water and it always tastes good. And I never thought that would be the case. So if you stick with it, you will most likely eventually stop hating it.
As for coffee, I really didn't like it black, but forced myself to drink it. Sometimes I would only finish half a cup. But it started to grow on me. Now I actually enjoy the taste. I heartily recommend an AeroPress. It's super easy (you just need hot water), makes very good coffee (even using packaged store-bought, I don't have the scratch for a decent grinder), and is super easy to clean up. I make it at work every morning and it takes about 10 minutes total from heating up water to drinking it at my desk.
"Black" coffee to me is coffee with nothing else in it. I guess you could stretch it and say coffee without any type of cream or milk, but I've always heard it as just coffee.
Not really. If you order black coffee its never going to have sugar. You may add sugar and you could still consider it black, but it will never be served that way.
Switching to sparkling water/seltzer like poland spring is also a good option, and you could combine the two things as well.
Sometimes being technically correct isn't much use if the common usage of the word is technically incorrect.
The technically correct and common usage of the word I'm sure is no milk, no sugar, no nothing. Having sugar in it and calling it "black" doesn't sound common.
Maybe there's a regional colloquial use of it where that's the case, but my 100% accurate anecdotal evidence is that "with sugar != black".
In related to the OP, something to consider for switching to sezter water over time is that it can contribute considerably to the acidity of your stomach (especially if you drink it in place of water). It can be a trigger for GERD symptoms, and shouldn't be done in excess.
some black teas have a decent amount of caffeine... it's like switching from cigarettes to vaping... but you have some control over the caffeine content by switching tea varieties over time, whereas soda is always the same
i did this two months ago and basically was able to end my soda craving. then it got fucked up again when I went on vacation and didn't have my instruments of tea consumption.. will be going back soon
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
You may like your coffee black w/sugar, but look at it from the server's side.
If black coffee was ordered and I had to fill it, then I'd give it to them plain cause I have no idea whether he/she wants it sweet or the preferred sweetener.
Seek the book Sugar Salt Fat, or notes on it.
I rarely drink soda and now I'm cutting out juice. Start off by reducing your sodas and juices in your refrigerator. You want to get to a point where the only juice you have is Tropicana 50 (and you'll get rid of that later like I'm about to.) When you cut out sugar, ordinary juices, fruits and vegetables start tasting better.
A brilliant doctor got me started using the Under Armor My Fitness Pal website and smartphone application to track what I eat. I didn't even use it right the first week and I still lost weight. The default values based on your goals are good, but a dietician and body fat analysis would help you tweak the macronutrient requirements (your daily protein, carb and fat requirements.)
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If you want to try a cold turkey method, do it over a weekend or extended weekend, just to see how it actually affects you. There's a pretty good chance that it won't really impact you much, but if it does, you're not going to feel like shit at work.
I used to drink an absurd amount of diet energy drinks, of the more potent kind, and probably consumed enough caffeine to kill a fairly large elephant, and cutting down significantly felt pretty good, and wasn't really jarring, beyond just the mental addiction of 'well, it's been 60 minutes, I guess I should crack open another one!'
I think this is a case of 'just do it'*
*®Shia LaBeouf
Worked for me for a bit too. I loved me some Perrier, drank a bottle a day or every other day... but after about a month, I could no longer drink it. It upsets the hell out of my stomach. Even over a year later, I can't drink more than half a bottle (small) of the stuff without getting an upset stomach, which is a damned shame.
Soda still doesn't bug me at all, but it's so terribly bad for me.
Yeah, pretty much
Like literally I am pretty sure soda machines combine carbonated water with syrup and that's the drink
If you add lime and change the water to club soda, now it's a sugar free Korean lemonade (they normally use Sprite.)
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Coffee was a big help, though that may not work for you since you are also trying to quit caffeine. I bought a bunch of Perrier and La Croix, and any time I got a craving for a soda I would grab one of those. I found that the carbonation and the act of opening a can or bottle helped kind of trick me out of the soda craving.
After a couple of weeks it got way easier, and now it's been like 13 years since I've really had a soda. If I am out somewhere I might get a sprite but that's about it. Now I basically just drink water. If your results are anything like mine, you'll feel way better without soda.
I found that I lost about 10 pounds without changing anything else about my diet or exercise routine when I cut out soda. I'm much more hydrated in general now so my skin looks great and overall I'd say my energy level is much higher even without constant caffeine intake. Also, when I do drink a coffee on the days I really need some help getting going in the morning it has a much stronger effect on me.
My reccomendation is quit soda first, don't worry about the caffeine. Use coffee or tea to get you through the inital soda withdrawal, then after a month or so without soda you can start to wean yourself off of caffeine. You'll find without soda that you just don't drink as much caffeine anyway.
This right here. Find the sugar sources in your life, cut those down and come back to caffeine later.
I still encourage everyone to put My Fitness Pal in their phone so they can track kcal and sugar.
The sparkling water has been a great help compared to some of the more ordinary flavored water I've tried in the past, really gotten into it over the past few days. Don't really find myself hankering for Dr. Pepper quite as much when I have it around.
Never had any green tea before but planning to give it a shot soon.
I find that keeping a bottle of water in the fridge greatly helps when the urge for a snack drink comes around, as does carbonated mineral water and green tea. Tried a can of coke this summer and found it tasted awful, then had another to confirm the first one wasn't a fluke. It was awful too. So the urge for soda is pretty gone by now. And it does get easier over time.