10 steps to getting healthy and losing weight. #3, cutting out the sodas.

One of my readers asked for a list of 10 steps to good health. I provided it, but now I want to break each of these items down and give you more useful details. So here’s step 3, cutting out the sodas.

We’ve already talked about sodas a number of times on 60 in 3, but now I’d like to share with you my personal experience with them.  At the height of my health crisis, I was consuming about 5 to 7 cans of soda a day.  It sounds high when I think of it in cans, but the reality was different.  At a restaurant, I would get a soda and then couple of free refills.  With the average size of a restaurant soda glass, that meant about 3 or 4 cans right there.  At work I would drink 2 to 3 cans, typically of ice tea, along with my lunch and just as drinks through the day.

Let’s do some quick math there.  A can of Lipton Brisk ice tea has 120 calories in it.  A can of coke has 140 calories in it.  So I was easily consuming around 800 calories a day from sodas.  These calories had no nutritional value and they didn’t contribute at all towards satisfying hunger.  That’s not even counting the times in the evening when I would go to 7-11 and buy one of those gigantic cups full of coke.  Those cups might hold upwards of 1000 calories, all of it from processed sugars.

Saying goodbye to coke

While I recognized that I was consuming way too many calories through sodas, doing something about it proved to be harder.  Simply put, sodas, especially caffeinated ones, are addictive.  Your body gets used to the sugar and caffeine rushes and it craves them.  Once you’re addicted, it’s hard to put them down.  Try it yourself if you think all this talk about addiction doesn’t apply to you.  Try not drinking any caffeine at all for three days and see how you feel.

So I decided to split the problem and deal with it gradually, as I did with other bad habits.  I switched my consumption of soda to 50% diet soda and 50% fruit juices.  I figured this way, instead of getting both sugar and caffeine with every drink, I would only get sugar or caffeine.   The amount of calories I was consuming dropped because half my soda consumption went to diet coke, and the amount of caffeine I consumed dropped because half my soda consumption went to fruit juices.  Then, I slowly started reducing each half by replacing it with plain old water.

Hard lesson learned

In the end, I learned that addiction to caffeine is a fact and that I was not immune to it.  I managed to completely remove the fruit juices and drink water instead, but I was still drinking 3 to 4 cans of diet coke a day.  Still, I considered this a victory since at least my calorie consumption from liquids went to zero.  Eventually, I managed to quit the caffeine habit too, but that’s a post for another day.

It took me slightly over a year to go from 6 to 7 cans of regular soda to 3 to 4 cans of diet coke a day.  These days, almost four years later, I drink 1 to 2 diet, caffeine free cokes a day and I’m trying to get rid of that too.  So yes, the soda habit can be a difficult one to break.  Just try to eliminate it gradually and steadily from your day to day routine.  Find healthier substitutes if you must and then slowly eliminate those as well until you’re left with the best drink of all, water.