Hi everyone! Frequent lurker, first time poster, and I want to share my story about how I overcame my soda habit.
When I was in high school, I drank a ridiculous amount of Mountain Dew. Easily 2-3 20oz bottles a day. I didn't put on weight then so I didn't think about it much but once my metabolism slowed, my soda addiction led to me gaining 80 lbs over the latter half of my 20s.
I had tried to quit soda multiple times before, but I always got intense mood swings, my energy crashed, and I started getting horrendous headaches (those caffeine headaches are absolutely brutal), so I'd go right back to my habit after being good for a few days.
After getting severely depressed over my repeated failures to lose weight, I finally had an epiphany and figured out something that worked for me. I realized that I was addicted to both the sugar and the caffeine in my sodas. I needed to quit one before the other or I wasn't going to be able to do it, and since it was the sugar that led to me getting so heavy, so I needed to focus on quitting the sugar in my drinks. It seems so obvious but back then, the denial was strong. I was an emotional eater/soda drinker, and it meant making a big change, which is scary no matter what, but I knew my health would only continue to suffer if I didn't at least try.
I started with only drinking diet sodas. Not great, but better than the full sugar ones. Did that for a couple weeks and then replaced my "morning" soda (I used to drink soda first thing in the morning) with black coffee. That was the hardest transition because all I wanted to do was put a ton of cream and sugar in it, but I stuck with it. It took a couple weeks to be consistent with it, but eventually, I didn't even miss the soda in the morning: I just wanted my black coffee.
The next step after that was going one day a week without sodas. I found out the best substitute for me were those cans of La Croix carbonated water. Still slightly sweet, fizzy, but it was water, not soda. One day a week of no sodas turned to two days a week, three, etc. The 12-packs of Coke Zero Vanilla that used to last me three days started taking weeks to work through.
As of today, it's been six weeks since I've had a soda. I'll still keep the La Croixs around for when I feel like I need something fizzy, but now I drink my daily coffee in the morning, and then almost exclusively uncarbonated water during the day with the occasional unsweetened tea. I don't need soda to get through the day anymore and I don't feel the urge to go get one when I'm stressed or upset. I feel like I have more control over my emotion and can handle stress way better than before.
I'm still at the beginning of my weight loss journey, but this little victory makes me feel like I can do it. I don't want to enter my 30s being obese and until I started this little soda experiment, I had pretty much resigned myself to being heavy for the rest of my life. But now, I really think I can get back down to a healthy weight before my 30th birthday.
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