Kicking My Coke Habit

I seem to be on a bit of a booze and drug theme these days....but I digress.

Throughout my 20's I had a severe Coke addiction.  I had to have a stash on hand day and night, at home, school, work..you name it I had some or knew where to get some quick. I don't mean the Robert Downey Jr, Less Than Zero kind of coke addiction, I mean that sweet elixir sold at corner stores, in every restaurant, and every vending machine in North America....Coca Cola.  At its peak my insatiable thirst for Coke saw me drinking over two liters a day, a day!!  That my friends is over 800 calories per bottle consumed everyday, sitting on the couch drinking glass after glass or at school plus a few cans while at work, let's tack on another 300 calories for those.  At that rate I was consuming roughly 1100 calories a day in pop...that is 400,400 calories a year! It's not surprising from 1995-2000 I gained 75 pounds.  Not only was I packing on the pounds at warp speed it's a wonder I still have teeth in my head, and I'm sure with the calcium leeching effects of carbonated beverages I have the bone density of Rocket Man.

As part of my new desire to get healthy,  and drop a few dozen lbs I knew I had to give up the Coke. I'm not going to lie, it was tough going.  Water was a foreign beverage idea to me, I was still drinking at this point but certainly couldn't replace two liters of pop with two liters of beer, or could I?  Kidding! So I did what most people do, I switched to Diet Coke.  Here's the amazing thing (not to worry I'll bad mouth Diet Coke in another blog), I stopped drinking regular, sugar laden pop... and my diet was still far from ideal...but I lost 20 pounds in just over two months!!!

There were times over the years I would contemplate severing a limb to get that damn scale to go down...and still to this day the biggest weight loss I have seen that I can attribute to one change in my diet was cutting out soft drinks.  I haven't had a regular soda in over six years now. 


There have been numerous studies linking soda to obesity, no great news flash there.  Here's an interesting article which shows soda consumption increases and climbing obesity rates over the last 30 years. 

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060305/news_1n5soda.html

Don't drink your calories folks...