Club soda with a splash of cranberry. Drink that. Switch it up, try grapefruit. Don't be surprised when you make other people feel safe to drink the same.
Club soda got me off them (this is before fizzy water became a trendy drink). Turns out my craving was mostly for the carbonation bite, not the sugar.
Seltzer water didn't work. The missing minerals make it taste super weird to my palate. Had to be club soda (or sparkling mineral water, but that was too expensive for me to have often at the time).
This is a great idea. In addition, consider flavouring to your taste by just mixing with soda.
I had an obsession with sprite/7-up one summer. The diet variety tasted awful and the regular not only was so high in calories, it was too sweet for me. I ended up with a 60/40 mix of club soda/sprite. It gives it a wonderful lightness while maintaining that great fizziness. It became my summer patio reading drink.
When (mostly) quitting soda I discovered my craving was actually 80/20 carbonation/sweetness, so I could almost totally satisfy it with club soda (cheap) or sparkling mineral water (pricier but generally better). Seltzer didn't work—I think it had too little salt, tasted weird. Lemons and limes are pretty cheap if you want a little flavor and a touch of sweetness, and they provide some vitamins so they're not a total waste of calories. Much better than various flavored sparkling waters, IMO. Mostly I drank it plain, though.
Of course I have a lot more fat on me now than back when I averaged (guessing) 1.5L/day of soda and probably 4000+ total calories a day, almost all junk food. Lots of effort just to slow the progression away from a fit (looking) body toward a middle-aged one. And I feel way, way less healthy and get sick all the time, as opposed to never. Man, being a teenager was great. :-/
Something similar has helped me in not drinking pop/soda. I just get soda water and add lemons/limes. It has the flavor and fizziness of Sprite, just not the sweetness. And it's pretty widely available.
I go for very low sweetness drinks too. I don’t have a soda maker but I buy cans of plain sparkling water and add a dash of store bought kombucha to the can. Usually I take one sip off a fresh can and then pour in a little kombucha. You can buy flavored sparkling water but the flavorings they tend to use don’t sit well with my stomach. The right flavor of kombucha does the trick for me nicely though.
I would feel sick if I ever tried to drink a Coca-Cola. It’s incredible how much sugar they put in those things.
Can confirm. Now that I'm not used to having soda all the time, when I occasionally indulge my tolerance for the stuff is really low. 3-4 ounces and it's starting to gross me out. Sodas on the sweeter end of the spectrum (Pepsi, my old favorite Dr. Pepper) are entirely unappealing.
It's a triumph of marketing that having a big-ass glass of soda (free refills!) with most meals isn't seen as just as indulgent/gross as eating a couple big handfuls of candy or having a bowl of ice cream with every meal, when in fact it's probably _worse_, since at least chocolate & nuts or decent ice cream will have _some_ redeeming qualities (vitamins). Yet no-one's going to buy a tub of Ben & Jerry's every morning to have at their desk at work—they'd be too ashamed (maybe at home, but not among co-workers). A 32+ ounce cup of soda, though? Sure. Very common.
To anyone looking to kick the habit: I found that even _unflavored_ sparkling water or club soda just about totally eliminated any immediate desire to have a sugary soda. The carbonation bite was the main thing I craved, turns out, not so much the sweetness. These days I mostly drink plain water, but I went through tons of that stuff when I was quitting, and I think it was a big help.
reply