I have an addiction.
 

Well it is time I come clean. For the last 2 weeks I have given up pop to see how it goes. well now I am on the 18th day and now I really want one. The irge is strong for me to break my streak and have a pop.

What do you guys do to ignore the urges? I need help here.

I do cocaine. Who needs soda when you've got cocaine?

Play Civ V.

I was going to say something like this, but Nonsie all ready said it, so now I feel kind of sad and useless. I guess I'll just go now.

I quit drinking soda like 2 weeks ago.



And every day since then.

Great, now my addiction of hookers seems weak in comparison.

Pfft, who has time for soda when you could be doing cocaine?

NONSIE http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/t...icons/doom.gif

Welp. Now that we've got our hee-haws out, how about we answer the OP? Honestly, when I wanted to quit...bottled tea helped. It was convenient...and still had caffiene.

Look... cocaine is a helluva drug.

Try switching to fruit juice. It still has flavor, but it's sugary, so alternate between a glass of juice and a glass of water when you get thirsty. Aside from that? Make sure there's no soda in your house.

I stopped drinking soda when we ran out once and only requested my family to get juice for a couple weeks, and just stuck to water after those weeks. It's a progressive change.

Actually fruit juice is just as bad for you as soda. The fructose is the real killer, not the caffeine. Switch to unsweetened tea for the caffeine if you need to. The real thing is just not to have any soda around you and a nice supply of water. If you're like myself and despise tap water then you should by some bottled water instead of all that soda. Bam, temptation removed.

Order the unsweetened ice tea at fast food joints if you go to them.

I mean I'm sure that you know soda is bad for you since you're trying to stop drinking it, but are you fully aware why? I mean the basic construction is kind of a twofold killer. For one, soda has tons of sodium which makes you thirstier as well as caffeine, which is a diuretic (it makes you pee a lot). For another, fructose (the main source of carbohydrates in soda, derived from high fructose corn syrup) does not produce the hormone leptin when ingensted, which is your bodies indicator to your brain that you've ingested calories.

Also, about 30% of fructose is converted directly into fat because it's just shunted directly into the liver upon ingestion. Your bodies cells aren't equipped to process fructose directly as they are with glucose, so it's a straight shot to the ol' liver from the gums.

Pretty much fructose produces almost the exact same byproducts as alcohol, it simply isn't metabolized in the brain so you don't get any immediate side effects. Chronic fructose consumption has almost the exact same effect on the liver as alcoholism however.

The More You Know

The fructose is what's bad for you but presumably the caffeine is what he's trying to quit.

Although the tea isn't a bad idea in that it tends to be enough caffeine to keep you going but not enough to make you all coffee/soda cracky.

Isn't the whole point of quitting caffeinated soda to quit caffeine in general?

I say every time you have an urge play a game that will distract you and drink water to quench the thirst!

Or the Red Blood of a VIRGIN!!!

I have weaned myself onto juice. I have a bottle of Calypso lemonade about once every 2-3 days and try and have a V8 Berry juice once a day. But a limited $$$ flow kinda is hard.

I also drink alot of water.

OK I'm not gonna lie, I really am addicted to rousing nerd ire on the internet. I even get a little thrill out of my own.

Yeah, I was mostly sticking to the "drop caffeine" part of giving up soda, and then move to drinking only water. The tea is a good idea, though. It simply didn't occur to me to recommend tea because I don't really drink tea ever.

I'm not saying that caffeine addiction is a good thing, but it really seems like the lesser of two evils in this case.

I think it was mentioned earlier but mostly: make it hard to have what you crave on hand. It's hard to give in to drinking a pop if there's none anywhere around you.

The same goes for cocaine, or easily sold personal electronics.

Incidentally it's not the caffeine that I was addicted to. It was the carbonation and the sugar. In Canada, we don't use High Fructose corn syrup in our pops.

Give up soda? What. I don't even understand what you're getting at.

I can't go a day without Coca-Cola without getting a headache. I have at least two a day. I'm like the Robert Downey Jr. of coke.

I thought Robert Downey Jr. was the Robert Downey Jr. of coke.

Not that coke.

What? Since when? The ingredients list glucose-fructose, which is just the Canadian wording for HFCS. However, don't try to check this by looking at an actual can of pop or you'll be tempted to drink it :P It may not be the EXACT same as HFCS, but it's still just simple sugar syrup.

If you're addicted to the carbonation you could try drinking just plain club soda. You can mix it with plain iced tea too to make sparkling iced tea.

I used to be very addicted to iced tea (the powdered sugary kind that you dissolve into regular water) and Monster energy drinks and sugary fountain juices (mainly because fountain juice was free where I worked at the time.) One day I decided that I'd had enough of feeling shitty all the time and switched to plain water and plain tea. After a few weeks water started to actually taste good to me and since then I haven't had any trouble. This was about a year ago.

@Mac: Consider it part of the race to losing weight with me. I've lost 50 lbs now- drinking pop would slow you down! You don't want to be beaten by ME, do you?

Mac needs to ease his way out of it. Start drinking soda again for a week. The switch to 90% soda and 10% run the next. Add 10% more rum each week until you reach 200% rum or when your liver runs away due to abuse.

EE has the right idea *shudder*. We're talking enough rum to blind a pirate.

Get a ridiculous amount of soda- like fill a room ofit. Get your friends to lock you in the room and you're not allowed out till you have finished all the soda. Chug it down, become sick- problem soled.

Water.... The only thing that worked for me was just straight up water. Like .... a fucking shitload of water per day to curb the pepsi addiction I had/have.
I wanted off pepsi because of all the goddamned sugar... to hell with the caffeine, I drink tea like its going out of style so I'm fucked there.
But I found that flavored waters were just stupid in sugar too, and juice is expensive. I wanted to not be thirsty so I just pump the water in practically intravenously. It works for the most part. Something else I find that helps is drink when you're thirsty. feel thirsty? drink. Even if it's like 20 times a day.

Pansy. You should have done a drink that's at least as strong as whiskey.

Switch to blood. It's got all sorts of great stuff in there like iron and protein. It's also really cheap. The stuff is in, like, everything!

Well, not plants, really. They just have sap. I suppose that can be good, too, but that doesn't really solve your sugar problem. :ohdear:



Edit: PS - Glucose-fructose is the formula for sucrose, commonly known as sugar. Sucrose is just a glucose bonded with a fructose. For that matter, glucose and fructose are isomers of each other, but glucose is what our bodies use. Fructose is much sweeter, though, which is why fruits taste how they do - they're our prime source of the stuff outside of high-fructose corn syrup, which is in pretty much everything in America just because we needed some way to get rid of all the corn we're subsidizing.

How does the NPF Health Junta (I just made up that name) feel about diet drinks? I go though about 1 liter of Pepsi Max a day, and when I don't I go into hibernation for a day or two. But basically I've weighed the pros and cons and found cancer more attractive than diabetes.

They may actually cause you to gain more weight because your body tastes the sweetness and then doesn't get the Calories it thinks it should be getting, causing you to overeat later.

Aside from that, the acid is still bad for your teeth. Also, there's very little indication artificial sweeteners are really carcinogenic. The amount of saccharine needed to cause cancer in rats was equivalent to like ten pounds a day in humans. You still can't cook NutraSweet, though (it turns into formaldehyde, and is even metabolized into such in some amount in the body and ends up in the brain).

I don't see his letting to comical misundersandings and wacky hijinks, therefore this is not an appropriate choice of daily beverage.

I forgot, when I go to bed I like to take some Baby Drops. Cause I like the taste of babies.

Seriously, Civ V.

You'll forget about soda.

Start with sparkling water. It's the same thing as soda only less damaging to your teeth. Then upgrade to some flavored non-carbonated water. Tastes exactly the same sans the fizz. In no time you'll be drinking water like a camel.

Or soldier the hell up son, and quit crying in the breast milk.

I uh... I just walked in...

Did I miss something?

People talk shit about fruit juice but I'd like them to point out all the people who got sugar diabetes 'cause they were drinking just way too much fruit juice, man. "Juicers", they call them. Just couldn't stop tipping back the V8. All that fruit juice gave them the sugar. They just drank gallons of it.

Anyway, my dad finally broke his addiction to orange soda about two years ago. He gained a bunch of weight and swore the stuff off.

Now he celebrates his newfound health with a giant bowl of orange sherbet ice cream every night!

I have the same problem. I try to limit myself to one, or realistically two cans a day, but there are days where three, then four, and then five seems ok. I was doing well for a while. Maybe I should again focas on the one can limit, and maybe I will eventually go a day without it. One can only hope.