follow up with the SODA post

RE-POSTING A FRIENDS POST ON SODA SITUATION! not my writings "I Couldn't Live Without Soda!" But can you live with it? I'm not gonna lie; I was a diet soda addict. Having come from the mother I did (you can read yesterday's WANT post for a bit about Big Norma; there's tons more about her in the archives) -- and I'm not slamming her; she was an amazing woman and very much ahead of her time in many ways -- but she was absolutely a product of her time as far as diet/body image were concerned, I grew up drinking...TAB cola. And then diet Pepsi or Coke, when they were invented; whichever was on sale. We drank lots of it, my brother and I, for lunch and dinner and when we were thirsty. When I was a teenager, I attended a private Catholic high school quite a distance away. I left home at 6:30 AM after a breakfast consisting of diet soda, an apple and toast and took public transportation (two subway trains and a bus ride) for an hour to get to school. Before I walked in to the caf to hang with my friends, I'd hit the corner store for a JOLT cola ("all the sugar and twice the caffeine" was its slogan). This became especially necessary during my last two years of school when my drugstore job kept me busy from 4PM to 10PM three nights a week and then I had an hour and a half of homework to do before crashing in bed around midnight and getting up at 5:30AM. In college, I bought at least two cans of diet Pepsi every day off the roach coach and when I moved along into adulthood and my office jobs, it was not unusual for me to drink four cans of soda during the course of 9-to-5 and more at home at night and on weekends. Trapped at home alone with two babies all day for years meant I was drinking six to eight cans of diet Pepsi a day (before going to my 7PM-midnight cashiering gig at the local supermarket, where I could re-stock the supply) and when I was working part time at the hospital, there was always at least a can or two consumed during my shift and on my meal break. I mean, what was the harm? It was just diet soda. No calories! I had one friend/co-worker at the hospital whom I remember telling me probably in 2003 or so that she had recently quit all soda cold turkey and had her family do the same. She told me all these things about how bad the carbonation and coloring were, what phenylalanines (sp?) do to your body and all this other stuff that I heard as blah blah blah. I'm sure I nodded and smiled and thought Fruit Loop! and I went along drinking diet soda in large quantities for another four years. From Norma....yes I feel NO SODA ALSO! I used to buy the 12-can refrigerator packs and keep two in the fridge in the kitchen and store two or more (stock up when it's on sale!) in the extra fridge in the basement. As I've mentioned, oh, way too many times by now, November 1, 2007 was "the day" I kind of went crazy and cleaned the cabinets of crap food and ran my death mile and all that...but the soda stayed in the fridge; I wasn't getting rid of that. That was going to be my one thing with which to kind of thumb my nose at clean eating. A weird thing happened. About two or three weeks into the clean food thing, I was in the refrig probably getting stuff to make a salad and I noticed there was a full 12-pack and two or three stray cans of diet Pepsi on the bottom shelf. It occurred to me that I hadn't had any in...how long? A week? Ten days? I took one out and kind of looked at it and realized I don't drink soda anymore. Much like in April 2010 when in a Facebook conversation with Josh I realized I don't drink alcohol anymore. There was no conscious decision to "quit" or "give up" either of them...my body had just simply lost its "need" and "want" for them. So I haven't had a soda in over four years and I don't see myself ever having one again. (I posted in mid-November about how the no alcohol thing came about; it's titled "Sober Life" if you're interested in reading about it in the archives.) So, in the now-world-famous "From Hell" post last Friday, I said that one of the stupidest things I've read on a weight loss blog lately was someone whining about how she'd never ever ever no matter what be able to live without soda: “I can’t imagine life without soda!” (Imagine making this statement to your grandparents who lived through the Depression or someone who’s come to the US as a refugee from a war-torn country and how fucking outright idiotic you would sound. If your life would be somehow diminished by the absence of carbonated flavored water, you should kill yourself right now.) Perhaps that poster was being hyperbolic, but I don't think she was. I've had too many real life people say the same thing. A few readers took exception to it in the comments, as is their right. And one of them (the very sweet, funny and intelligent Miss April) nicely took me to task on that line in her response. I replied back to her comment, saying: As for the diet soda whores playing in traffic...I want them to do that not as much for drinking the crap as for having convinced themselves that it is such a great thing they couldn't live without it. Not for a week, or a day or even an afternoon. It's for having such little confidence in themselves to even push themselves to do a very, very small thing ...like not drink a diet soda for a whole day. I said somewhere around here (and I stole it from somewhere else that I wish I could remember) that this really SHOULDN'T be all that hard...getting off heroin is hard, going through six rounds of chemo is hard, growing up in foster homes is hard...respecting yourself enough to make your health a priority by doing simple things like eating right most of the time and exercising in a way you enjoy as much as you can really isn't that hard. Trust me, if you'd asked me at any point prior to mid-November 2007 if I could "live without" diet soda, I am sure I would have said: No Fucking Way. I never tried to "give it up," or thought there was any reason to give it up. I, of course, know a lot better now (there is actually no reason to drink the shit) but my real issue, as I said to April, is that it's really not even the soda itself that irks me...it's people's utter lack of faith in themselves at being able to change. If you consider yourself dependent on soda (as I was) but know that it is seriously no damned good for you and you'd be improving your health by getting it out of your diet (or even limiting it) why not challenge yourself to TRY? For a day. For an afternoon. If you usually drink four cans a day, just skip ONE. TRY. YOU ARE CAPABLE OF SO MUCH MORE THAN YOU GIVE YOURSELF CREDIT FOR.