Today marks the 378th day without a single drop of soda. I’ve never taken on a challenge like this before. I didn’t start this goal with an end date in mind, so this is more of a milestone than a job completed post. I’ve learned a lot already in the past year, but I’ve also uncovered a bunch of deeper layers to this campaign.
In December of 2016 I started to become aware how much sugar I was consuming and how it was affecting my every day of life. While assessing my overall diet I was having soda for lunch and most cases dinner every day of the week. On the Weekends it was even worse, Jim Beam and cokes Friday and Saturday nights and on Bears games, every weekend was a nonstop soda fountain (plus Bourbon but that’s a different story.) Underneath all of the liquid/empty calories from the sugars there was also the astonishing amount of caffeine I was ingesting. For reference, just one can of coke-a-cola contains:
- 140 Calories
- 39 grams of Sugar
- 39 grams of Carbohydrates
- 32 milligrams of Caffeine
Being conservative I was having about 3 cans of coke every weekend night or 9-10 cans a weekend (during the NFL season.) It was wild I always seemed to wake up 90% of the time with zero effects of a hangover. I thought I was one of those lucky few of the population that was incapable of getting hungover. After a few weekends of experimentation’s, I soundly proved that I was not one of those Lucky few that will never escape a morning/day of sacrifice for going too hard the night before.
My hypothesis was that the amount of caffeine and sugar I was drinking was hyping me up enough to the point that it was counteracting the hangover headaches caused by the dehydration of the booze I was consuming. During the experimentation party nights, I only removed one variable, the Soda. I still drank bourbon, but instead, I would have bourbon on ice or with ice and water. Still ate the same foods, same bars, same activities, and was out to all hours of the night.
Initially, it was hard to drink Bourbon straight, so that restricted the quantity of bourbon in a night compared to the mixed drinks amounts. This extended the length of the experiment by 6 weekends. I became acclimated to the straight bourbon taste. I was back to my standard of 2-3 glasses intake an hour. #yikes
No Surprises, I started experiencing debilitating hangovers that seemed to last all the way to dinner the next day. This got OLD fast, now that I had established a new control data set. I had to go back to the Bourbon and colas to see if the hangovers would go away. As expected the hangovers did not come but every morning after a night out I would live in fear of that dreaded hangover. The quick conclusion was that the sodas, sugar, and caffeine were enabling me to drink the night away without the consequence of a hangover.
On the surface that simple conclusion seems to support the 2 thumbs up for Soda. What I didn’t hypothesis would be all the little effects soda would have on my weekday life and overall health. So I swapped the experiment to only drink soda when I was enjoying libations. I also had a quick goal to only drink on the weekends and never during the weekdays.
The first thing I noticed was how well I was sleeping. I had always been able to operate on 5.5-6 hours a sleep and night and not feel tired or less productive during the day. Waking up with only one alarm, no snoozing and didn’t need any coffee to get me geared up for the day. I never knew what being completely rested felt like. I was so used to being under-slept it just became how I lived my days. My sleep quality would get better and better through the week, especially Thursday nights into Friday mornings. Waking up on Friday I felt like I could sprint 10 miles before breakfast. It was an awesome feeling getting real sleep with out caffeine keeping me awake all he night.
Getting rid of all that sugar from my system did put a serious shock to my system as well though. Cutting the soda cold turkey tuned me into a sweet tooth especially for chocolate. All of the sudden I was craving fats all kinds of fats. I was using loads of butter on my toast and on my vegetables and started eating 3 times as much bacon as I usually did. It got absurd, I even took bite of a stick of Kerry Gold Butter straight out of the fridge. I came across on some articles that described my cravings post sugar habits. Basically it was my body trying to replace all the intake of sugar with fats. This just proved to me at how bad of habit i had developed and how it was brain washing me, and sad that I didn’t make this switch sooner.
Next steps of this project will be to add other levels to capitalize on this progress. I haven’t decided yet but here are some examples.
- 9 hours of sleep a night (bedtime around 9:00 PM)
- Removing as much added sugars as I can from my diet
- 3 Strength workouts a week
- Start stretching with consistency either by Yoga or other routines
- Eliminating caffeine during the weekdays or all together (I love Iced Mochas)
- Due that I only drink water most of time I will still keep drinking the Iced tea, just so I can have some diversity in my liquids
Going forward, I will continue to stay away from soda drinks but might have one here and there. I’m not a cokeaholic or at least I don’t think so at this point but, there are some days I want a Mountain Dew Icee or something similar to a one off situations. I Have built a taste for the other liquids so i have good options now and I plan on sticking to those rather then the Cokes
TL:DR
Drank to much soda, So i stopped drinking soda. Started Sleeping really well but eating lots of chocolate and other sweets to compensate for the missing sugars. Feel way better now and will try something else to progress my overall health.