No More Soda

 These are the things I did before starting this Journey as they take some good willpower and time to overcome.

The first thing I did was quit drinking pop. Yep, no soda. Now, this was done four years ago to help me improve my sleep. I gave up not just soda, but sugary drinks and caffeine After I gave up the pop I have only been drinking three things. Water, beer (IPA), and whiskey. Now, the only proper drink out of that list is water, so I still had some work to do on this. 

You may wonder what the process was like to quit drinking caffeine. Well that is why I am here. Let me share my story with you. I hope this motivates you to do the same. No soda is good, period.

I simply said one morning it is time to quit drinking soda. So what I did was stop drinking soda. This lasted about 4 hours until the headache came. That is when I realized that going cold turkey was not going to cut it. So I created my own 50% rule. We will call it the 50E. I didn't look this up nor did I research anything. I needed to learn what would work for me so I started putting 50E into practice.

For the record I drank pop and tea. Mostly Mountain Dew and Green Tea. Coke, at work since they had free pop, this made it even harder. Today we now have free Mountain Dew. It would be so hard for me to quit drinking pop now if I was trying. Thankfully, I was off the Dew at this point.

So the plan was to cut pop out a fast as possible. I started the first week by cutting my consumption by 50%. Before I quit, I had a glass of pop in the morning, two at lunch, and one in the evening. That is approximately 64 fluid ounces of nasty soda a day. I moved to fill my glass to the brim with ice. Then I would just fill the glass with pop, three glasses a day was my limit. I did this for the first week. The second week, I removed the evening pop. The headaches came and I just pushed through them. I was very irritable too. Of course, all this would remain for the entire process. The end results are worth it. And if you can make it through you will never want to drink a pop again so that you don't have to experience those headaches again. My second week would end up going for a month as I was hoping the headache would reduce, it never did. So I moved on to then next step. I went to one glass a day with cup of ice filling it 50% full of pop. Again, this went on for a few weeks with me slowly adding less ice and less pop. Then finally, in the end I was filling the cup with up halfway with ice and only covering half of that with pop. This went on for two weeks. At that point I was like why am I still drinking this. I know the headache is going to come, but I need to get over it. At that point I just switched to water and then the real headaches came. The headache was relentless and came back day and day again. A couple of over the counter ibuprofen helped take the edge off my headaches. I cannot tell you what to take to help with the headaches but I can say do not take anything that contains caffeine. Eventually, the headaches will go away. For me, I thought I was finally over the headaches, after a month, only to have them start back up shortly after the signs of them disappeared. Since quitting drinking caffeine, the amount of headaches I have went down to just about zero and my sleep has improved. And, I am not talking about caffeine headaches here, just general headaches.  My consumption of over the counter pain relivers have dropped significantly to almost taking no more than six a year.

If you are looking to quit drinking caffeine and drink coffee, you could just figure out what works for you while reducing your intake. Or follow what I did.  You could even water it down with ice if you were so inclined to do so.

This has changed my life for the better. No, afternoon crashes and I don't wake up groggy. I also don't need to keep large quantities of headache medicine around.

Thanks for reading,

Eric

(This is a modified post from 07/05/2021 from my initial website which I converted to a blog type page.)