What Drives Me to Drink

I suppose you'd like an update on that diet soda habit kicking thing:

Good News:  My Coke and Pepsi diet product drinking has reduced to sometimes 1 a day.
Bad News:    There are still times when I have a four to five diet drink day.
Good News:  I realized that my diet cola/caffeine consumption is relative to two things:

Meals & Stress

I am an ex-smoker. The need for the beverage and the thrill of having consumed it is a LOT like needing a cigarette after a meal...or lots of cigarettes through highly stressful moments.  When I quit smoking, I did a lot of gum chewing and overeating. Not sure I want to resort to THOSE things to quit caffeine in a can altogether. Not sure what the solution is yet, either. Sometimes I want that sensation of calm satisfaction having had the drink. Sometimes I want to taste, or even crave, the flavor.

I have ("hot" for you southern people) tea with breakfast which probably provides enough feel-good to get me to my lunch time, but by then I want/need a drink. A straight up diet cola, on the rocks, that is. Same for dinner time.

And if on some night I'm in a 4-H meeting with my sassy-pants daughter and her easy-to-show-off-in-front-of friends and my sometimes-gets-sidetracked co-leader (ALL of whom I love very very dearly) and I can't manage to sort out the chaos of people talking too much about stuff not really relevant, and am fielding comments from my kid who is normally not bully-ish toward me (we do talk about this before and after and I'm finally to a point of there are consequences for that), and I'm keeping cats off the table and letting dogs in and out of the house...(I host the group at home) and remind the kids to listen to my co-leader because they sometimes get too talky with gossip and stuff and forget we're having a meeting... man, I can drink two or three diet drinks in the hour and some we're together. That's what I did last Monday.

So, I need to learn how to let 4-H be pretty much completely uncontrollable and sip on water...or continue to be the "Bad Cop" co-leader and suck down Coke Zero the whole while. Maybe I can crush the cans in my hand upon finish just to accentuate how bad-ass I really can be.

Or maybe there's a way to not need that drink. And I can kick my daughter in the shin once for every snarky thing she says back to me. What?! That's right, I said it. She's mean! Like: playground mean. But, okay, I'll handle that with love....I promise.

Anyway: Have you heard of this problem? Had this problem? Know what to do?

The Dreaded Diet Cola Kick

I have the horrible habit of drinking can after can after bottle after fountain drink of diet or zero colas. For years I've had myself convinced that drinking them is OK and I've gotta have my caffeine somehow. Doesn't matter that I love hot tea and that if I limited my choices to tea drinking I'd have less of it a day. What matters is I USED to be a Mountain Dew addict and I'm not now.

Been wearing that "I no longer drink The Dew" badge around for so long that it's not only justified having zero calorie soft drinks, it's made me a goddamn super hero. But, while kicking Mtn. Dew was tough, I didn't totally let go of carbonated caffeine...so I didn't totally suffer....so I didn't overcome anything near world evil....so what was I thinking?

Using the excuse is what.

I'm smart enough to know deep down in my gut that drinking this stuff isn't any better for me (even if it doesn't threaten to fling me headlong into a Diabetic coma.) I'm honest enough to admit that I'd function better without it (even though I've convinced myself that I neeeeeed it.) And I'm swift enough to realize I will find even more elaborate excuses if I can't find a feasible way to kick my soda drinking habit.

What to do?

Copy my BFE - or at least his intention. We recently reset our lives by going through a process based on the book The Best Year Yet - something we practice annually now - and on his BYY plan, he wrote that he'd drink as much water as he does soda. That set the lightbulb over my head to "glow."

I don't know how he plans to account for it, but I know I can only drink so much in a day before I feel all sloshy. SLOSHY. It's a word now because I made it up. Anyway, I made a deal with myself on my own BYY plan to drink 1 glass of water for every 1 can/fountain drink/bottle of zero cola (or equivalent.) 

So every time I head to pour myself a sweet glass of caffeine a la phenylketonurics  en carbonate...I will pour myself a glass of water, too. And I can't get another diet drink til my water is gone. That's THE NEW DEAL.

We can talk about cold turkey quits later.  OK? Because this I can do.