How do I break a fizzy drink addiction?
I've realised that I'm a little too fond of fizzy drinks. It's not a severe addiction to the point of downing gallons, but I am drinking a 330ml can of Pepsi Max almost every day. Sometimes a little more.
Swap to a 0 calorie version and just keep enjoying it? Fizzy drinks are a pretty harmless vice in the grand scheme of things. Hollow calories, so if you can replace it with a 0 calorie version, it would at least stop affecting your weight.
I know everyone is against artificial sweeteners. They won't kill you faster than microplastics, pollution, break pad dust, war, alcohol, smoking,...
Enjoy life! Enjoy a fizzy drink! I thoroughly enjoy my daily coke zero can.
It costs ~$150 to build your own CO2 carbonation setup. After that, refills are pretty infrequent at ~$10. That gets you relatively unlimited sparkling water.
If you're jonesing for specific flavors, flavor powders, extracts, and raw sucralose in bulk on Amazon will run you around $20, or ~$100 total for a decent assortment. It'll pay for itself in like a year and the powders will last you awhile.
Is it the sweetness that you're addicted to? The fizz itself maybe? There are drinks that are sweet yet not fizzy, and there are drinks that are fizzy yet not sweet. If you can find out, you can begin to substitute less unhealthy options. Then eventually quit entirely.
BDS puts most of the big brand junkfood on the boycott list. Join the club.
What is BDS?
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led boycott of a small number of companies that are particularly heavily involved in Israeli apartheid and colonialism of Palestinians.
The comments here are fucking wild.
Outside of the caffeine, there’s nothing inherently special about a fizzy drink habit that would make it remarkable from other habits when it comes to giving it up. So a guide like https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-break-a-bad-habit-202205022736 could be useful.
that’s rather untrue. sugar is actually very addictive, and the quantity in soft drinks (they have additives that make them actually palatable - without they’d be so sweet you couldn’t drink much) makes them particularly problematic
Wait. You can talk??
Seltzer. Kombucha.
Club soda or seltzer is a good start, if you want the fizz but not the sugar/flavor. If it's the taste you like, try the syrup they make for fizzy water.
I kicked mine by winning a weight loss bet with a friend. Depression and anxiety caused the weight to come back, but I still haven't had a soda in three years.
This is what I did as well. I also had to get some flavored water i found I liked the taste of and it helped to have a variety.
I find coffee to be the best replacement but never liked sugary sodas, only the sugar-free ones.
I still have a diet soda now & then but not even once a week.
Drink fizzy water instead.
Co2 mod to a used sodastream is awesome
🤮
I'm not a fan of fizzy water either. Plain or flavored.
Sometimes a small cold Gatorade does the trick for me.
I did it, it started with not buying them and not including in any ordering of food, delivery or in restaurants. Step 1 was to replace it with sparking water and mixing a spoon or two of raw fruit reduction (no aded sugars or anything) (my wife kept doing this, while i did the cold turkey method i just coud not be bothered by this) Step 2 completely replace to sparkling water only. (i kinda jumped on this, but sometimes used to use my wife's made fruit reduction, or sometimes she bought that from a local store, and sometimes i just felt fancy so, there is a method for a drink and here is how it goes.: Step 3: Fancy option / only for special occasons (lol). You buy the sparkling water in botles, (for the 250ml) you add a tea bag in it and turn them upside down, and put it back in the fridge. Then 20 mins later, you can add agave syrup if you want a bit or honey. You can also add mint leaves, and just throw them in the bottle you are going to consume 30 mins later or next day. Combine things like this, and then you have a fancy drink in the dridge whenever needed. (i never left the tea bags more than an hour in the bottoles, i would always get rid of the tea bag and put the bottle in my edc bag when leaving the house or something).
I got off of soda by drinking plenty of water in place of it. Good luck!
My trick? Have severe stomach issues requiring you to cut sodas out completely, and then just cut them out. I quit full cold turkey, no more caffeine, nothing but drinking water for at least a year, and then I started with a couple teas.
hatred. just hatred and anger, fueled by seething rage that's there in a split-second, whenever you need it. when your synapses overflow with visions of screaming mongol hordes burning and pillaging through the C-suite of whatever corpo that's yanking your chain, the desire to gorge on crap you're conditioned to consume just fades away.
that works for anything. smoking. eating meat. you ex you can't stop thinking about. getting the new GPU. give it a burst of 30-45 seconds of white-hot fury and you don't want none of that, ever again.
in the words of the wise denpok singh: "hate in the hands of the enlightened can be a tool for great change".
Thanks ml
Don’t break it. Switch to kombucha. Synergy raw kombucha is 60 calories per ~450mL. Fizz is from fermentation, which gives it a little bit of alcohol but with a lot of probiotics that are good for your gut biome. I keep that and flavored carbonated water in rotation, along with plenty of filtered water.
Rephrase this because you mention alcohol. Kombucha is non alcoholic and.. Has .5 percent alc. Volume. So fear not people. Good for the gut microbiome too.
replace with fizzy water
This is how I got off beer and wine during the week. Sip fizzy water. It's perfect. Replacing one habit with another.
Carbonated water helps
Stop drinking fizzy drinks
It's not cocaine
I'm cured
things can be psychologically habit forming, like biting your nails or plucking body hair
tbh i don't think a single can in a day is all that much if your diet is otherwise reasonable and balanced.
do you think it's the bubbles or the 40-some mg of caffeine that gets you grabbing one every day?
Also, Pepsi Max is a zero calorie drink, so 1 a day is hardly a lot. Three artificial sweeteners aren't the best for you, but OP shouldn't feel like they are ruining their health on that.
To this point, for me, it was all about the bubbles. So replacing with a seltzer water did wonders. Sometimes I still have a craving to pound bubbles real quick.
I have a soda stream and then several flavoring options. I have mio and other brands, then soda syrups, and cocktail mixers. That way I can control the amount of sweet. I personally don’t like the flavor of artificial sweeteners or stevia so I try to find ones that use real sugar and real fruit extract. There’s some with caffeine too.
My solution to most things, make it a chore.
Like, if you don't buy it, you can't drink it. If you have it, put it in an inconvenient place so you you won't see it or bother getting it.
Start watering it down. Honestly.
Working in foodservice, I would drink soda and other sugary drinks from the fountain all the time. I started watering down my drinks and actually started liking it like that.
That's actually a pretty good idea, never thought of that.
Okay, I had trouble getting off of sodas, and everyone suggested fizzy water instead, and they all tasted nasty, like maybe the water sat in the room with the fruit maybe.
But this is the only time I'll ever say good about Walmart, their walmart branded carbonated waters are 99 cents a liter and taste amazing. The Fuji Apple one is the one I usually get and it tastes like a fizzy apple soda but doesn't have sugar.
Since I avoid walmart like the plague, I've learned to just drink water now. Tap water is my go to. But these things are like my guilty pleasure, which is a far cry better than the sugar drinks imo.
Think about kidney stones and how a guy I know who chainsawed his leg had a kidney stone that he claims hurt worse
I've had kindey stones twice so far and can confirm: it hurts. So much, I've formed the habit of drinking multiple liters of water a day, every day.
I eventually switched over to sparkling water and now I find normal soda nearly undrinkable. There’s lots of different brands with all types of flavors. It’s worth exploring.
One can? Lightweight.
Switch to a caffeine-free version some of the time, then all of the time. For Pepsi Max this is only available in the 1.5L bottles where I am, so add in an extra step switching from cans to bottles (which should also reduce cost/waste).
Buy a nice reusable water bottle and ensure you have a clean, not-bad-tasting source of fresh water to fill it with (where I am this means bottled or filtered). Keep it filled and close to you at all times. Only use water in it.
Once you're comfortable with these adjustments, taper off the fizzy drink. If you're still having significant trouble or cravings, or substitute for something worse: just keep drinking the fizzies. It's one of the least harmful bad habits you could have, and depending on your circumstances might be a best case scenario
A few things. Firstly, regarding waste cans are actually recyclable unlike bottles. As for buying 1.5l bottle and then drinking only a glass or something like that a day, for some people (talking from my own experience) they don't drink the volume of the drink, just the unit. 1 bottle = 1 can for me, doesn't matter the volume 😅 So I usually advocate for reducing the size of units if a person lacks self control.
I think that's true for small containers, such as a can. Whereas 1.5L is an impractical amount to drink of anything, more likely to lead to drinking until satiation rather than until the container is finished. Especially where the starting point of the habit involves opening a fresh container with a certain aesthetic, and finishing it. That itself can be psychologically addicting. It was for me.
Neither aluminium nor plastic are infinitely recyclable. I read somewhere that factoring in the energy and materials required in the initial production of the container, plastic is about 13x more wasteful. So while of course it depends on serving size (which would logically be different transitioning from small cans to large bottles), as well as recycling programs in your area and their respective efficiencies, you're most likely correct that the carbon footprint of large bottle would be higher overall.
What I really meant to get at was 'waste' in terms of the amount of empty containers that tend to pile up around you. For myself being addicted to drinking cans of fizzy, I would stack them around me and it would become a much larger job to clean them up than it is for large bottles.
I'll also say that while being addicted to cans, I lamented their relatively higher cost and was more compelled to go for small bottle form factor on occasions where they were available cheaper than cans, rather than large bottles. Small bottles of course being by far the most wasteful.
Replace with something else - back when I was actually addicted to soda, I realized how expensive it all was and replaced it with drinking tea.
Of course, might not be viable if you're an american.
While we did dump most of our tea in boston harbor way back when, some did make it's way through our borders since then.
American and I drink all types of teas???
My european mind can't comprehend making tea without an electric kettle, something that is very rarely used in the US
This is tough, because I used to be there but I kind of grew out of. I just started drinking tons of water all the time and now if when I get thirsty I just crave water.
I do drink two iced pour over coffees in the mornings though. They seem to keep me going for most the day caffeine-wise, so that’s helped a bunch too.
That's not that much, also are you sure it's a "fizzy drink" addiction or instead a sugar/sweets addiction? You could try swapping out the pepsi max with an unsweetened fizzy water like Perrier or La Croix and then eventually transitioning to regular water from there, but i'm betting it's the sweetness you are craving.
Soda hits a spot that sugary drinks without the fizz don't. It's why sodas taste awful when they've gone flat. If I buy one of those prepackaged sweet teas I can't handle it, the sweetness is somehow overpowering for me. Same goes for most juices.
For me, sugar really brings out the flavor in things though. The sugar in a soda works to enhance the flavor, while the carbonation offsets the strength of the sugar. If I water down a soda with seltzer it's okay, but it's much more bland, so much less enjoyable. It really is the combination of the two that works here.
With that said, I am pretty picky with my sodas (much like everything else I'm eating or drinking, unfortunately). Anything I don't enjoy much more than water I'll turn down. I like colas and birch beers and cream sodas, not so much orange/grape soda or sprite.
Bubbly water with a dash of vanilla extract. Now you’re just addicted to bubbly water with a little flavored alcohol instead of all that sugar.
They can also start mixing their regular drinks (Pepsi) with sparkling water and up the ratio as they get used to the taste. Eventually they’ll be just drinking water.
Yeah. Or they can start adding a little whiskey to each glass until they’re an alcoholic.
Depends on the reason and what you find most motivating. Addiction is tricky and it's rarely just one thing. Caffeine is physically addictive but there's also psych and lifestyle aspects to it.
If it's about the caffeine, try switching to coffee or tea. If you want to go cold turkey, caffeine withdrawal peaks at about three days with symptoms lessening to minimal after about nine.
If it's a convenience thing, try keeping a water bottle on you and just drink that. If you find water too boring or your local water tastes bad, try it carbonated and/or with a twist of lemon or other fruit. I'd suggest avoiding places where they serve it, but that's near impossible. You could take note of what situation you're in when you tend to do it, and try to rejig your routine around that. You could also not keep it in the house; it's a lot easier to not put it on the shopping list than resist the temptation when it's right there. Then there's health and money. Of course you know they're not great for you so I'm not going to harp on that, but you could try focusing on it more (but try to frame it in a positive way; not "ugh soda is bad", but rather "hey drinking water is good!"), or give yourself a goal to save up for purely with what you save on soda.
Sugar free seltzer
What worked for me was to find a replacement for the sensation in my mouth. The big problem with a lot of sodas is the sugar and calories so I wanted to find a substitute that’s lower in those categories. I broke my addiction to Mt Dew with a big glass of the coldest water I could get, the cold mouth feel took the place of the fizzy one. I’m back on fizzy stuff but I stick to flavored seltzer water and usually only one with dinner.
permanently. no idea. temporarily a substitute is nice. hibiscus tea worked somewhat now.
Just stop. There are no tricks.
Do or do not.
Thanks Master!
I was in a similar boat previously and can attest that seltzer helped me shake the habit. And then I got bored of that so I just drink water, sometimes with flavor packets (think Crystal Light). I still buy a bottle of diet caffeine free coke now and then, but it's a rare, special treat.
i have a soda stream, which i bought without realizing who makes them.. but i buy 3rd party gas refills and just drink fizzy water.. it's awesome
As another person suggested try to substitute with something similar.
It doesn't have to be purely fizzy water, I used to mix seltzer with a little pineapple juice. Pick whatever you like and start there, you might eventually appreciate just the seltzer on its own and not need the juice.
Just try not to replace a ton of sugar with a ton of sugar, so even with the fruit juice 1/2 & 1/2 would be a start as opposed to 3/4 juice 1/4 seltzer, the opposite of that of course being best.
