Goal Met: No Diet Soda for 30 days

I’m not sure what this was going to be like – I was a diet soda fiend. I had a diet coke for breakfast, for lunch, and a couple with dinner. Was it the caffeine? The bubbles? The familiarity? I was going to find out – and the results were.. inconclusive. 

The first thing I did was change the scope of this to include all diet drinks (not just soda) so no diet ice teas, zero sugar Gatorade or other sugar free drinks. This also crossed over with the no sugar month so I really was limited to water or unsweetened iced tea. Why I decided to do both is a mystery. I guess go hard or go home? Scientific principle? Lack of planning? Masochism?

I quickly learned to love unsweetened iced tea and specifically McDonalds iced tea. It just hit different than a lot of the bottled teas. I made my own iced tea using various blends and had a few hits and a lot of misses (there’s just some teas that don’t blend well) and quickly became an aficionado of sparkling waters. Which led me down a rabbit hole into BPA, can linings and which canned seltzers were the best to drink (Waterloo is my acqua frizzante of choice) 

The sparkling water was clutch for this as the habit of cracking open a can with my meals was hardwired into my brain and by replacing it with something that is also fizzy went a long way to reducing the cravings. The mouthfeel and texture of diet coke is hard to replace but it wasn’t enough to put me off seltzers as a replacement. Over time I got used to the seltzers as a stand in and as the weeks went by the urge for soda kept decreasing. 

So, I got to the end of the 30 days and I wasn’t really sure what, if any, changes giving the diet soda up made on my health or mood. One of the major factors is that without my nightly two diet coke dinner I was getting tired a lot early and even falling asleep at my desk which was alarming to me. Were my sleep habits that bad? Was all that caffeine at night altering my sleep patterns? I suspect being out of shape at the beginning of the year was a big culprit and that all that caffeine was propping me up and masking the need for me to work out more and get better rest. [This turned out to be true: regular exercise and diet changes led to more energy.  I still fall asleep on the couch watching sports but that’s a middle-aged man’s right and I refuse to relent it!]

Other than the tiredness nothing else really changed – but I just felt like reducing the overall consumption can only be good for my health. So, while I still drink diet soda occasionally, it’s mostly at night with my dinner or when I’m out at a restaurant. I’ve replaced most of the other occasions with plain or sparkling water. 

Overall, I’m glad I did it just so I could see for myself if my consumption of diet soda was impacting my health in any way. While the scientific data out there seems to back me up I still can’t shake the feeling that reducing my intake is a good thing so my plan is to keep it to the 1-2 can a day habit I have now and maybe over time phase that out as well.