Quitter! (Part 1)

Soda pop

So, about 300 days ago, I quit drinking pop.* 

Screen cap from my Quit for Health app.

I'd had a one-a-day habit for years. I started with Diet Coke in my teens (more like three-a-day back then), but after I drank way too much aspartame pulling an all-nighter in Uni, I switched to the full-on sugar version. Never a coffee-drinker, I settled into the habit of drinking one Coke (or an occasional Dr. Pepper) in the morning to get myself going.

Or, if I was trying not to drink pop first thing, or at all (both of which I attempted many times), it would be my fall back emotional safety net if things got bumpy in the middle of the day.

I resorted to it if I felt sad. Or angry. Or if I needed energy. Or if I needed to dig deep to find one last burst of cheerfulness to get me through the day.

I thought quitting was going to be a miserable experience. I thought I would become a total ogre and that everyone would hate me.

Quitting was hard, don't get me wrong. I probably looked at my quit app hourly (or more often than that!) for the first couple of weeks. And for a couple of months, I would say my mood was a little darker than usual, but not ogre-calibre. As the months have gone on, I feel like my more-or-less usual self without needing those bursts of sugar – which I used to think were an integral part of me, something I couldn't possibly live without.

This far into the Year of Quit, I don't really think about it anymore. I think I've transformed into a person who doesn't drink pop.

And just look at that screen cap up there to see the amount of sugar I have not consumed in 300 days – over 11 KILOGRAMS! That's more than 5 and a half of those bags of white sugar you buy at the grocery store. Terrifying. And I thought nothing of it for years and years.

It's kind of amazing. And it's probably the first time in my life that I am glad to think of myself as a quitter.

*In the interest of absolute accuracy and transparency, I have been 98.5% pop-free for the past 300 days. Which means I have had pop four times, once by accident and the other times when I was feeling unbearably cranky. Nobody's perfect, and 98.5% is close enough for me.