About four or five years ago, My Mister and I went cold-turkey and gave up soda pop. I was working sort of dumb hours at the time – a little late evenings and whatnot, and was under a bit of stress and realized I was drinking about six to eight Diet Pepsi’s a day. Now, the verdict is still out for me on whether or not artificial sweeteners is a direct contributor to cancer – I mean, it is in lab mice, so how far off could we be from it? – but I didn’t want the calories of regular soda, either. Not at that level of consumption for sure.
Changes needed to be made, so we just gave it up one day. Just like that. No more. We switched to unsweetened iced tea or water.
Luckily, I love water. It has long been my non-alcoholic beverage of choice.
I frankly cannot wrap my head around people who vehemently declare, “I just can’t stand water!” Oh, really? How do you feel about oxygen?? The body is made up of 75% water (I just made that stat up, but I feel it’s close enough and I’m too lazy to click to a new tab and fact check, plus I’m under timing constraints because I have company coming and this is just a little break-ie-o from cleaning, and I realize in the time I typed this I could have just fact checked, but well, we’re this deep into this run on sentence by now so we’re sticking with it, whew, it’s done) so how in the world can someone say they, “Don’t like water,” without sounding like an idiot. They can’t, Reader. And if you’re someone who declares you “can’t stand water” well, keep it to yourself or I’ll give you an idiot crown. Little kids in Africa travel 15 miles barefoot with a little earthen bowl to collect drinking water, braving lions and other wild things that would eat them, just to get water. That’s how important water is. And if you still don’t think you like water, Reader, I challenge you to go three days with nothing in your mouth and tell me how much you don’t want a glass of water. Do it in the middle of the salty ocean, on an open-roof raft, just like in the movie Unbroken, with the blazing sun beating down on you. Then tell me how you don’t want a glass of water.
There. ~dismounts from soapbox~
But back to the original intent of this post, which is how I was insufferably gloating casually mentioning how I don’t drink much soda any longer. After the initial hard-stop, to kill the craving for soda, I allowed myself to have an occasional soda, because as soon as I think I can never ever have something again, it’s all-consuming for me. So I have soda occasionally. Usually a regular, not diet, because they are so infrequent that I don’t care about that little bit of calories. So if you see me drinking a soda sometime, Reader, don’t get all pointy-fingers at me. I allow myself to have some. Like with my Jack, or after too much drinking of the Jack & coke, when nothing is as good as a McDonald’s fountain soda.
So there’s that.
And then this past January My Mister proclaimed that he was giving up fast food. And so I did, too, because what’s good for the goose’s waistline should be good for the gander’s, too.
We were becoming late-night Taco Bell junkies. And it was no thought at all to get a Big Mac & fries when we were out and about.
So we gave it up. Cold turkey. A few items were “grandfathered” in, in particular we could get McDonald’s coffee, maybe a McDonald’s breakfast sammich, Wendy’s chili, salad and baked potato. That was the extent of it.
And then after about three months we figured we were good, and we could once again loosen the reigns a little and dabble back in the cholesterol-ladden fast-food world should the mood strike. Again, I hate saying, “I can never have.” Because sometimes ya change your mind, ya know? And I didn’t want a mind-change to feel like a total un-do, but rather the occasional treat.
So we had McDonald’s once.
And after four months of no fast food?
It was gross.
But then we tried again one night, when we were out late and had an early dinner, and perhaps some drinks were involved, so we did the Taco Bell run.
And it was gross.
Then this very morning I had an early awakening and was out and about and thought, “I’m going to treat myself to McDonald’s coffee and a Big Breakfast!”
At the drive through? As I was about to order? I noticed the calories on the Big Breakfast.
Reader.
1350.
I still ordered it, because I was in line and committed at this point. But the whole ride home I thought about those calories, and how it’s almost a whole entire day’s worth – or should be for a girl – and that was ridiculous.
I got it home and ate a quarter of it. A bite of this, a bite of that, and threw the rest in the trash, including my very favorite thing from there, the hashbrown.
The calories just didn’t seem worth it. The fast food flavor is no longer a temptress. At least for today. I don’t want to be too insufferable about it, because the next thing you know I’ll have my head buried in a new boatload of fries, which I saw was McDonald’s newest thing.
As a result of these two big health changing shifts, guess how much weight I’ve lost, Reader? Because foregoing soda and fast food would have a really big impact.
So go ahead. Guess.
Alrightie, I know you hate guessing games, so I’ll just tell you how much my two “haha I’m better than you at fast food and soda avoidance” has netted me in the weight loss game.
Nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
Not one pound lighter from these two sorta huge lifestyle switches.
Weight loss is really rude.
So there you have it. I’m not sure what we’ve learned here today, except drink some water for the African children who trekked 15 miles each way and fought off lions to get some, and that sometimes big changes have zero visible results.
It makes a poor argument for me to give up cake.