Confessions of a soft drink junkie

We’ve all got weaknesses. For Superman, it’s kryptonite. For the Green Lantern, it was the color yellow, even though that is quite possibly the dumbest weakness ever. Randy Quaid’s weakness is the Hollywood Illuminati who are placing tiny microphones in his toilet paper rolls to monitor his every move (or movement, if you’re into toilet humor).

As for me, my weakness used to be soft drinks. If you’re from Michigan, you’re probably asking yourself “What the hell is a soft drink?” To clarify, it’s a carbonated beverage that comes in bottles or cans, usually containing lots of sugar and branded with ultra hip names like Jolt, Vault, Kick, Surge, or Canada Dry White Tea Ginger Ale with Raspberry. That probably didn’t help at all since 95% of those beverages no longer exist, so for the sake of simplicity: soft drink is another name for ‘pop’. And boy did I used to love pop.

Around ten years ago, when President Obama was still an angsty teenager (I have no clue how old Obama is), bottles of Pepsi didn’t have those big black numbers on the front of the label warning potential suitors about how many calories were inside that 20 ounce container of liquid heaven. All I knew back then is that I wanted at least three bottles of that delicious brown sludge every day, and come hell or 750 total calories, I would drink every last drop.

When it wasn’t Pepsi, it was Sierra Mist, or Mountain Dew, or Dr Pepper, or Squirt… the list goes on. Not seen in this list: water. It took me a long time to realize that drinking that much soda was probably unhealthy, no matter how cool the commercials on television portrayed these addictive beverages. I mean, Enrique Iglesias really, really wanted me to keep drinking Pepsi, but I had to consider that maybe Enrique Iglesias didn’t know what was best for me. Also I am pretty certain that Enrique Iglesias is not a doctor or nutritionist, and that he may have actually been getting paid to tell people to drink more soda.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done is give up drinking soda, but I made the smart choice and started drinking diet soda instead. I knew that diet soda was good for me because the cans said I was making a “smart choice” whenever I bought a case of the stuff. At first, Diet Pepsi tasted like the liquid you find in the bottom of the crisper when all of the produce in the refrigerator spoils and turns to goo. There was no way I could switch to this swill! I would sooner drink fabric softener, or possibly the newly introduced spinoff — Fabric Softener Code Red.

But I forced myself to stick with it, and before long I was addicted to diet soda instead of regular soda. Success! Right? Right??

Well a few years later I decided that it probably wasn’t healthy for me to keep drinking so much diet soda, either. So no matter how badly P. Diddy wanted me to keep chugging those cans of Diet Pepsi, it just had to stop before my body dried up, my bones became calcified, and I turned into a mummy or Martin Landau.

But what is the next logical step after diet soda? Gatorade? No, too much sodium in those. Water? What kind of monster are you? How dare you suggest water! Speaking of Monster — I briefly dabbled in energy drinks, but I had to start selling my plasma in order to afford them. Eventually the lady at the lab told me that my blood was too contaminated from the energy drinks for them to allow me to keep donating, so I continued my search for a delicious beverage to replace sodas.

Thankfully, there are a number of delicious alternatives, some of which might even be good for me! Or, at the very least, not completely filled with toxic ingredients. Does anyone even know what taurine is, anyway? Should I be drinking that or injecting it into my butt muscles?

Anyway, on to the happy ending! Recently, I have become a huge fan of tea, both hot and cold. Who knew that iced green tea was both delicious and refreshing? On top of that, it comes in a variety of subtle fruit flavors. Whereas Mountain Dew delivered all sorts of new flavors that were based on colors (Yum, this new Mountain Dew tastes like purple!), the teas that I’ve been trying have blueberry, pomegranate, and sometimes even a delectable peach flavor to them.

I even found a can of sparkling green tea, which I believe is probably tea’s way of telling soda to SUCK IT! because there’s a new carbonated drink in town. I definitely feel better after drinking tea than I ever did after consuming 20 or more ounces of Fanta. (And even though Fanta comes in various fruit flavors, don’t be fooled — it still follows the Mountain Dew formula of tasting like chemically charged colors.)

I confess that I still have the occasional Diet Dr Pepper, so I can’t claim to be 100% clean. You should cut me some slack, though, because I achieved all of this on my own, without even attending a single Sodaholics Anonymous meeting or checking into rehab. The good news is that I rarely ever crave a soda anymore. In fact, I went through a period where I would buy a bottle of Diet Coke and end up dumping most of it out — and not just because it’s Diet Coke and tastes like fertilizer. But a can of tea or a fruit flavored soda water — I’ll drink those in two big gulps. Plain ol’ water, on the other hand — GTFO. How dare you keep bringing up water in my blog.

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