Occasionally I’ll drink a ginger beer from a glass bottle medicinally. It’s a great way to clear the sinuses.
In the past I’d buy generic cream soda or root beer, as something fairly regularly.
I remember at 20/21 doing this as a way to keep calories up. 800 calories in a 69¢ or 79¢ (depends on which store, and public service announcement : some generic root beer may in fact be battery acid) 2L is 1000+ calories per dollar and very easy to consume.
I had went from 235 to under 215 over six months of improv training and what averaged out to $5/day grocery costs.
(Chicken or pork stew with potatoes over ramen or rice, tuna with ramen, milk, generic soda, that’s easily 80%+ of calories right there.)
Growing up my mom would get me the four packs of made with sugar glass bottled cream soda or root beer as a present for birthdays and Christmas.
When this happens I’ll drink them.
Occasionally I’ll be given a 20oz pepsi or buy a generic 20oz of something. Me drinking these is rarer and rarer.
Last summer I really started to notice that drinking high fructose corn syrup bothers me.
For this reason I pay the extra 10¢ to drink gatorade instead of powerade.
Ginger ale at work was an exception to the noticable negatives of hfcs, and my experience with ginger ale in the heat mixed with the bad reaction to high fructose corn syrup was part of what initially got me to start using ginger beers.
Drinking soda with hfcs?
I often get headaches, and can sense that I’m mentally slowing down.
An obese and dumb nation is hydrated on hfcs. It’s obvious.
I had also admitted to treating 2L of cream soda, pepsi/cherry pepsi, and root beer as if they were a different type of bottle, sitting there at weird hours hitting the bottle a liter plus at a time.
In a bad mood, at an hour I should be sleeping at, and sipping a bottle…what’s that remind you of?
Aside from the ginger beers (~0-2 a week) I haven’t had soda for months.
It strikes me as not being worth it.
I see soda drinking as self harm.
The pinnacle of that was doing the aforementioned alcoholic like behavior with a 2l of generic grape soda a couple/few years back.
Whenever it was I had a hfcs soda last, I didn’t really enjoy it.
(It was a likely 20oz root beer, I passed on a cotton candy one the other day.)
I’m not completely cold turkey on this, I’ll get a 20oz generic (orange I still seem to enjoy) to go with the meal if I’m truly craving it, but an old staple craving was cream soda and mozzarella sticks. I had this craving about a week ago.
I fought the craving for a few days as I did not see the soda being worth it, eventually just getting the mozzarella sticks having stood in front of the generic 2L thinking “nah”, laughing that I was saying no to something on sale that I was at least in theory craving when only a couple years ago I’d be happy to save the 10¢.
Now it’s not like I was some corn syrup weened american. My “heavy” periods of drinking soda (aside from 20/21) involve weeks, even months at a time without soda.
In SoCal two years back I had to think if I even had any soda.
Yes, I did. Only at restaurants, and to try two brands of apple soda, one a 20oz bottle, and one hecho en mexico in either 1L or 1.5L size.
Now whereas many will get a cold soda in a gas station or as impulse purchase in the grocery line, I tend to get milks instead.
At work, to props from a coworker, I’ve instead of anything sugary or caffeinated, when a gatorade is $2.50, for about a quarter more I’ve downed a half gallon of milk instead.
I’ve said this before, but in a pinch, on the road milk is available, generally your best option for calories.
It’ll hydrate you, and actually is nutritious.
Why exactly do people drink copious quantities of soda?
Persistence & Tenacity