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[RedKing]

After the whole flooding incidents in early 2013 (got trashed New Year's Eve, accidentally flooded my roommate's house; got drunk again in February, wrecked my car and flood the house again), I went cold turkey on booze. Not even beer.


Finally had a beer in about July 2013 in the Atlanta airport, because I figured I couldn't do much damage strapped into a plane. Since then, I've slowly worked my way back into social drinking (including a margarita not too long ago, and split a hurricane with my GF the other night while out to dinner).


In my case, it wasn't so much an issue of breaking an addiction as getting my life to a place where when I did drink, I didn't get possessed with the urge to keep drinking full speed until I hit the wall. It's a lot easier to avoid alcoholism when life is good. :-/

Hugs to ya Truean. You can do it.

[alway]

With soda, you're dealing with two things:
1. the sugar
2. the caffeine

I find sugar tends to be somewhat self-reinforcing, and so just cutting down on that in general helps deal with that side of things.

Then there's the caffeine. For that, I recommend switching to teas or coffee. I mostly drank soda for the caffeine up until university, at which point I was drinking about 1.5L a day. At that point, it was obviously silly (especially when I went to the dentist and they immediately noticed I drank a lot of soda just by looking at my teeth). So I gave up soda for coffee.

Only problem was, I really disliked the taste of coffee; so to get it over with more quickly, I simply started drinking plain espresso shots. 2/3 of an espresso shot is about the equivalent of the caffeine in a 12 oz can of soda.

Espresso shots also have quite a powerful taste to them; one which varies quite a bit depending on what sort of coffee shop you go to. Some of this taste will stay in your mouth for hours (or until you next eat), which is beneficial both because coffee is an appetite suppressant (and so you won't even really want soda or other sugary snacks) and because it enhances the psychological (placebo) effects contributing to your caffeine buzz.

This will likely strengthen your dependence on caffeine; however, plain espresso shots have effectively no calories or other negative stuff associated with them, and some amount of coffee intake can actually be good for you. So if you really want to get off caffeine at some point in the future, fine; but if not, no worries, since it isn't really harming you any more outside of the dependence itself.

Of course, the major caveat to this is it has to be plain coffee or espresso. Starbucks dessert coffee drinks actually have more sugar and such than even sodas. Avoid creamers, milk, and so on, as they only make it simultaneously less healthy and more expensive. Depending on your past experience with coffee, this may be somewhat repulsive at first, but be gung-ho about it long enough and you will start to enjoy it.