How to Break your Soda Habits in 2021
Trust me, you are not the only one looking to break the bad habit of excess soda in your diet. And if you assume that it is easy to just quit the practice, you need to rethink it. Medically, high soda consumption can significantly add to the body weight and is not recommended if you target weight loss.
If it were that easy, perhaps it won’t even be a topic of discussion today. In other words, it takes strategic and diligent efforts to make you altogether quit drinking soda. Some people who have tried so hard to quit still find these drinks almost everywhere around.
For instance, vending machines, fast food joints, supermarkets, and other stores sell all soda. The options range from Coke to Pepsi as well as other standard soda drinks that definitely excites sugar-lovers.
This fact brings me to some reasons why you should quit taking soda immediately, mostly if you have never felt so. But before then, you may disagree that you have a soda habit until you find out that you usually take a can or bottle per day.
As a weight loss expert, Ally’s angels is a dependable partner to achieve great fitness. However, the fitness journey depends on breaking certain habits, which may include soda intake.
In making matters worse, some can practically go out late at night because they could not find any more soda in the refrigerator. Or you can flare up just because you could not take your daily dosage of coke or Pepsi.
Why do you have to stop taking soda?
Let us get back to the starting point, why do you have to kick out the strange habit of depending on soda. Truth is, soft or diet drinks are of themselves, not a wrong choice. However, when we consume much more than average, we are harming our health.
Tracey Halliday, the spokesperson for the American Beverage Association, supports this stance in a statement. She agrees that consuming diet soft drinks at a moderate level is part of a balanced lifestyle.
However, not all consumers stop below the average level; many Americans, for instance, shoot beyond this limit. For example, medical research in 2004 found that Americans above age 2 get up to 21% of their total calories intake from beverages (https://www.webmd.com/diet/guide/calories-chart ).
Furthermore, the article discovered that Americans triple their calories from sweetened drinks between 1977 and 2001. Imagine what you stand to gain in weight loss while breaking challenging habits such as soda intake.
The very harm of soda drinks is through the high-fructose corn syrup found in them alongside ordinary sugar. Also, excess calories from the intake of soda contribute mainly to the possibility of obesity, according to Barry Popkin in an interview. Barry is the director of the University of North Carolina Interdisciplinary Obesity program.
How then do you really stop taking in soda once and for all?
While many experts have lashed at the need to stop the bad habit, the work’s nitty-gritty lies in the process. How can you kick this habit out of your life and replace it with healthy ones? Experts came up with four significant ideas of how to quit drinking soda and break the addiction:
1. Make a decision
Every habit started with a decision and, funnily enough, will end with a decision as well. Many factors may have contributed to the growth of the tradition. But with gentle and diligent steps, you can also untie this gridlock.
However, this decision may not also be as easy as it sounds. But just like other serious decisions that affect your life and career, such a decision directly impacts your health, and indeed your life requires some seriousness.
So, if your usual style is to present yourself with the pros and cons before making a sound judgment, by all means, do. Conversely, if you need a friend to help you stick to your decision, that is only fine. What is essential is to make the decision and stick to it.
If your goal is to lose weight, you need to start by breaking those habits that add to your weight. No doubt, one of such practices is soda, containing fructose syrup and sugar.
2. Go for diet sodas as alternatives
Instead of outrightly putting soda and soda-related drinks out of your refrigerator, you may consider some diet sodas instead. Paul Rozin, a University of Pennsylvania professor, suggested that a gradual switch to diet sodas can help overcome real soda intake.
In other words, if you take more than one bottle of soda per day, switch gradually from one bottle while the rest is diet soda. The next step is to reduce further from one can/bottle to less. Then as time goes on, you will still eventually reduce the diet soda intake as well.
3. Target quitting all caffeine food content
While kicking out soda from your diet and your body system, you must also consider dealing with caffeine-containing foods altogether. By reducing caffeinated foods, you are invariably dealing with the need to take in more soda.
The mild addiction to soda intake is basically because of the caffeine content, making it relatively harder to break. However, when you focus on the bigger enemy, you are doing a lot of good. Little by little, you draw closer to achieving the bigger goal, which may be weight loss.
Experts agree that the work of reducing caffeine and soda is a gradual one and requires you to work at it each day. Depending on your consumption times and days, you may have to adjust some stuff about your day. For instance, carefully select what you have for breakfast and lunch.
4. Stock up alternatives to soda instead
Instead of worrying about soda in your refrigerator, why don’t you deliberately replace these drinks with their alternatives? For instance, you can stock up your store with plenty of non-soda drinks, including water.
Some of the alternatives you should consider are soy milk, skim milk, green tea, and black tea or water. By the way, coffee cannot be an alternative to soda because of caffeine. Besides, there are other unique ways to take in these alternatives to nourish your body perfectly.
Conclusion
On a final note, focus on the goal to altogether remove soda intake from your diet while building a healthy life. Apart from a healthy lifestyle, you can also reduce your body weight, especially if you are tending towards obesity. Many experts agree that the most-effective way to quit a tough habit is to replace it with a good one.
Therefore, as you focus on the advantages that non-soda drinks give you, you get more encouragement for better health. On the other hand, achieving your dream also boosts your self-confidence in health and in different walks of life.
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