How To Stop Drinking Pop

As mentioned in my previous post, I have decided to make a tutorial on how to stop drinking pop. There are a couple options that I recommend trying.
#1
Quit cold turkey. I understand that this is probably one of the harder ways to stop drinking pop, but it works. This was the method I used. I had a realization that this was not doing anything good for me and might as well stop. The thing with pop for me was the carbonation. The feeling in my stomach is what I liked. It wasn't until after I stopped drinking that I realized I also liked the caffeine. Be aware that when you stop drinking pop, the first few weeks will be rough because the sudden drop in caffeine could lead to headaches, excess sleepiness, or even restlessness (wow, I feel like I'm listing side effects on a commercial). Though the whole quitting cold turkey thing may be hard, it is very rewarding in the end.

#2
Slowly wean yourself off the pop. When I decided to quit cold turkey, I was at about two bottles of pop a day. In order to slowly wean yourself of, I recommend reducing your soda intake to about 1 every other day. Try that for about two weeks, and then to 1 or 2 every week. Do that for another couple of weeks, and finally, stop drinking pop altogether. In the end, that's about one month and you will have stopped drinking pop. This way is probably the easier of the two, but restraining yourself to just a little pop can be surprisingly difficult.

#3
Substitute pop with juice or water. If you go with juice, make sure you get 100% Juice because the other stuff has loads and loads of sugar that could in turn be worse for you than pop. I have found that when you drink water when you're craving sweets, is surprisingly suppresses your craving.

If you choose to do either of these, I highly recommend doing them with somebody. When I began not drinking pop, my friend JeepersCreepers was by my side. We kind of made a competition out of it. We were going to not drink pop until New Years Eve, and then we would drink it again. Well sure enough, somewhere around November, she began drinking pop again. This in turn made me want to prove that I could still do it, so I kept on with not drinking pop. I even chose not to drink pop on New Year’s (again, except for the fake champagne). The whole competition side of things pushes you to move forward and not give up. Not that you need to have a competition or anything, but a support system is always nice.

In conclusion, if you choose to do neither of the things listed above, I strongly believe you should give up pop, still. The positive side effects of not drinking pop greatly out-weigh the side effects drinking pop.

Will you stop drinking pop?

P.S. One little bonus I found is that when you order water when you go out to eat, you save a surprising amount of money. $0 for water is a lot less money than and average of $2.50 for soda.

Photo from moneyreasons.com