Today is the day I give up Soda

From the time I was a teenager until I was 36 years old, I didn't drink much soda/pop/coke* at all. I cleaned up eating and drinking majorly as I worked out to prepare for my college scholarship. And not drinking soda was top of the list. I rarely drank it. Maybe once a month. Maybe a few times a year.

And then, following Hannah's birth, I started having terrible migraines. I had always had them now and then, but hormonally, they got really bad after she was born. Like debilitating. They started with blurry vision and ended up leaving me sick to my stomach. Trying to avoid narcotics (and yes, I tried nearly every migraine medicine known to man with no help), I started a cocktail of Tylenol, Ibuprofen, and Caffeine during the week each month that I would be plagued by these terrible visitors.

It didn't keep me migraine-free, but it allowed me to function through them and continue being a mom. I didn't have the luxury of lying in a dark room for hours.

However, at the same time, I stopped being able to nap regularly. Up until Hannah, I had napped every afternoon. (I called it my wipe-your-own-butt-time.) But four kids had prevented that possibility. So I started using the Caffeine to get me through my mid-afternoon hump as well. Now I was using soda for migraines and lack of sleep.

For the last two years, I've been going on and off soda. I'm not drinking a ton, but I am probably, on average, drinking 4-5 Mountain Dews a week. I have always prided myself on not drinking my calories.

And now I am doing just that.

This part of the country has a terrible problem with obesity. And when I go shopping, people have soda just exploding in their cart. They are drinking it all the time. I don't want that for myself or my kids. And so I have decided that as of today, I am done.

I would really like to lose the last ten pounds that has not come up since Hannah. I am getting tons of exercise. But I can't get it off. And I know that these extra calories are to blame.

I have decided that no headache or fatigue is going to allow me to keep doing this. We do not allow our kids to drink soda at all. It is actually one of our only hard and fast parental rules. We decided to do this because soda seems to be a learned taste and because we truly believe, unlike junk food, soda is addicting. So every time I drink it, I have to justify to them why it is okay that I do it this time but not okay that they do it.

This morning I told the kids I am done with soda. And if I drink one, I have to pay each of them FIVE DOLLARS out of my personal blow money envelope. I've also set up a reward system for myself. If I make it a week, I get a reward. If I make it a month, I get a really great reward.

So that's it. I am blogging about it because I want accountability. I am going to do this.

Stay tuned.

*I have found that you know what people call soda/pop/coke by how they describe a machine used to buy it. Do you call it a soda machine? Then you use the word "soda". If it is a pop machine, then you are a "pop" word user. And of course, then there are the coke machine people who call it all Coke even if they mean they want a Mountain Dew.