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Soda is addictive. At my worst, I drank 6 Cokes a day. I've been a heavy Coke drinker for a long, long time. I have a psychological dependence on it, so when I'm particularly stressed, I need to guzzle it down.

I'm down to about 1-2 Cokes every week. I will crumble and drink a 20 oz Coke about once a week and drink water or ice tea (either unsweetened or low-sweetened (90 calories)).

The irony is that an equivalent glass of milk has 2x the number of calories as Coke, but I'll drink a glass of milk a day for the calcium, etc.

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Congrats on the impressive progress.

How did you get started/what steps did you take? Was it a straight switch to water (with occasional back-slide), or did you just slowly progress away from the soda one drink at a time?

Thanks but it's far from impressive. It's been years. I've gone back and forth and did no-carb a few times (lost 30 lbs once and then fell off the wagon) which helped me break the habit. But then someone stressful would occur and I was back to 1-2 Cokes a day for a while.

Finally I scared myself enough that sugar drinks cause pancreatic cancer (no evidence but I'm still scared) and high fructose corn syrup causes fatty liver disease, which I actually do have, which in turn can lead to cirrhosis and/or liver cancer.

From that I basically scared myself straight. I started drinking a lot of unsweetened tea actually, and then substituted a little sweet tea for Coke. Eventually I've just broken the habit of drinking Coke every day and drinking tea instead and these days a lot of water as well.

Since I don't drink tea or coffee (I dislike warm drinks, especially in summer) I was left with soft drinks, juices or plain water. And since most places don't offer tasty water and each place has different juices I went with soft drinks - Cola is universal!

You could say that I used a lot of it but then one day I decided to see if I would be able to quit and so I just did it. It wasn't hard at all and it did not change the way I feel. I started drinking mostly water instead (it is still hard to get tasty water so I ask for a slice of lemon in it whenever it is available). Now I sometimes go for freshly squeezed juice and from time to time I drink some soft drinks but I do not depend on them like I did before.

Yeah but in milk, calories are much more than just sugar. It's good protein and fats (good fats?). So sodas can't compete.

Honestly you need more than just one or two data points to conclude a substance is addictive. For pretty much anything you could always find a small number of people who have trouble avoiding it.

If you want to ignore the science, you can argue that soda isn't addictive. We know that sugar and caffeine each in isolation are addictive. We also know that the combination is addictive. But all the studies could also be "data points." It really comes down to how many data points you feel qualifies for legitimacy/where the threshold is.

For example

Caffeine:

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/104/4/1144/4557113 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S18762... https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/262054?jou...

Sugar:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976340... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026156140... https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/139/3/623/4670401

Both together:

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cdar/2011/0000000... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03069... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-015-0634-5

Soda, specifically, hasn't got many studies that directly look at its addictiveness. But its ingredients (namely sugar and caffeine) have tons of studies and meta-studies that looked into them vis-a-vis food addiction, and most concluded there was some addictive/habit-forming properties.

Where did I ignore science? My whole point was that you need to provide scientific evidence if you want to conclude a substance is addictive, not just 1 data point from yourself. Otherwise I would just cite myself because I stopped drinking soda the day I decided to and my body couldn't care less, and now we're back at square one.

Just because someone says a fact and then a personal anecdote doesn't mean there isn't lots of scientific proof behind that fact. Not every comment needs to be someone stating a fact and then including pages of references supporting that fact.

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