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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

Quitting cold turkey after a change of environment (moving somewhere else) is a good tip not just for addiction, but for any change in habit.

However, a more practical approach is to reduce the dosage slowly. That works especially well for sweet drinks. If you have a soda maker, you can slowly reduce the amount of syrup you use.

After a while, your tolerance for sweetness goes down, so things that previously felt not sweet enough feel just right, and things that felt just right before will now feel overly sweet. This will then also help with reducing sweet food.

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Gradual reduction is often more sustainable and manageable for most people. But for me that didn't work when I first started.

I go for very low sweetness drinks too. I don’t have a soda maker but I buy cans of plain sparkling water and add a dash of store bought kombucha to the can. Usually I take one sip off a fresh can and then pour in a little kombucha. You can buy flavored sparkling water but the flavorings they tend to use don’t sit well with my stomach. The right flavor of kombucha does the trick for me nicely though.

I would feel sick if I ever tried to drink a Coca-Cola. It’s incredible how much sugar they put in those things.

Another possibility is to add a dash of lemon juice.

I switched to diet cola, my sugar intake easily went down by 2/3 or more. I’m not sure I can quit cola though :) . I don’t really drink, I eat fairly healthy, I exercise, so if zero coke is my only vice, maybe I can be forgiven by the nutrition gods

I found that kombucha is an excellent, really low-calorie alternative to sugary drinks. Actually, to sugar in general. I have a sweet tooth and I have difficulty managing it some times.

Kombucha is filling and most times one can is enough to make the cravings stop completely. I suspect it's a combination of the slightly sweet taste with the good gut bacteria.

You unfortunately need to be fairly careful about the kombucha you select. Many of the big/common ones sold at grocery store chains oftentimes anywhere from 10-20mg sugar for a 12/14oz bottle (I've seen them with more than that too!). Better than soda but worse than many smaller brands or even local kombucha you might find at restaurants around town or a farmers market. My favorite kombuchas hover around 5mg per 12oz serving which is perfect.

You mean "10-20g sugar" not "mg"

I'm in the UK. I always check the nutritional information labels. So far I haven't found a single brand of kombucha that has more than about 20kcal/100ml. Most are around 1-5kcal.

For example, this Lo Bros [0] flavour has <0.5g of sugar, and only 3kcal/100ml.

[0] https://lobros.co/products/raspberry-blackcurrant-330ml-uk

Isn't kombucha basically the same as soda? High acidity (which is bad for dental health), which is offset with sugar (which coincidentally is also bad for dental health).

(At least, as a water drinker, they both taste equally strong)

Check my answer to the sibling comment [0].

I'm not sure about the acidity but it certainly doesn't taste very acidic despite the very low sugar content.

In fact, I find even the sweetest orange juice to be a lot more acidic than most kombuchas I've tried.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40837102

i stopped drinking soft drinks out of spite for my siblings. now they taunt me but i dont feel any urge to drink regardless of how it takes. for me it tastes like sugar water

I love sugar water. On my new ADHD meds I finally managed to kick soda for a few weeks, but I think I'll limit myself to one can a week on Saturdays because I miss the feeling. It's the only drug I do and all my friends are stoners, so..

Why not just a sugar-free option like Coke Zero?

The sugar-free sweeteners taste odd to me, I haven't found one I like

You won’t like any of them out of the gate, but if you drink it for a month you won’t notice it much at all. It’s how I got 2/3 to 3/4 of the sugar out of my life along with dropping processed foods.

I drank my mountain dew today and it just wasn't as good as I remember. Maybe I can completely kick it

Cold Turkey has always worked best for me. Quitting smoking by gradual reduction just never seemed practical. If it works for others, more power to them!

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