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If you are asking yourself: Why would anyone want to give up sweet carbonated beverages??? Then you may want to pick another item to read, for the rest of this post is for those with a desire to give these up.

For the purpose of the rest of this blog I will refer to the carbonated drinks(Pepsi, Coke, Mountain Dew, etc) as PSC (Pop/Soda/Coke). This will prevent any regional arguments about what exactly to call these beverages.

Their are several reasons for wanting to give up PSC. Perhaps you want to lower your sugar intake. Maybe lower the amount of caffeine. For the diet drinkers out there maybe its cutting back on Phenylalanine?

I personally crossed PSC off of the habit list back when I was 15. I started practicing for high school football and was strongly advised to drink only water before, during and after practices. PSC would impact my performance it was said because caffeine, sugar and more were bad for endurance training and strength. So there it was after my initial dismay, I parted with my PSC lifestyle with a big cup of water in hand.

So how can you cut out PSC?

Step#1: Prepare yourself. If you aren’t ready to stop drinking it, you won’t. If you don’t have anything else to drink then you won’t quit for long. My suggestion would be to focus on this goal. Write it down, and set a short term date that you will quit for good. Buy bottles of water. These will help in a moment of weakness when PSC rears its ugly head. Keep in mind ALL dine-out places have plenty of water, all you have to do is ask. Please remember that ALL PSC machines also have water as well.

Step#2: Start changing your Self-Talk. This is the little voice in your head that will tell you its ok to drink PSC when you’re having a bad day, or when you are really thirsty, or when you are ordering a Combo Meal at McD’s. You have to step in and tell yourself that this is not in my best interests. The person who knows your Self-Talk best is you. You have to sell yourself on this for it to work. You know what objections it will have, so you must be prepared to overcome those each time they are brought up.

Step#3a: Ok this is where those rare strong folks out there give it up. Done. End of story. It will be tough, but its all or nothing. I give great Kudos to those individuals.

Step#3b: For the rest of us: Ease your way toward your ultimate goal date. Talk yourself out of that daily PSC during lunch, or at dinner. Each week cut out 1 PSC per day, and eventually you’ll be down to Zero. As mentioned earlier, make sure you know what your options are when you are thirsty.

Say goodbye to PSC, and hello to the new world of healthy non-carbonated beverages like WATER!

To read up some more on healthy eating stop by the 3-2 Eating plan post.

A.D.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 11:14 pm and is filed under Discipline, Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.