If You Can’t Lose Weight You Might Want to Change This

How the soda industry is holding our waistlines hostage.

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The verdict is in folks. If you’ve been dieting, struggling, battling with your body to lose weight and can’t…you may be poisoning yourself the whole time.

That is, if you started your weightloss journey and kept holding on to that one indulgence — Sugary soft drinks.

The soda industry has been holding your waistline hostage. And it’s time for you to stop this addiction. It’s time to admit that sodas are ruining your health — and your waistline!

Facts About Soft Drinks

No amount of dieting, no amount of healthy eating, no amount of workouts or sweat or endurance runs you do..can make up for pouring TONS of sugar down your throat each day.

And let’s face it…sodas are like a sugar bomb to your system.

How often do you just drink one of them? Likely, if you drink sodas — you drink them a lot. Maybe even excessively. Why are we doing this? As it turns out — all that soda does more than sweeten and tickle your tongue with bubbles.

It actually changes your health.

Averaging just one can of a sugary beverage per day had a 20% higher risk of having a heart attack. — More Soda Facts

The Impacts of Sugary Soft Drinks on Your Health

I spoke with Blanca Garcia, Registered Dietitian Nutritionist with Health Canal about how sugary soft drinks are ruining our health.

Garcia admits that when she was studying to be a dietician — she had an epiphany.

How could she, in good faith, with all that she was learning about health — continue to drink sugary soft drinks? She shared with me about her own personal experience with sodas:

I had made soda so vital in my life that I needed the sugar to stay awake for study sessions. There came a point when I asked myself, here I am learning about health behaviors but not practicing what I will preach. I started to read up on soda and its effects on health, and that is all I needed to know to stop drinking soda.

I recently also felt this way. As a health and wellness writer professionally, it felt wrong for me to drink half of a 2-liter bottle (+) of Cheerwine soda every day of the week. I woke up one night feeling haunted, guilty, done. I haven’t had a soda since and it’s been a life-changing thing for me. Finally, after trying for years — the weight is starting to come off.

Garcia discussed with me why this might be so hard for us to stop drinking sodas each day…and why we seem to drink more and more of them. She told me that “the reality is that soda is addictive, you never truly stop craving it.”

And Garcia’s right — sodas are highly addictive.

But why?

The Addiction Risks of Sugary Soft Drinks

Sugary soft drinks are formulated with several problematic ingredients:

• Addictive caffeine
• Addictive sugars
• Syrups and additives that harm our teeth and our health

To put this in perspective, one 12-oz can of Coke contains the equivalent of TEN TEASPOONS OF SUGAR. That’s 39 grams of sugar.

TEN teaspoons.

Now, how many sodas do you drink each day? How much sugar is that in the course of a day?

I encourage you to do the math on your own soda/sugar consumption.

How Much Sugar Are You Drinking?

I was drinking 1/2 of a 2-liter bottle of Cheerwine soda every day. 12 ounces of Cheerwine contains 42 grams of sugar. Let’s say that’s 11 teaspoons (by comparison to the previous Coke example.)

That’s 3.5 g of sugar per ounce. 1/2 of a 2 liter is one liter. There are 33.8 ounces in a liter. 33.8 x 3.5 g = 118.3 GRAMS OF SUGAR EVERY SINGLE DAY

That’s roughly three 12 oz cans at roughly 11 teaspoons of sugar = Imagine eating 33+ teaspoons of sugar every single day.

You may, essentially, be doing this right now. Or worse.

The math makes it simple.

Sodas are ruining our health by filling us with TONS of sugar while also dosing us with a DRUG — caffeine. Complicating matters; drinking sodas helps trigger dopamine release, our body’s natural “happy hormone.”

We chase that happy feeling by — you guessed it! — drinking more of them.

Read more about how our cravings are transformed into addictions when we drink these sugary drinks regularly:

The Health Risks of Sugary Sodas

Garcia shared her “hit-list” of the bad effects of drinking sugary carbonated drinks regularly:

• Contributes to obesity and weight-related health conditions.
• Increases risks of diabetes
• May contribute to cardiovascular disease
• Causes tooth decay and destruction to your tooth enamel

Garcia discussed more about the horrid tooth decay from soft drink consumption, causing, as she explained it “Tooth decay-related to simple sugars that feed germs that ferment the sugars and make acid that erodes teeth. Also, soft drinks are acidic and contribute to tooth enamel decay.”

Craving sugar? — Try this healthy option instead!

Aside from the effect all that sugary syrup has on our teeth, it’s the whole-health damages that can create poor health. In a sense, we drink what’s heavily advertised to us, we become hooked, we drink more of it — then, we need medical care for all the complications it gives us.

(Does that remind you of anything? How about the tobacco industry?)

This guy nearly ruined his health with a soda dependency. The NY Times covered his story of 30 Pepsi cans a day for decades just this week. He quit with hypnotherapy.

What Medical Science Says About Soft Drinks

If that’s not enough to convince you…let’s take a look at actual medical studies on the harmful effects of regularly drinking sodas:

1. Sugary sodas may have a carcinogenic link as described in this study performed by Ismail AI, Burt BA, Eklund SA: “A significant positive association was found between the frequencies of at- and between-meal consumption of soft drinks and high DMFT scores.”
2. One study published in 2007 showed a higher risk of “increased serum uric acid levels and the risk of gout.”
3. Another study published in 2010 explained that sugary soft drinks can contribute to liver problems: “Inappropriate dietary fat intake, excessive intake of soft drinks, insulin resistance and increased oxidative stress combine to increase free fatty acid delivery to the liver, and increased hepatic triglyceride accumulation contributes to fatty liver.”
4. This Icelandic study from 2005 recommends reduction of sodas to reduce their erosive potential.

Some fascinating information about soft drinks and public health:

How to Stop a Soda Dependency

Now that you’re convinced there’s a problem…how can you stop drinking something you love?

First, learn not to love it. Learn to remind yourself with every sip that you are poisoning your body.

Kick the Soda Habit

1. Quit “cold turkey” — Plan for withdrawal, but know — soon your head will feel better. Your food will taste better. You will feel much better.
2. Wean yourself off — Take it slow. Reduce your soda consumption bit by bit each day until you feel comfortable stopping them altogether. This method may help if you are prone to headaches without caffeine.
3. Stop buying them — Just drink water! You can do water infusions to make water more fun. Remind yourself each day of how much money you’ll save by skipping the soda aisle. Plus, you’ll have more room in the pantry for healthier alternatives!
4. Find an alternative — If you need the bubbly feel of sodas, try adding a little carbonated water to a fruit juice and weaning yourself off this concoction. Then, it’s a matter of losing the carbonated taste bit by bit without worrying over caffeine withdrawal at the same time.
5. Focus more on healthful eating — If you spend more energy on healthful eating, you’ll less likely want to sacrifice your calorie count for sodas.
6. Reward yourself with dopamine — Do something fun when you start craving sodas. Drink a smoothie, take a walk, get in some exercise, call a friend. Distract yourself from the craving and drink some water. You’ve got this!

Don’t miss this heart health tip that’ll also help trim your waistline!

Thanks for reading today about how sugary soft drinks are ruining our health and our waistlines.

Take care, dear human.

~Christina M. Ward: Freelance CBD, health, wellness, & beauty writer for 3 international companies; ghostwriter for several others. Writing is paving her way to the ocean. Here’s how you can learn more about writing for a living. Here’s how you can learn more about poetry.

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