Quitting Diet Coke & The Terrible Thirst

Me: You know what's great about giving up diet coke?

Ben: What?

Me: NOTHING!! Nothing is good about giving up diet coke, it's fucking pointless and stupid and pointless! Seriously, I have not noticed any difference!! No headaches, no increased energy, no improved hydration! I'm losing weight only because I'm dieting in the week AND THAT’S ANOTHER THING! I'm not eating carbs during the week, I'm not drinking during the week, I'm limiting sugar and I ALSO can't drink diet coke! It's double balls and bollocks!!!!

Ben: (pauses while he finishes his toast) Your skin looks better.

Me: I...! What?

Ben: Your skin is very bright. You’ve drinking more water, and you have less blemishes.

Me: ...Really?

Ben: Yes.

Me: Oh. Oh. Well. Wait, are you saying I had blemishes before?

(Ben puts his head in his hands)


It’s fair to say that I have a problem. Yes, yes, we all enjoy my many ramblings about the drinking of gin and the drinking of beer and why drinking is great and why you should all be drinking all of the time. But this isn’t about THAT. This post is entirely alcohol free. Like a Becks Blue. Or a really well behaved child.

My one and true addiction is diet coke. An addiction I recently kicked. And I’m feeling reeeaallly pissy about it.

That'll do, Diet Coke. That'll do.

I could no more avoid the lure of a ‘healthy January’ than you lot could. (Don’t pretend you did spend the majority of this month juicing cucumbers in an effort to remove those festive pounds and that hump of residual alcohol). For the most part, I was perfectly happy with my plan: no carbs or alcohol during the week, limited sugar, and buckets of water. And I joined the gym a couple of days ago (I know – ME), and am now constantly sore and in Lycra. So far, I’ve lost 5lbs in 3 weeks (without exercise) and have only another 7lbs to go before I hit my ‘woooo MAMA’ weight.

YET. I made a decision on 12th January to cut out Diet Coke once an for all.

Yep. Courtesy of Jezebel.com

I used to drink Diet Coke the same way normal people drink tea or coffee, or water: all the time, every day, morning noon and night. Before the Diet Coke ban, I would quaff two to three 500ml bottles of ice cold DC at work – one at around 9am – and would drink another couple of glasses at home, and swig from my big fridge bottle every so often before bed. At the weekends, I’d probably get through two to three litres. I would also open little bottles while shopping because I couldn’t wait until I got home to quench my thirst.

I’m not sure when the addiction started (though I’m pretty sure Dad was hooked on the stuff), but I drink it because I genuinely love the taste. No other brand of diet cola has ever come close (don’t get me started on Pepsi). I love the refreshing tangy fizz, I love how it makes hangovers go away, I love pouring myself a tall frosty glass while I do the house work on Saturday mornings. And given that I have to watch nearly everything I eat, a tasty one calorie beverage is a welcome friend in dark times.

Thank you Buzzfeed

But aside from the taste, part of me kept drinking the brown stuff just to annoy the never ending stream of c***s who delighted in lecturing me about the horrors of all diet sodas.

Oh I NEVER tired of strangers confronting me in shops, crying 'oh you shouldn't drink that stuff, love, full of chemicals it is!" Nine times out of ten, their breath was thick with the stench of fags. I NEVER got a stress headache from being told ‘oh, we don’t have soft drinks’ by conference organizers while they flooded boardrooms with industrial strength coffee. Once, a broken-toothed man lying on the pavement outside Oddbins, and swigging some sort of thick blue liquid from a plastic jar, clocked my bottle of DC and shook his head pityingly.

When did Diet Coke become a drink so demonized that meth heads could pass judgement on it? Coffee & tea are so mainstream that no one bats an eyelid when Glenda from Purchasing staggers to the office peculator for her fifth cup before 11am. Yet when it comes to Diet Coke, all you get are lectures on how aspartame will strip out your insides and bring back Nazi Germany.
 
So why give it up, and grant the evil hordes their victory dance? Eh. There’s no denying DC is full of nasty additives and chemicals. It has just one calorie, but it more than makes up for that in pure unadulterated evil.

So. Here’s how it’s been going…

No withdrawal symptoms

The crippling headaches I had been promised by various websites, magazines and witch doctors did not arrive. On my first day of quitting, I did feel a bit more sluggish but simply compensated with an extra cup of tea (I only have 2 or 3 a day in total, no sugar), and lots of extra water. But I was otherwise fine, and have done ever since. I’m guessing the caffeine wasn’t affecting me as much as I thought.

…Except for some minor stomach cramps

Fizzy chemical-laden drinks have clearly taken their toll on my innards, as I noticed some mild  stomach aches and a dash of nausea when I had my morning cup of tea in the first week. My body’s new wake-up call of boiling plant stew and cow juice in place of fizzy acid was not appreciated. It didn't last long, but it did make me wonder....what damage have I been doing to my stomach for it to react so?

I am thirsty all the time – and always have been

I’ve miss the taste of Diet Coke. Badly. I associate the taste with the quenching of my thirst, and I hate other liquids for not stepping up to the mark. Which brought me to the more worrying revelation…

I have a terrible thirst. I’ve never noticed just how much liquid I drink and how fast I drink it. I’ve been guzzling diet coke like there was no tomorrow, as it was my main source of fluid, but any drink I have to hand is gulped down rapidly: water, tea, and our good friend alcohol. It’s part of the reason I drink pints when I'm out - it's a long drink and I see it as value for money. I can't tell you how many times I've bought a round and then watched friends delicately sip their mixers for 30mins, while I slump gasping on the table, begging for it to be someone’s round soon.

I had to drink all of this wine to compensate for the loss of Diet Coke. HAD to.

Honestly, this was something I only ever really worried about with booze, but now I see that I have probably been under-drinking on all counts, and have needed to up my water intake for some time. I’ve also reduced my salt consumption accordingly*

Hangovers from hell

Oh this was not fun. My first morning after a night on the booze, I woke with a pounding headache. I’d had four pints and quite a bit of water, which normally leaves me trouble free. But the pain in my head persisted until around lunchtime. Maybe it’s the bitterness talking, but I was convinced a Diet Coke would have sorted that bad boy right out.

The next instance was worse. After a night at a friend’s house, where we drank all the wine in Ashford, I woke up feeling like death and barely made it through our fry up. On the walk home, I begged Ben to get me some sparkling water - anything to replicate the DC taste - and spent the next couple of hours under the duvet, hugging the water bottle, whispering 'it's not the same, I'll never love you like I loved it'.

My skin and my body - HELLO

It was half way into week two when I launched into my opening rant with the beau. And unfortunately, he was right. The lack of cola and the increase in water has made a difference. My skin is looking brighter than normal, and blemishes vanish much quicker than usual. I also feel…I don’t know, a bit cleaner? I think this is down to me having a lot more water during the day, and it is the one thing keeping me on track.

Has DC really been the cause of those pesky little blemishes cropping up on my chin? Has my shocking lack of water been pushing me slowly towards the grave and ugliness? Will I survive this coming weekend, where Miscriant and I will attempt to break Brighton?

Let’s see how this bad boy plays out.

Have you quit Diet Coke? How did you find it? What have been the best and worst parts of your struggle? Tell me about it, please, or I’ll get bored and lonely.

*My sister will enjoy reading this statement as she has, for years, claimed I have way too much salt in my food. This is based on one occasion TWELVE YEARS GO when she visited me when I was ill and tried a bit of food from a plate that I had abandoned and actually screamed about the salt in it. I had left that food because I had accidentally spilled salt on it and I found it inedible, but she would not be told. Since then, I have been a salt addict in her eyes. She still doesn’t believe me, she thinks I’m sprinkling salt on this blog right now, even as I type.