Goodbye diet Coke, I will miss you

I drink too much diet Coke.

I know all those chemicals can’t possibly be good for me, but it’s an acquired taste. I have a buddy who once told me I drank so much of it that I would someday grow a tail.

This is how I’ve gotten my caffeine ever since my teen years. Sure, I’ve tried coffee, but the only way I can put it down is if it’s iced and combined with a quarter-cup of sugar and topped with whipped cream, and then I’m too embarrassed to drink it. I’ve tried to quit caffeine before, but I always seem to fall off the wagon when work gets rough or I’m at a conference or the day ends in ‘y’.

And I’m one of those guys who is finicky at restaurants and is actually disappointed when they say “is Diet Pepsi OK?” Ugh, well alright, but can you stick a lemon in it?

So it is with deep sadness that yesterday was my last diet Coke.

I wouldn’t go cold turkey (I’ve done that in the past, no fun), so this has been my process for the past few months: each Monday I’d reduce my daily limit of diet Cokes and keep to it for a week. In the past I’ve been much worse on the daily intake scale, but when I started tapering this time I was drinking six cans of diet Coke a day. So week one I dropped to “only” five cans per day.

Week two went to four cans, and so on. I started supplementing with water, but it’s canned water you see, because I can pretend the carbonation in LaCroix is a replacement for the bubbles in diet Coke. Oh those delicious bubbles…

This went on fine until I got down to the two-can-per-day limit. I thought: I’ll taper slowly so that I don’t get the caffeine headache, and thus I poured off three ounces of each can for a week, effectively tapering down to 1.5 cans per day. Then the week after I went down to one can per day.

Now I was at a dilemma: I couldn’t go to zero all of a sudden, so I employed the same tactic the next week. I poured off three ounces every morning and only drank 9 ounces per day. Oh so sad to watch the diet Coke go down the drain, but I knew I had no self control and couldn’t be trusted with the fluid if it were to remain in the can.

The next week, I poured off a bit more, and got down to one-half can per day (yes, I know about the smaller cans, but I had a huge stock of diet Coke in the garage that I needed to exhaust).

To drag it out just a little longer, last week I was only drinking three ounces of diet Coke per day. But oh how delicious those small sips were each morning…

As evidence of how strongly I feel for diet Coke, I’ve just written an entire blog post as an ode to my weaning.

We’ll see how long this lasts this time…