quitting the habit of a life time…. Coke

story goes like this……

1980’s dragged up in north east pit village and taught good values but never given good food habits…..

1990’swent from being thin and fit van driver in early 20’s to a sales rep and the pounds piled on over the years..

2000’s got into motorcycling and women and eating lots of junk

2010 peaked at 20st11lbs and got into MTB

2011 down to 18st but still battling with a lot of emotional stresses in life (in hand due to counselling) and blew best part of £14K on MTB’s and all the expensive trendy must have shit that I needed to have

2012 lost job and sold most of the above (for less than half of paid price) to get by but retained the desire for sugary foods, sweets and coke.

I’m currently putting myself through a real life laundry. I have a great well paid job, nice exec company car, beautiful MILF GF, coming to terms with some erratic and emotional purchasing habits and in a quest to get myself off junk I sat down and was 100% honest with what I was eating every day. Driving around a lot I eat serious amounts of junk and here’s a taster, like I said 100% honest and this is a conservative estimate

every day I’d have two cans of full fat coke and three bars of chocolate.

I costed this up in calories, £’s and g’s of fat over this month.

£114.70 30,598 calories and 1229g’s of fat..

When I saw this I nearly had a heart attack 😆

my theory is eat better and won’t feel need to emotional eat and then won’t feel depressed because my money has disappeared and then won’t emotionally purchase or comfort eat.

Does this sound like a good way of approaching the issue???

be honest, I can take it….

s

http://www.myfitnesspal.com

+

will help with the calories, but not the money or emotion.

Coke Zero ftw.

Look out for your teeth too.
As children we used to clean coins in coke.

Dude, I feel your pain. Many hours in the car makes it quite difficult to eat healthily. All road stops are based around sandwiches, crisps, junk food etc. If you *really* want to do something about it, then invest in a cool box for the boot of your car and start preparing all your road food at home. Plenty bottled water and a few veg snacks chilled from your mobile larder will help a lot!

Kicking it sounds like a good plan, less sugar highs = less sugar lows, gotta be good right?

Maybe make sure you always have a bottle of water (tap, not expensive bought!) on hand, drink it so you’re not thirsty and don’t fancy a can?

And nearly 2.5kgs of sugar!

There are clearly some underlying issues to emotional <anything>, don’t try and fix everything at once would be my advice 🙂

And come ride with us again 🙂

I allow myself a couple of cans a year. Its evil stuff even with sweeteners, if I had kids I’d rather they took smack 🙂

I think that in the longer term you need to lose the sweet tooth, so I would suggest that replacing Coke with Diet coke is not such a great strategy. And it tastes like poo.

Get used to feeling hungry; it’s not a bad thing.

It’s largely a matter of self control; you decide what you put in your mouth, and once you have got to grips with that, the self discipline begins to creep into other areas of your life.

It’s not easy, but it is a good thing; go on my son..

Join a gym (a real one, not a fitness first job).
ONLY eat food prepared from scratch and you’re onto a winner, I promise.

I think that in the longer term you need to lose the sweet tooth, so I would suggest that replacing Coke with Diet coke is not such a great strategy. And it tastes like poo.

Mmmm… I’ve drunk Diet Coke for years. Mrs is diabetic so it is obviously what she drinks and what we have in the house. I’d say you get used to the taste. In fact full fat coke tastes sickly sweet to me now and I only ever drink it for hangovers.

I was serious about MyFitnessPal (or similar food tracker) – logging everything you put in your mouth is a huge motivator, especially if you are in the mood to be brutally honest with yourself as the OP is.

Does no one make a packed lunch any more??
You know what you’re eating, and how much you’ve eaten over the day…

DrP

All road stops are based around sandwiches, crisps, junk food etc. If you *really* want to do something about it, then invest in a cool box for the boot of your car and start preparing all your road food at home.

This is true. don’t forget most service stations have a microwave for heating kiddies foods, on motorway journeys we now pop into M&S and buy a ready meal and then heat it in said microwave, beats the fast food junk 💡

I work at home.

problem is, if you have crap food in the house you tend to eat it 🙁

my diet is probably better though – I have a bowl of muesli rather than a chocolate bar out of a machine if I get peckish.

I would suggest that a packed lunch is your friend here.

If you’ve prepared a healthy lunch with water/fruit juice then it will reduce the temptation to stock up with junk at the roadside!

Within a couple of weeks you’ll feel better on it,save a few quid, and wonder why you didn’t think of it before.

Good luck!

If you’re going to change “cokes”, might as well get the diet caffiene free one.
You never know, you may have a bit of a caffeine dependence that’s been keeping you drinking the stuff.

Had a similar problem to you years ago, except for the weight, but was eating waaaaaay too much sugar. Replaced full fat Coke with Coke Zero or Pepsi Max (you get used to them quickly and soon full fat Coke will taste horrid!) which cut out a lot of the sugar highs and lows (I drank way more than you!), and actively tried to cut down on the chocolate.

Spending a lot of time in the car does make it hard(er) to eat and drink healthily, but if you at least start by cutting out a lot of the sugar in your diet by substituting in sugar free drinks, it’s a very good start. Once you’re used to it, you will start to notice you’re not so dependant on sugar, which will then make it easier to start cutting down elsewhere.

Can’t help you on the weight front though, cos 2 cans of coke and 3 chocolate bars a day ain’t the only reason you’re still as heavy as you are. Suggest on that front you speak to a proper nutritionist and probably a gym as suggested above. Cycling lots is great for your fitness, but it’s a crap full body workout, and there’s lots of fit yet still quite fat cyclists out there.

Quick note of warning: You will, like I am currently, lapse from time to time and hit the choccy again! Depression is a funny thing, but if it happens, just make sure you get back on the wagon as quick as possible before your body becomes reliant on it again.

Coke is my nemesis as well – bloody cans of the stuff, if its in the fridge – its soon in me! Good luck though and do as they say above – pack your own lunch (Walkers crisps Grab bags in petrol stations are also a habit former…)

Sugar free drinks are evil. Sweeteners are really quite bad for you. And the sweetness messes with your hormones like sugar does.

Just MTFU and drink water.

Weird, I grew up with a mild allergy to citric acid, so most fizzy drinks would turn me a bit hulk. I enjoy the occasionaly drink of full fat coke, but would never consider drinking it daily. As for the diet stuff, I have no idea why anyone would drink that, it has no redeeming qualities.

Good luck with the weight loss fella, it’s hard work, I originally dropped from near enough 18 stone to 13.5, back at 15.5 at the moment but as a result of lack of activity and too much good eating rather than fizzy drinks.

I will be doing the London 10k at the weekend though, slowly 🙂

Have a look at a low GI diet, it’s certainly helping me understand my up and down sugar cravings and has helped me control what I’m eating.

I hated diet Coke for years, but recently switched from four-star Coke and you do get used to it.

As discussed on a previous thread, I used to carry a big bottle of water on long journeys. I swapped this with a refillable Sigg bottle (which came free with an Osprey backpack) filled with water from a Britas water filter jug, far more cost-effective in the long run.

thought this was going to be an amazing thread about beak, o well

Is the eating also tied up with the need to buy something as well? At lunchtime I always felt compelled to buy something – anything and the purchase of food would provide this, and also provides a break in your routine / change of scene.

lifelong fizzy drink addict here:( can easily get through litres of the stuff a day unless i keep it in check. luckily i’m not into chocs that much and the thought of a mars etc turns my stomach

read somewhere a long time ago that diet drinks esp coke have about double the amount of caffeine than normal so it is easier to form a “habit” with diet (think methadone), seems to ring true with me through personal experience anyway.

I find if I have to travel a lot get quite dehydrated, which can get mistaken for hunger. Might be worth trying to drink more water ? Of course, you will need to timetable in more stops.. but that’s quite good too for maintaining energy levels, not getting all cramped. I always buy a bag of carrots and munch on those if I have to drive a long distance, but then I like raw carrots, not to everyone’s taste, but cheap and nutritious and worth a try ?

Look out for your teeth too.
As children we used to clean coins in coke.

Last time I checked though, it’s not normal to soak your teeth in coke. Perhaps I’m not drinking it right? 🙂

It takes 5 minutes of soaking in coke for tooth enamel to begin to show signs of eroding, and if there’s a 50/50 mix of saliva, then it takes up to 30 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to keep coke in my mouth for more than a few seconds at a time.

Sweeteners are really quite bad for you

They’re not fantastic for you, but aren’t “really quite bad for you”

Aspartame, the sweetener in diet coke:

Critical review of all carcinogenicity studies conducted on aspartame found no credible evidence that aspartame is carcinogenic. The data from the extensive investigations into the possibility of neurotoxic effects of aspartame, in general, do not support the hypothesis that aspartame in the human diet will affect nervous system function, learning or behavior. Epidemiological studies on aspartame include several case-control studies and one well-conducted prospective epidemiological study with a large cohort, in which the consumption of aspartame was measured. The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener.

I had read that there were more effects than just carcinogenesis. However what I read was not known to be of good provenance.

Aspartame on snopes.

It’s probably fairly trivial to find some badly produced study or lazy journalism article suggesting that there ‘may’ be a health risk for just about anything you care to think of. I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could probably ‘prove’ that Cliff Richard may cause gout.

Pretty sure I read something a couple of weeks ago suggesting that cinnamon is carcinogenic. In the small print, it said something along the lines of there being a study twenty years ago that had shown lab rats falling ill after being fed a diet of pounds of the stuff for weeks. I think if I had to eat my own bodyweight in cinnamon and nothing else, I’d probably welcome cancer by that point.

Conclusion, trust no-one. (-:

Big respect for coming on here and posting that. I’ve nothing positive to add as I think it’s all been said up there, but what in gods name did you spend 14k on??

Sugar free drinks are evil. Sweeteners are really quite bad for you. And the sweetness messes with your hormones like sugar does.

[CITATION NEEDED]

I don’t need a citation, it’s on the internet.

Diet Coke gives you diabetes quicker.

Life can be hilariously cruel.

My advice for the OP is to see a shrink or get some sort of mentor to help you through this. You need some positivity back in your life matey.

I don’t need a citation, it’s on the internet.

+1

Although I tried telling my lecturers that once.

The recent documentary The Men Who Made us Fat discovered that Coke replaced sugar with corn syrup which is 3 times sweeter and fattier than sugar, Coke made the ground breaking decision at the time to change the drinks recipe this was in the USA, not sure if this entered the UK market? Instead of using less corn syrup they used more, crazy.

You could try connecting with your inner miser – I’m sure it can’t be just me that has this feature which precludes the purchase of soft drinks and chocolate most of the time…

Does no one make a packed lunch any more??

Curry or chili con carne or something similar in a cool bag and ice to keep cool was fine, and that was in Spain where it get a bit warmer than here. Never had any food poisoning problems and I got to eat in some great places.
And good luck to the OP.

US coke is less sweet than UK coke.

not sure if this entered the UK market?

Nope, and until UK farmers are offered the same subsidies to grow corn that US farmers are, I do not see that changing.

I find it interesting that a lot of folks in the US covet ‘proper’ sugar based Coke. Something they can only get when Coke issues the yellow capped ’Kosher-Cola’, which are intended for Jews during Passover as they cannot eat corn based products at the time.