Did you ever have a life changing event? Like perhaps you came close to death and you realize that you’ve been wasting your life?
Well, the other day I was at Baja Fresh and I went to fill up my giant, 99 cent refillable cup and I was just about to start filling when I realized I had accidentally almost filled it with diet caffeine FREE coke! I said, “Blech”, made the face that Evie is making at the top of this blog, and moved over to the regular diet coke.
Then, it happened. My awakening.
Why wouldn’t I drink caffeine free? Caffeine isn’t added for flavor. I’m not in some situation where I need to stay awake. Seeing as I am not a pre-teen boy anymore who thinks it is cool to drink 8 Mountain Dews and stay up all night, there really is just no reason to be putting caffeine into my body. All the sugar (yeah right, try high fructose corn syrup, or worse) etc. is bad enough, why add more chemicals? Why does anybody? I don’t know. But I made a decision right then to stop drinking caffeine pop.
I mean, I won’t be crazy about it. I’ll drink it when I have it. I’ll drink it if I’m driving and trying to stay awake. But I’m going to choose caffeine free from now on, when I can. You know, the funny thing is that my mom used to always drink caffeine free diet coke and I thought that was just about the most disgusting thing I could imagine. “Why drink pop at all?” I said. And here I am arriving at the same point. How did I get here?
Well, I used to think I would never drink diet pop. Tons of people told me, “oh, once you get used to it, you won’t go back” but I told them they were crazy. Then I switched to diet during a weight loss competition. Sure enough, when I tried to switch back I couldn’t. Regular pop just tasted too sweet or something somehow. I really couldn’t believe that it happened, but it did. Then, the caffeine realization and here I am.
I don’t know, maybe I’m growing up. But I have to think that it was some marketing ploy or something that made me think I wanted the caffeine in the first place. What other reason could there be? But now my eyes are opened! Viva la revolution!
Shane Halbach 
The word “pop” is soooo midwest!
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Oh boy, don’t tell me you’re one of those “soda” people! I must have had that conversation about a million times when I moved to Philadelphia.
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I think I went through nearly the same transformation process! I switched to diet when I was trying to lose weight, and I nearly always prefer it now. However, Diet orange Fanta still tastes weird. That makes me wonder: maybe our original loathing to these sugar-free, caffeine-free drinks stems from the fact that diet technology wasn’t up to par in the 80s. Remember the huge campaign when they re-crafted Diet Dr.Pepper and endless commercials aired to inform us that “Diet Dr.Pepper tastes more like regular Dr.Pepper”?
As for the caffeine side, I was having problems sleeping last year, and I was drinking large quantities of diet cola at the time, so I thought maybe I should cut back my evening caffeine intake. And then I had in-laws reminding me of all the potential harmful things in artificial sweeteners, so now I’m drinking something I never thought I would ever turn to… sparkling water! I’ve become a sparkling water drinker! That’s one I never expected of myself!
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