Doing a Bit of Reflection

I got to thinking today about some of the changes I've made with what I eat, well, more like don't eat any longer, and that led to thinking about the amount of calories in a cola. Which led to how many calories I had been drinking when I was consuming a 16 ounce cola each day.

Every. Single. Day.

I pulled out my handy, dandy calculator, punched in the numbers--240 x 365--and my jaw dropped.

87,600 calories.

I then divided 87,600 by the amount of calories in a pound.

25.

That's 25 pounds worth of calories I was consuming each year while I was drinking colas. Talk about sabotaging myself and my desire to improve my eating habits. Part of me kept saying, "Oh, it's okay. I exercise every day, so one cola a day isn't going to hurt." Yeah. I was duping myself for a very long time.

Now, into my third month of being soda free, I feel like I've taken a huge step forward with my journey to better health. While giving up sodas may not seem like a big deal, when all the related issues are brought into the equation, just how big a deal it is becomes clearer. The sugar. The empty calories. The caffeine. The carbonation/cola combination. As I see it, these are four very solid reasons for giving up the soda. 

Comments

RKBrison said…
Proud of you, JK. Isn't it something how those calories pile up? Sort of the way money goes out of our hands on something small if we keep doing it every day.

And I'm going to have to try the French toast recipe. :) RB
February 15, 2014 at 8:31 PM
JK said…
I hadn't even thought about the money aspect of drinking a 16 ounce cola every day. I plugged the numbers in for that and found I was spending $639 a year! Then there's the plastic bottles . . ..

Yeah, just the mention of that French toast makes my mouth water. :)
February 16, 2014 at 9:45 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marriage: A Meeting in the Middle?

Monday marked the 9th wedding anniversary for Hubby and me. We went to a nicer restaurant in town to have dinner and celebrate. Unfortunately, what should have been a lovely dinner spiraled downward, each of us unhappy with the other by the time we left the restaurant. One comment Hubby made stayed with me the next few days, and Friday, on our way home from taking Lovely Beautiful Daughter and her boyfriend to the airport (another unfortunate event--they were flying to Boston after learning of the unexpected death of her boyfriend's father), Hubby and I talked further about his comment to me at our anniversary dinner. I told him I was considering writing about it here, and he replied that he would love to see what comments I receive regarding this subject. So, here goes. My perspective of a marriage is it is a partnership. Each member of the relationship helps the other out simply because, to me, that's what a partnership entails. Including housework. Yeah. This is why our di...
Read more

Taking My Health Into My Own Hands (Cuz My Doc Certainly Isn't All That Helpful)

After a month of tracking my glucose levels, I've learned a few things, the most important being I need to have something sweet in the evenings. An orange. A fruit smoothie. A vegan chocolate chip cookie. When I don't, my glucose dips with each consecutive morning after not having something sweet, the monitor showing my glucose going lower and lower. While I never went below 79, I was inching lower each morning after not having something sweet the evening before. So now, I make sure I have fruit or a smoothie with dinner. Every now and then I'll have an orange juice mid-day just because. While I don't think a month is long enough to really know if my glucose levels were the culprit for the tachycardia, I have felt so much better. The weird feeling I'd been experiencing when the tachycardia was happening has not happened. The waves of heat that would wash over me, causing me to peel off my sweatshirt or sweater even though my house is at 65 degrees haven't happen...
Read more

Searching for Some Truth

A friend mentioned in a comment that he read David Perlmutter's Grain Brain , and is especially interested in the studies that "show a strong relationship between high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and cognitive / neurological problems." I, too, am very interested in all of these ideas, so I decided to check out Grain Brain . Just a few pages into the book, I was thinking, "My gosh. This is some scary shit." Part of me wanted to think Perlmutter is fear-mongering and working for some big business of some kind, and that eventually I was going to get to the chapter where Perlmutter was going to try and sell me something. Granted, I'm not that far into the book yet, so I haven't come across the selling chapter if there is one, but what I've read so far has been extremely interesting, making me want to continue reading. A month or so ago, I read Real Food: What to Eat and Why by Nina Planck, and one chapter in her book that really got me thinking ...
Read more