Habits and Diet Coke

Diet Coke: I quit drinking Diet Coke in August. Psychologically, it was much harder than coming off of Celexa. In fact, drinking Cola of some kind had been a life-long habit turned addiction. I didn't have any physical reactions of withdrawal, but I had many psychological reactions. My brain did everything it could to convince me that I needed to have a Diet Coke. Perhaps I was physically addicted, too, but the withdrawal manifested itself in mental arguments with myself. Every single meal of lunch or dinner was agony for me. When I sat down to eat, I wanted to put a Diet Coke down in front of me like I wanted to breathe air after being underwater. It tore me apart to drink water. Food tasted terrible, first of all. But worst of all, no other drink would satisfy me. Water, tea, seltzer water, juice, I tried everything. During the first month of withdrawal, no drink satisfied me. Except one. Which I'll talk about later.

Now, three months later, I'm fully weened from Diet Coke, or any soda of any kind. I have absolutely no taste for it, and now I love seltzer water with my meals. And interestingly, my body feels different without the chemicals of Diet Coke. I'm sleeping better, have less intense dreams, I don't feel as much anxiety, don't feel tired during the day, and many other feelings that I just can't explain. I feel cleaner.

I have tried going off of Diet Coke many, many times. But it's everywhere. What finally made me quit was when I started to have an allergic reaction to it. Every time I drank Diet Coke, my face would get very greasy, and no matter how much I washed my face, I would break out with huge boils on my skin, and I couldn't get rid of the shine. Within a half hour after drinking Diet Coke, this would happen. The negative feeling of the reaction to Diet Coke was finally bad enough to counteract the positive feeling of feeding my habit. Sometimes, I think it's the only way we can break addictions. The bad has to get bad enough that we're willing to fight our brains and bodies' call for its "drugs" in order to avoid the bad that we know will happen if we succumb.