Challenge Spotlight: I'm sorry, did you say "No Coffee"?

CHALLENGE: No pop, no coffee.

For most of my life-- heck, even for most of my adult life-- I haven't been a coffee person.

(Read that again in case you skimmed-- HAVEN'T been a coffee person).

What changed, you may ask?

Why, I started hanging out with my highly enabling writing group on a semi-regular basis and I was introduced to flavored creamers and things sort of snowballed from there. Now I really like coffee if it's highly creamed and highly sugared, but this fashion of drinking it translates to lots of empty calories. Hence... the challenge of trying to cut it out while I lose weight.

One of the nice things about this bit of challenge is that it's easily "replaced" by drinking tea (black, green, or herbal), which almost uniformly satisfies my craving for something hot and comforting in the morning, evening, or wintry midday. Exploring different teas will be an entertainment of sorts as I go along.

The other nice thing is that coffee will most likely be acceptable to pick up drinking again when I hopefully lose the weight I'd like to lose and am ready to bump back up to a "maintain" level of calorie intake.

Soft drinks are a more life-long nemesis. I say "pop" and will continue to do so for the duration of this blog. Feel feel free to start lively conversations about the various regional nomenclature for soft drinks-- I have friends to whom the word "pop" is ridiculously funny for some reason.

I drink mostly diet pop, not due to any pretensions that it's more beneficial to my health, but a preference for the taste. I've found that pop is, to me, a lot like cigarettes are to smokers. I did a 30 day "Stop the Pop" campaign last year which I achieved, but I was amazed to discover how many different ways I enjoy sucking down on sweetened carbonation-- during a meal, when I'm particularly thirsty, and especially with pizza. Pizza and a dark pop are like bread and butter to me. Without a Diet Pepsi or Diet Dr Pepper (my particular kryptonite), I sometimes don't even see the point of pizza.

The detriments of pop-drinking are so great that I'd love to be one of those people that can give it up entirely. I'm not sure that's possible, but learning to live without it for 100 days is surely a place to start. We'll see what things look like on the other side.

So today is day three and I haven't had either of these beverage types since lunchtime last Sunday.  For last year's "30 Days" campaign I got the most monstrously evil caffeine withdrawal headache, so I was prepared for something similar, but it was surprisingly more navigable this time around.

Ooooh, I just used the word "navigable"....