The year without soda

This time last year, I was sitting at my desk at work, thinking about how gross I felt, and as I slurped down the last sugary mouthful of a canned Coke, I realized — as the clouds parted and the angels sang and God stroked his honky bearded chin in approval — that soda was going to have to go.

So that very moment I resolved to make that Coke my last. Ever. And to transform my soda-drinking habit (I probably averaged three or fours cans a day, minimum) into a water-drinking habit.

I knew it wouldn't be easy; I'd actually tried to cut back before and failed miserably thanks to my aversion to water and my addiction to caffeine and sugar.

See, I was a hardcore soda devotee. I'd grown up in a household where soda wasn't kept or offered to the kids. My parents kept a cache of Diet Coke, which we wouldn't drink even if we were lying in a dust bowl dying of thirst. The kids were expected to drink Kool-Aid the juice, for the most part. We got soda on special occasions and holidays. It goes without saying that soda wasn't available at school.

When I got to middle school, though, all that changed. There was a single Coke machine in the entire building, and students earned Coke passes for getting good grades and basically making teachers' lives easier. We'd stockpile passes and then send classmates out on Coke runs when the teachers gave us the go-ahead, usually on Friday afternoons. My friends and I developed an intense addiction to the bright-yellow allure of Mello Yello. It became our official drink. We sought it out in all situations. And when its luster began to fade, we looked for the rare and elusive Surge at gas stations and Sam's Clubs. Surge was like Mello Yello, only it tasted like shit and claimed to have a hundred times the caffeine. Surge helped usher in the era of the crap-tasting energy drink. I thank the fate monkeys in the sky that I never hopped on that bandwagon, even when I worked with someone in college who was a campus Red Bull rep and could have had that nasty shit piped directly into my mouth at all times.

In high school, I awarded joint custody of my soda allegiance to Mello Yello and Coke. It was more sophisticated that way, having two favorite drinks. Through college, my habits continued and my teeth dissolved into the sugary concoctions I poured down my throat at and between mealtimes. I further refined my preference to Coke when I moved to Memphis and Mello Yello became hard to come by.

Water, for all of my life, has been a necessary evil. I only drank it as part of something else -- tea, lemonade, Kool-Aid, a concoction meant to dissolve a hangover. I hated the (non-)taste. I hated the smell. I don't know how a person goes her entire life hating that which comprises 75 percent of her own body. But I did.

Until last year. And I'll never forget the first few days after the Coke ban. It wasn't a minefield of caffeine headaches and grumpiness ... at first. No, the headaches came slow and steady about three weeks later (actually, it was one headache that lasted for three weeks; I thought I had brain cancer). Instead, what sticks with me is the memory of literally having to choke down water and feeling repulsed by it until I got used to it. I forced myself to drink eight cups — that's 64 ounces — every day. And by the end of week two or so, the revulsion melted away and in its place there was a weird craving to have water constantly.

This past year I've had a few sips of soda here and there, just to see how it tasted, and each sip has been gross and metallic and reminiscent of mid-century medicine. I slipped and drank an entire can of Pepsi once several months ago. It was extremely disgusting. I felt like shit afterward.

I will not make that mistake again.