None of us are perfect, I happen to drink way too much soda, soft drinks, or pop depending on which part of the country you live in. There’s no other way to put it than that it’s an addiction. I drink two or three a day and can’t manage to get rid of them. I’m moody and get headaches when I don’t have my soda. In fact, I’m drinking a 24 oz bottle of Vault as I write this article. This stuff is just bad for you, and if your in a similar situation to mine, hopefully I will be able to convince you and me both to get rid of pop and trade it in for glasses of nice clean and purified tap water.

We’re all so used to having a lot of flavor in our drinks. We don’t just have soda, there’s also sports drinks, juices, milk, energy drinks, alcohol, and the like. It seems that water just doesn’t cut it any more because it doesn’t have enough flavor, but let’s think about how much the cost of these drinks alone are. Whenever you’re on a trip, you usually get a couple. You get them during your weekly trip to the grocery store. You get them at work when you’re thirsty, and the list goes on. How much money you would save by switching over to water will depend on how many flavored drinks you go out and buy every week, but it can add up to be a lot of money over time.

Your dentist will also be thanking you for getting rid of these flavored drinks. Usually they’re full of sugar and not very good for your teeth. When you slowly sip on a soda or other beverage, your mouth doesn’t have time to clean it self and cavities form. If it gets real bad you could be looking at a crown, a bridge, or other dental surgeries which can be thousands of dollars to have.

All of these flavored drinks such as pop are full of carbohydrates that your body converts to fat. My 24 oz Vault actually has 350 calories in it! Each pound of fat in your body contains 3500 calories, and if I were to drink 2 of these a day, that would be a pound and a half added every week. You might work some of this off throughout your day, but over the course of the year, that’s still a lot of added weight.

So how can you start taking a path to break this addiction? It’s no easy task, but the writer of PFAdvice recently went through a similar experience, and he found a solution that worked well for him. He committed to drinking three glasses of water a day, one in the morning, one over the noon hour, and one drinking the afternoon. He allowed himself to have the soda after he had his three glasses of water. This way he did not feel deprived from his sodas because he could have them any time he wanted, and drinking water severely curbed his cravings for water. Eventually he was able to give up his soda addiction all together and now drinks good old healthy water. It’s a life saver.