Good morning everyone
I'm still struggling and contemplating and crunching numbers and doing all the stuff that is part of my personal process before I undertake a major change....but reading Matthew's recent posts got my brain going.
Matthew, I'm sending you a great big hug, because I know how tough this struggle is...especially when you have someone in the household actively sabotaging you.
Because I'm a "numbers" person though...in my work life I'm a project manager, and live and die by my spreadsheets...I did a little number crunching that might help to inspire you to make some changes.
Here's what I found....cold, hard facts...not to alarm you, but to show you what's going on inside...
One 12 oz. can of Pepsi probably looks harmless. It's small, it's cold...it tastes good. I had my own struggles with Coke...so I know how enticing and addictive it is.
But....one 12 oz. can of Pepsi contains 150 calories, mostly in the form of high fructose corn syrup. One of the biggest arguments against high fructose corn syrup is that it contains mercury...a neuro-toxin. I haven't read the studies, so I won't say yea or nay on that...but just the possibility of ingesting neuro-toxin daily scares the crap out of me.
Okay...but back to the numbers....
One can...150 calories.
Let's say you drink 4 a day....not hard for any soda drinker to do.
4 cans a day is 1,460 cans a year
(how much does that cost? You could take a nice vacation every year for that money?)
1,460 cans a year at 150 calories is 219,000 calories.
Since it takes 3,500 calories to gain or lose a pound of weight...that's 62.5 lbs...in a year...on or off, depending on what you do.
Drink those 4 cans a day....gain 62.5 lbs. in a year.
Replace them with water...lose 62.5 lbs. in a year.
Of course, that's assuming that nothing else changes in our diet or activity levels.
The scarier thing for me....if the mercury/neuro-toxin thing is true....drinking 4 cans of Pepsi a day means you're consuming 59,850 grams of high fructose corn syrup in a year (41 grams a can).
Since 454 grams of anything equals a pound....that's 131.8 pounds of high fructose corn syrup running through your body each year.
This is the equation I ran for myself and my Coke consumption....right before I stopped drinking it forever.
Hugs to you all.