How to break an addiction to cola drinks
Including Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, Pepsi, etc.
🔑 The key to breaking the addiction is to intentionally confuse your brain about the origin of the things that you crave.
People crave two things in a cola drink:
The caffeine.
The sweetness (either sugar or an artificial sweetener).
The human brain craves a cola drink when it has learned that the cola drink is the source of the things that it craves (caffeine and sweetness).
Defeating the first craving: The caffeine
During the first phase of breaking the addiction, you should continue to provide your body with the same amount of caffeine as you were consuming, but consume it in other foods and drinks, not the cola drink anymore.
Calculate how much caffeine you were consuming per day. Purchase caffeine online. Randomly distribute the same amount of caffeine per day in the things that you eat and drink during the day in order to confuse your brain about the source of the caffeine.
The goal is to arrange your caffeine intake in a manner that prevents your brain from knowing/learning where the caffeine is coming from, and which caffeinated food or drink to crave. You may wonder:
“I know what food or drink I added caffeine to. How can my brain not know where the caffeine comes from if I remember adding caffeine to those things? Don’t I need to ask someone to hide the caffeine in my food without me seeing it?”
Different parts of the human brain have poor connectivity and an inability to transfer knowledge from one part to the other. For example, your conscious mind knows and remembers that yesterday you put the caffeine in yogurt, a smoothie, and a sandwich. However, your conscious mind is a different part of your brain than where the addiction/craving occurs.
The addicted part of your brain is unable to access your knowledge of where you put the caffeine (unless you do the same thing every day). Therefore, it makes no difference if you see yourself or another person adding the caffeine to a smoothie.
Do not put the caffeine in the same food or drink every day. Randomly choose which food or drink to add the caffeine to and randomly change it every day (or every few days), so that the addicted part of your brain is unable to learn the pattern, because there is no pattern.
Over time, your brain will recognize that the source of caffeine is not the cola drink anymore, because you are not drinking it anymore, and yet somehow the caffeine is still arriving.
Your brain will gradually learn that the link between cola and caffeine is no longer correct. Consequently, your brain will gradually deconstruct the incorrect link/pattern (cola ⇒ caffeine) and try to construct a new one (??? ⇒ caffeine).
Your brain will try to make you addicted to the new source of caffeine, but it will fail, because there is no pattern anymore, because you are adding the caffeine randomly and changing it every few days.
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Important: Carefully ensure that you never overdose on caffeine. Ensure that you do not increase your caffeine intake. You must gradually reduce your caffeine intake over time until one day you reduce it to zero. |
Defeating the second craving: The sweetness of cola
The second thing that your brain craves is the sweetness of the cola drink. Purchase a selection of sweet things and randomly consume these for a limited period of time until you have broken your cola addiction.
If the cola drink contains sugar, then calculate how much sugar you were consuming per day from the cola drink and replace it with the same amount of sugar (per day) in an assortment of other sweet things. Gradually reduce your sugar intake over time.
If the cola drink contains an artificial sweetener instead of sugar, then you are unable to calculate it exactly. Just estimate it. An exact calculation of sweetness is not required. Just consume other sweet things instead of the cola drink and gradually reduce your intake over time.
Every few days, randomly switch to different sweet things in order to prevent your brain from learning a pattern and constructing a new addiction.
When you visit the supermarket to buy sweet things, avoid purchasing the same sweet products as you previously purchased. Keep switching to new products in order to prevent your brain developing cravings for any one product.
An additional weapon against sweetness
You can use unsweetened carbohydrates as an additional weapon against sweetness. If you are one of the people that are opposed to carbohydrates, then do not worry, because the carbohydrates will be used only temporarily until you defeat your cola addiction. Then you can return to your current habits regarding carbohydrates.
When you feel a craving for cola or sweetness, defeat it by eating a meal consisting of the following ingredients:
Regular pasta, cooked, “al dente” (not too soft).
Oats, briefly soaked in boiling hot water.
Sunflower oil or other unsaturated oil. Raw.
Protein powder.
Salt, herbs, and spices of your choice. Nothing sweet.
The oil and protein powder will slow down digestion and make you feel full. The reduced speed of digestion will cause a stabilization of insulin and glucose levels in your blood. When your stomach is filled with this special meal, your craving for sweet cola will disappear.
If you eat it, but you still crave sweetness, then eat some more. Keep eating until you feel slightly sick from overeating. Then the idea of consuming anything more (sweet things) will be repulsive.
Only do that a small number of times. Obviously, you should not continue to overeat or do anything unhealthy for a long time.
Please note
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Disclaimer: Nothing in this article is medical advice or health advice for your personal circumstances. Do not use any of the aforementioned ideas without first discussing it with a medical doctor and getting his/her approval. This article provides only suggestions/ideas for things that you can ask your doctor about. |