Imagine a warm, early summer-like evening. The sky is going from pinks and oranges to violets and blues as the sun sets. There’s a soft breeze gently moving the aromatic flowers and green trees around you. Soft jazz plays in the background as you sit down to enjoy a wonderful outdoor meal with a small group of family and friends, talking and laughing about everything and anything. As dishes are being passed back and forth,the hostess is handing out tall glasses of ice filled with coke with a wedge of lime just to give it that extra little pop. You take your refreshingly cool to the touch glass and anticipate the deliciousness of the liquid passing through your lips. When you finally take that first drink, all you can think is “…omg..That’s kinda…gross.”.

Being sans sugar these past three months, I’ve cut my soda drinking down to zero. It has (and still does) surprised the hell out of my family that I’ve gone so long without a drink. It is not unknown in the past for someone to buy a two liter of soft drink in the morning and the container to meet its demise by mid-afternoon of the same day even though there may only be one person (me) in the house.

This particular day I was at a friends house enjoying the above activities and a coke with lime seemed like a nice accompaniment to the food and festivities. But that first sip was – off. It was sickly sweet, not refreshing at all.  Took a second drink to make sure it wasn’t a fluke and nope, just as gross as the first sip. I couldn’t drink anymore after that. How weird that a beverage I’ve been consuming for 40+ years, quite happily, within a span of a couple of months, becomes the taste equivalent of a boiled brussel sprout to an 8 year old.

But it’s not just coke – anything that I try a bite of now that has added sugar like sweetened cereals, “health” bars, juices, cookies, cakes -taste excessively saccharine to be to the point of inedible. Don’t get me wrong, I still like sweet things like whole fruits and/or a piece of really good, dark, DARK chocolate but with the change of palette, today’s over saturation of “sweet” in our food is too much for me. And the really funny part of that realization is that I’m kind of sad about it. For better or worst, sugar is a huge part of our current society and culture. We celebrate with it, we console ourselves with it, we share it with those we care for. There was a true sense of loss when I realized coke was no longer the “real thing”for me.