The biggest moment in my life wasn’t my sixteenth birthday. It wasn’t the junior or senior prom. It wasn’t the day of my weddings (nor my divorces). It wasn’t even the day I lost my virginity. The biggest moment in my life was the day I made the switch to diet drinks.
It was the day I traded in my Mountain Dew for Diet Mountain Dew. That fateful moment in history when I surrendered to the fact that my metabolism wasn’t what it used to be.
I was sad that day as I realized my youth was truly gone. A 12-ounce can of Coke has the same amount of sugar as 2 candy bars. Isn’t that amazing? The moment I compared the two, it became painfully obvious that my soda days as I knew them were over. My eyes had opened. There was no going back.
So I made a commitment to drink diet sodas 99.9% of the time I had to have that effervescent carbonation, no matter how nasty the diet drinks tasted. It was a paradigm shift in my thinking and a major lifestyle change (considering my addiction to Mountain Dew). I felt like a politician switching from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican. The whole world completely upended.
It probably took a month before that diet drink after-taste melted into nothing but a memory. It was a rough time because before my epiphany, diet drinks were the scourge of the liquid refreshment world. They tasted funny and the only people who bought them were fatties and women.
You wouldn’t catch me dead drinking a diet cola.
Oh well, if anyone needs me, I’ll be at the grocery store, buying some Diet Mountain Dews, Lean Cuisines and Tampax.