For Want of a Straw

I'm admitting it here: Last year, I had a drinking problem. Or, more accurately, a hydration problem.

Sometime last year, I started cutting back on my soda consumption. It started slowly- I'd grab  can of Coke at work, but only finish half of it. The sticky-sweetness of it started to appeal to me less and less, and I was glad to be putting less of all those unpronounceable chemicals in my body. Over the winter, I replaced my soda consumption with hot tea, or the occasional glass of water. I got addicted to peppermint tea and a couple Celestial Seasonings flavors, and seriously would have 3 mugs-full a day on some days. Other days it was just one- and that's all I have to drink all day at work.

As the weather got warmer though, hot tea didn't sound as good, so I stopped making it as much. I didn't replace it with anything, though, and wasn't really drinking anything during the day. I'd get home & realize I had maybe one glass of water since I woke up- and sometimes not even that. It's like my brain doesn't register that I'm thirsty. I thought about it some more- where DO I drink a lot/enough? Do I ever drink? When I'm at home, I don't often grab something to drink, except with meals. When I'm at work, I may grab something at lunch. But, when I'm eating out? I work the waitress ragged- I usually get two or three refills. Why is that?

While I do prefer fountain soda to cans or bottles, which could be why I drink more at restaurants, I do the same thing if I order tea or water. At a restaurant, if the drink is in front of me, whatever it is, I drink it. I finally figured out what it was- the straw. If there's a straw in front of me, I drink. Period. So what's the solution, for me, to get that recommended 64oz of fluids a day? A water bottle like this, picked up from Meijer on clearance. Over the last two months, I have consistently drank at least two full bottles of water per day, sometimes more. All thanks to the simple straw.

Yay for hydration! My sister posted about the benefits of drinking water in a post on Monday, and my brother-in-law posted about his journey giving up soda recently, too, and I can enthusiastically agree with both of them. I knew I wasn't drinking enough before, but I never knew how MUCH I wasn't drinking. Drinking problem, solved.