It's been 6 months since I gave up drinking carbonated drinks. Times like these get you thinking about how your journey started. For me, it started from reading a blog post by a fellow blogger and friend about the importance of drinking water. I still don't know why that particular blog post finally struck the cord that got me to make the huge lifestyle change that I already knew I needed to make long ago, maybe that was the 'final straw that broke the camel's back' that we always hear people talk about 🙀 who knows?
Also, for another reason I still can't bring myself to admit, I actually followed through with the lifestyle change even with the many temptations (and damn! were the temptations many 😖). At this point, you are wondering why this is such a big deal that I had to put in a blog post, better still, you're probably wondering why you should continue reading, (well, don't worry, it gets a little better... I think 😕😝).
For me, back then, there was no complete meal without a carbonated drink, especially since my friends that I would normally go to cafe with would also buy carbonated drinks for themselves; so this sudden change was well... quite challenging. I had to use water as a substitute and at the time, I honestly felt water was bitter. Imagine after eating food that more often than not tasted awful and the only mouth rinser you had was this bitter WARM drink called water... (not even cold sef 😞) yea, that was my life 😓.
It got easier with time though. After the first 21 days, water started being tasteless like our science teachers told us in primary and secondary school (some of the time, it was tasteless I mean 😒) and meals were made whole 🙌 even without my treasured carbonated drinks.
More recently, I gave up eating the fried, Jollof and white rice sold in the cafeteria. In view of a promise I made to myself this semester that I would no longer post long rants on my status about how the cafeteria food was horrible, which I have come to accept as the state of nature for food sold at the cafeteria, I decided to solve the problem from the source. If I do not buy horrible food from the cafeteria to eat, I would not post long rants about how horrible the food is (Quick maths).
At first, it felt impossible because before, if I eat 10 times a week, 8 of those times, I would be eating Jollof rice. So this change was a little bit more radical than the previous one. In this case, I had to change what I eat totally. Furthermore, the other options would later prove to be a more expensive lifestyle to sustain. It was hard at first but the more I did the math in my head, the more I convinced myself not to just turn back, save some cash and buy jollof rice.
It's been 3 weeks now. I've not complained about horrible food on my status so far because I've been treating myself to relatively better food sold by contract vendors and trust me, I've had peace of mind 😤.
So what was the point of these 2 long and unnecessarily detailed stories you might ask, (puts on motivational speaker shoes) sometimes in our life journey, we have to let go of things (and people) that seem very important to our happiness (at the time). These decisions would be very difficult to make and even more difficult to maintain (trust me, I know this) but we have to make them nonetheless because if these entities aren't giving us our much-needed long term peace of mind, it doesn't matter how happy they make us feel sometimes, they have to go. Because in the end, that's what our future selves need to be truly happy. So let it (whatever 'it' is) go, not because the cold never bothered you anyway 😉, but because warmth is just so much cooler 😌.
Thanks for reading 😏😏😏.
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