I just mean a good drink to help go low(er) sugar?
kombucha (low sugar)
coconut milk (no added sugar/low sugar)
Honestly, the best way to lower your intake of sugar isn’t to replace it with a different sweetener. In most cases, you’ll find its not an adequate ‘replacement’ because psychologically, looking for a direct analog (or super close in taste at the minimum).
It’s the habit that needs to change, not the way you scratch the itch. I’m not a fan of absolutes, so I don’t think an intention of “no more refined sugar. Period.” is practical or reasonable. But cutting down how much you intake by reducing the frequency, that’ll do wonders for you.
This method is what kick started my journey down this same path. You can still have sugar (yay!), but you most likely won’t want to very often after not too long (wtf?).
It is so mind bottlingly crazy how much sugar is in literally everything from breads to sauces. Once I cut down how much sugar I was taking in (by cutting down how often I had a sweet drink of any kind, one drink at a time), I could taste the sweetness in food at restaurants, savory stuff from the bakery…I couldn’t escape it.
Now, I’ll have a couple of sweet drinks in a day. I control how much sugar I put in by not buying sweet drinks and instead making stuff at home. Coffee, flavored water, etc.
Long story short…
There is NO great methadone for refined sugar. If you want to reduce how much you’re ingesting, reduce the frequency. Be kind to yourself by setting reasonable, bite-sized goals so that the achievement encourages you to continue on and make more progress.
Anything in moderation; nothing in excess
I can definitely resonate with this.
I’m ‘old school British’ with my drinks, in the sense that I have far too much tea in a day. I’ve gradually reduced the amount of sugar, and now I’m down to one sometimes less than one teaspoon per mug (larger than a traditional cup though more common I suppose). I have most certainly noticed the same effect, as it has reduced my sugar dependency overall; I can taste sweetness in things much better now, and this only took a little while. Barely noticeable of an effort.
A few drops of Lemon or lime juice in Carbonated water.
- icecubes.
That’s the good shit. Not just a few drops, get the whole lemon in there.
Even better if you add some sugar.
Good stuff too
If you want something to replace soda and don’t want artificial sweeteners, flavored carbonated water can scratch that itch. There’s some that are low sugar and some that are no sugar. They have some really interesting flavors, too. La Croix is not a great brand, in my opinion.
La Croix is double the price of the supermarket brand 👎
All sparkling water costs significantly more than it used to before ~10 years ago. Safeway brand is my go to, but I miss those being like 3 bucks for a 12 pack.
Wegmans brand is 4 dollars
8 or 12 pack tho? We don’t have Wegmans here.
12
Some of the other name brands are expensive, too, but so much better than La Croix.
Agree on LaCroix. I like Waterloo and Polar
I don’t think I’ve tried those brands, but I will have to.
Haha! This whole post was a ploy to get you to try those brands and it totally worked! We got 'em boys!
XD
It’s a bit of pop science to say that nutrisweet and other artificial sweeteners produce the same insulin response as sugar, but that’s not what the data indicates.
The response is consistently lower.
So my recommendation is to switch to diet soda, assuming the sugary drinks you’re drinking are sodas.
If they’re fruit juices, I would recommend relaxing them with smoothies. The fiber in a smoothie slows the absorption of the sugar, resulting in less of a blood glucose spike.
I’m a big fan of unsweetened soda water. Ila Croix, klarbrunn, bubly.
I make my own though with a soda stream. I have a shit ton of hops as a home brewer so I make flavoring that’s steeped hops (filtered out after steeping), combined 50/50 with juice blend I make 50/50 from lemon and lime. Not the fake from concentrate shit, but I don’t fresh squeeze it either. You can get the real stuff in most grocery stores these days.
So 1/2 hops tea, 1/4 unsweetened lemon juice and 1/4 unsweetened lime juice.
Then I put about an inch of that in a pint glass and fill it the rest of the way with soda water.
Very low calorie and hits the spot. It has helped me entirely stop drinking beer at home.
Black decaffeinated coffee for me. Sometimes real coffee.
Can someone explain the question to me? I don’t understand.
Methadone helps people get off heroin
So it’s a drink? Would cranberry juice work? They make a low sugar one that still has strong taste.
That I don’t actually know. I’m working off knowledge gained from an arrested development episode years ago.
Water
People may really give me shit for this but I switched to artificial sweeteners for my drinks. When I really feel like something with flavor I drink diet soda or crystal light. Back when I made the switch I lost 13 pounds immediately.
Let the down votes and hate take me.
Can you edit this to give the actual sweetener > bolded at top? Like you talking aspartame, stevia etc?
Well, it depends on the drink really.
I personally prefer aspartame, I just like the taste more and even liked it when I still drank sugared drinks. Sucralose is also perfectly fine but I hated it back when I drank sugared drinks. It took my tastebuds changing to adapt to it. Stevia is okay, not my favorite, but I won’t shy away from it.
It’s just personal preference. I’m sure people here will rant and rave about how this is all poison, I’m killing myself, and that everyone should only ever drink water.
I missed the boat on forming a water habit. I grew up on really bad well water that wasn’t potable sometimes and even when it was safe (maybe?) it smelled strongly of sulfur. So my mom just made Koolaid with it to hide the smell and taste and that’s what we drank. It’s hard to imagine sitting down for a meal and not having a drink with flavor, you know?
Should I have formed better habits as an adult? Yes. Am I killing myself by drinking diet drinks? Possibly.
But I’m not too bothered by it. It’s not like I don’t drink water now.
When you go to a restaurant, do you not enjoy the nice water they usually serve with immersed lemons?
Short Answer: Sometimes, not as my primary drink and it really depends on the water. I’m very sensitive to tastes in it.
Long unnecessary additional information: I am very particular about water and I could not drink anything when I visited Florida because everything tasted like nasty swamp water. Even locally sourced bottled water. We had to hunt for out of state or purified water to hydrate us for our vacation.
In fact, most spring water is blech. Including “premium” bottled spring water like Fiji and Evian and such.
But I do enjoy water from high quality aquifers. The best well water I’ve had was from a deep bedrock aquifer.
At home I have a pretty advanced water purifier system to get that high quality H2O.
What about San Pellegrino? Its rich in minerals (I tend to equate mineral content with taste/nourishment) and goes well with lime or lemon
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I’m addicted to 4C Energy Rush. I think it hydrates me better than just water. Bring on the hate.
Soda is just addictive diabetes water.
Water is the ultimate sugar free drink. If you want different mouth feel you can do carbonated water. If you want caffeine you can do black coffee or tea.
If your ultimate goal is lower blood sugar levels the best solution is to stop consuming sugar and carbs. It will be difficult at first, but after the first week the cravings go away.
A helpful guide, if you only eat the green food, your blood sugar won’t rise. The drink list here is: water, coffee, tea, bouillon, bone broth, kombucha. Fat lot of good food guide
If you get a continuous glucose monitor (GCM), you can see in real time how different foods impact your blood sugar. It can be a great tool and feedback loop to help you achieve your goals.
Stevia, either as an ingredient (stevia-sweetened drinks) or a mix-in (dried powder or tincture dropper, eg to add to tea or coffee)
Water. I like plain water when I’m absolutely thirsty, like after working outside, but always gravitated towards sodas all other times I should have been drinking water throughout the day. I had to try a few dozen different flavorings, but once I found one I liked I was able to kick the sugar habit with water.
I go through a lot of no sugar propel. Probably more than I should? But it’s good.
User Forty2 made a great comment and I agree with so much of that.
Do not focus on stopping a behavior. Focus on slowly moving into a new behavior until the old one slowly disappears.
You can use transitional steps. What I did, was to change from regular soda to diet, and I did it by slowly mixing diet into the sugar until the proportions had reversed. And eventually you got to the point where it was mostly diet. There, I successfully changed to diet soda, I didn’t do it overnight, I took a month to do it and it was easy that way.
This applies in all areas of your sugar consumption.
For example, if you’re taking two measured tablespoons of sugar in each coffee… Start by reducing that amount by 7%. Yes, literally that small amount… But you layer one change on top of the next, on top of the next, once you have some success. It will take you literally 3 days to get used to the smaller amount of sugar, and you’ll barely notice it… And once that feels good, you reduce my another 7%
I like to mix soda water with good Apple cider 50/50 then add lemon and ginger to taste (about a teaspoon of each per pint works for me).
