Kicking the soda habit can be a challenging one for many, but eliminating high-calorie, high-sugar sources from your beverages can have a major impact on your health and weight management. Even though diet drinks offer a low-calorie option, the chemical load can still be a major detriment to health, not to mention the additional sodium intake from most carbonated drinks. Plus, we all know excessive caffeine intake isn’t great for our health either.
Above shows the total amount of cubes of sugar in a typical soda can. Your body keeps the equivalent of just one of these cubes as blood sugar in your blood for optimal function.
However, switching to just plain water can be a real drag once used to having a flavorful beverage, especially with meals or other associated activities that we’ve built up habits around. What I have found to be helpful is trying out some alternative teas to provide more flavor than just water, better nutrients with my beverage instead of chemicals, little no calories, and even some non-caffeine loaded options!
Here are two of my favorites:
Hibiscus & Rose Hips Tea
This tea makes for a light and sweet-tasting tea without the calories or caffeine of most other beverages. High in Vitamin C and packed with other antioxidants it is a great amplifier to your nutrition.
You can find this tea and other great options here: Hibiscus and Rosehips Tea
Ginger Peach Tea
This tea provides a nice sweet flavor without a huge sugar load of calories. The natural caffeine from the black tea and the ginger provides a better boost for energy without overdosing the caffeine intake like most energy drinks.
You can find this tea and other great options here: Ginger Peach Tea
I prefer the From Great Origins (FGO) brand for teas because of the purity of their ingredients as well as the minimal manufacturing in their tea bags to assure there is no toxic loading from the paper or staples that are in most other tea bag brands.
Above is a French press for my Ginger Peach Tea and my Rosehips and Hibiscus Tea.
If you’re like me and don’t really like hot or warm beverages, let me give you some options to enjoy these teas cold. First, the old-fashioned way of brewing a cup and then pouring it over ice once it has finished steeping is perfectly fine. If you like having it on hand and ready, the method I prefer to use is a French press to steep multiple servings at once with the hot water needed. Then, I put the French press container in the fridge to chill. I like this method because it allows you to prepare a lot of servings at once and keep it ready to go, eliminating the excuse of time to prepare it later when you are looking for a cold beverage.
Here is one of the French presses that I use: French Press