Coffee Addiction!

Rachel and I have a New Year's resolution to not drink soda at all at least two days a week. I'm pretty sure we do that anyways but we want to drink less sugar (and caffeine) to be at least slightly healthier. I thought we were pretty bad at our little addiction, but I now realize that I was dead wrong. We weren't addicted at all; we merely enjoy soda on occasion.

I write this during the middle of my 10-day new hire training for my accounting job. I'm in Orlando, FL for 5 more days. If you can't tell already I'm suffering from quite a culture shock. The thing I'm surprised about is that it is the coffee drinking (as opposed to alcohol drinking) that is the monster culture shock! There are about 300 people here but I spend most of my day in a room of about 35 people. 5 of the 6 LDS people at this training are in that room with me, so that leaves 30 potential coffee drinkers in the room each day. These 30 people (and I assume the other 269 in the conference) have a fresh coffee or tea with them at ALL times from morning until lunch. About 1/2 that number continue that trend into the afternoon. From what I can see it is absolutely a necessity of life. I had no idea how huge (and important!) coffee was to pretty much everybody. Anyone who hasn't had a cup in the morning (basically in the elevator ride down to breakfast) complains about needing it until they get it. No wonder the owner of Starbucks is rich enough to own his own country.

Seeing what to me is this phenomenon of non-stop coffee drinking has me re-assessing my soda consumption. Problem is, I can look at it in two different ways: 1) I don't want soda to become my coffee in either caffeine consumption or daily "need", or 2) I don't even sniff drinking that much soda so I should relax on my 2 days a week rule! I of course naturally want to select my second point of view in order to take better advantage of the free soda I have down here (I understand that the coffee drinkers could also be over-consuming just because it's there and free). But I for now will continue on my relatively light goal of 2 soda-free days a week. If not for lowering my caffeine intake, I at least need to take small steps in hopes of someday reducing (notice I recognize that I will NEVER actually eliminate) my "soda gut".