Sunday, June 13, 2010
4:15 AM
Pop
I come from a family of serious pop lovers. Even when I was young enough to drink from a baby bottle, I was a pop drinker. One of my sweetest childhood memories is that of my mom filling my baby bottle with coca cola and putting it into the fridge while I was taking an afternoon nap so that when I awakened, I would have an ice cold special treat to refresh me. Mmmm. I LOVED my post-nap bottles of coke. Even more, MUCH more, I love my mom who has always been the sweetest, most thoughtful mom in the entire world. Vintage coke bottles always remind me of her. We always had pop in our house. If I ever visited a house that DIDN'T have pop available, I was confused because I grew up thinking that pop was a staple grocery item. We never, ever came home from the grocery store without pop. I came to love a lot of flavors over the years but during the first 8 years or so of my life, Coke was the main brand we all drank. It was my mom's favorite and she passed that love onto my brother and me. You could always find one or two (sometimes more) cartons of empty coke bottles on our carport because that's where we kept them in between grocery store trips. Back then, the bottles required a deposit so you had to take the empty ones back to the store if you didn't want to have to pay the deposit multiple times. Deposit money was also a way for us kids to get some extra candy money. If you were desperate for some candy and your parents weren't around to give you a little change, you could just take the bottles up to the store and they would give you change in return for them. I can't remember for sure how much it was but it seems like it was either 3 or 5 cents per bottle. Candy was cheap back then so a carton of pop bottles could be traded for a good handful of sugary treats. LOL
We also had a real coke bottle opener attached to one of our kitchen counters. You can buy them in several places today as they have become popular vintage items but back then, they were not nearly so easy to get so people who visited our house always thought that bottle opener was something especially cool. We forgot to take it with us when we moved from that house at the end of my 8th grade year and we've always regretted it simply because that one held so much sentimental value for all of us. Today, the skinny people of the world are attempting to wage war against us overweight folks by trying to remove pop from schools and other public places where vending machines can usually be found. Pop is high in calories so they want kids to drink fruit juices, etc. instead of pop. But let me tell you something. I love pop. I let my kids drink pop in reasonable moderation. I don't care if it has a lot of calories. We drank it when we were kids and it didn't automatically make us fat. People are getting fat because long work days/weeks are leaving everyone too tired to do anything but sink into the couch when they get home. Sugar is not the enemy. A sedentary lifestyle is the enemy. Give us shorter work weeks, less stressful work environments, more paid vacation time, affordable healthcare and affordable gym memberships, and America will get healthy again. That's a fact. But regardless of whether you believe that or not, be sure of one thing: you are not getting my pop away from me. I pity the skinny know-it-all activist who even tries. A glass pop bottle is a horrible thing to have to remove from your intestines. You'll just have to trust me on that. : )
* Update: God has an interesting sense of humor. A couple of months after I wrote this, I became life-threateningly ill with an upper respiratory infection that sent me to the ER three times. Long story short, I was drowning in my own fluids. I was horribly bloated with a suffocating amount of fluid around my heart. My weight had ballooned up to an astronomical number and I was also unexpectedly diagnosed with an enlarged heart. I've never been so miserably ill in my entire life. I was terrified and there were moments when I really didn't think I was going to make it. I pray I never have to go through anything like that again. Out of necessity, I have embarked upon a radical journey toward total lifestyle change and while I still stand behind my theory that sedentary lifestyles, etc. are the main cause of America's obesity problem, I also have been forced to face the fact that a huge amount of my excess calories and sodium were coming from the approximated 2 liters of pop I was drinking at the time of my illness. So sadly, I have had to cut WAY back on my soda consumption. As far as I know, I'll never need to give pop up completely but I'll also never be free to drink it at will again. Giving it up continues to be very hard as I thirst for it every single day. Besides, that, just the act of going out to get a cold, refreshing pop with crunchy ice is one of my favorite things in the world to do so I just miss it all the way around. It's something I can only have once in a blue moon now. Since February 23, when my new diet began, I've only had pop a handful of times and when I did, I limited it to a single 8 oz. glass with no refills AND, most of the time it has been 0 calorie Diet Dr. Pepper. I could count on one hand the amount of times I've had any of it. On a daily basis, I now pretty much stick to ice water and sugar-free kool-aid. I love pop very much but I love my family, good health, breathing, and life much more. It just sucks that I have been forced to choose either/or.