help kicking the diet soda habit

so, I'm 1.5 years post op RNY and I made the horrible choice to start drinking diet soda again. Now I just feel yucky & bloated all the time I have absolutely GOT to get off the darned things. Here's my problem, I have a HORRIBLE head ache if I don't have my morning soda. There's no way I can go cold turkey, I would not even be able to function at work. in the past when I wanted to kick the habit, I would take excedrin every 4 hours to stave off the headache because it has caffine in it. Then I would wean the excedrin down slowely. Problem with that now is I can't take excedrin. So, does any one have any tips / tricks for getting off the soda train?/

Decafe coffee or tea, iced in summer if you wish, may be a way to get over the headaches.  Some people have big issues with caffeine withdrawl.  Starbucks brewed coffee is 180mg caffeine per cup, while Starbucks brewed decafe is 15mg caffeine. I use a pre packaged green tea packet, each caffeine, 10 calories and less than 1g sugar.  3 flavors and mixing with different amounts of water will vary the taste slightly. Recommended to mix with 12-18 oz of water, but I prefer to mix with 21 oz of water and 3 oz of ice to fill my Hydro Flask to have cool tea any time of a hot day.  Doing a quick Google on caffeine amounts in 12 oz diet sodas:  Diet coke has 45 mg, Diet Pepsi has 36mg, Diet Mt. Dew has 71, Diet Dr. Pepper has 44mg as examples.  Iced decafe coffee with SF flavoring or flavored green tea may be an alternative, and you can dilute these too, so the caffeine level is even less. DAVE

This may be oversimplified but...why don't you just replace soda with another form of caffeine? You can have caffeine in limited amounts at this point. Drink a cup of coffee in the morning. Coffee, unlike soda, has some health benefits.

thanks guys, maybe I'll just order unsweet iced tea instead of soda on my daily Sonic run. then at least I'll feel like I'm still getting a treat. LOL Love me some Soni****

what about just cutting down slowly?  How many sodas do you drink a day?  Maybe you could start drinking half a soda at a time instead of a whole one, and cut down from there.

 I was a diet coke addict! Now I drink caffeinated tea with sweetner.  I have to have something sweet. The only thing I can recommend is to just stop buying them, then you won't have them to drink.

preop when I quit a nurse friend of mine suggested I take tylenol each morning for the two weeks after I stopped cold turkey. She said it take 2 weeks for the withdrawal to go away. I opted not to do that and suffered for 3 days with headaches and they stopped. I would say cut out one a day depending on how many you have til you can stop altogether. Or you may find that one in the morning doesn't have the adverse affects on your body and is enough to keep the headache at bay once you've cut back.

Are you sure it's the caffeine doing it? When I quit diet soda completely I had bad headaches but it was from the aspartame. I had actually quit aspartame entirely (diet soda was just one of several things I tossed) and started drinking iced tea sweetened with stevia. Iced tea had caffiene too, so it wasn't like I wasn't getting any caffiene at all suddenly. I was totally brain fogged. I left the remote in the freezer, I could not speak correctly, I felt depressed, I had a constant headache that became a migraine. But that's me. You may only have one symptom from aspartame withdrawal.

Yeah, I have the same caffeine/aspertame issues. I have kicked it several times only to pick it back up again. What worked for me: When I woke up, drink an ounce or 2 to head off the pain. Then, as my day wore on, take a few sips when the pain was barely starting back. It took the edge off. And, definitely not drink any diet soda in between. Of course, Tylenol helped in conjunction with this. Good luck. I know how truly tough this is. No clue why I keep going back. When I am off of it, or at least after the first 2 weeks of being off of it, I feel AMAZING.

 When I was getting off soda (total addict!) I switched to diet Snapple, and then from there to Crystal Lite and Mio.  Now that I can have caffeine again I'm back to the Snapple, although now I need to cut that out too because it's $$$.