Life Without Diet Coke

Lunch.
Nearly my favorite of favorite things as it frees me from my desk, my computer, and the client I've been glued to since arriving that morning.

Lunch in our cafeteria is, as Forrest Gump put it so well, exactly like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get but you do know you can always wash whatever it is down with a Diet Coke. Even when you're still wondering later what exactly it was that you got.

Today was no different. I set down my tray and my Diet Coke and as I did, my best friend Holly, setting down her own tray, said, "Ah...you're not drinking Diet Coke -- ?"

I'd planned to but I know that tone. I'd missed something.

"The cancer article," she said. "They found the same stuff in brain cancer that is in Diet Coke."

Ok, that definitely planted a visual in my head that made the thought of drinking it much less attractive.

"Now it's not just the Diet Coke," she went on. "If you read the article, it's everything diet."

"Well good," I said, pushing my drink away, "no more of that then."

And I made a mental note to myself to read the cancer article I'd as yet only skimmed since she sent it.

Keeping up with everything you shouldn't have vs. what you should is daunting enough. At least learning I should remove diet everything simplified the process. Until, that is, the next article came out.

Case in point: Soy milk. Love it. Prefer it over the regular kind. Read Dr. Christine Northrop's book and was so impressed with the miracle properties of soy I seriously considered moving to a remote island somewhere in the Pacific and existing on a diet of nothing more than edamame beans (even if I'd have to have them flown in daily and disregarding the fact that it wasn't necessary to move to an island to implement the dietary change but it did sound like fun). If it was a soy-based product, it was in my pantry.

Then came the day I pulled my soy milk from the office fridge.

"Be careful with that stuff," Diane, who offices next to me, warned. "You're just inviting breast cancer."

She wasn't kidding. She produced a copy of Prevention magazine, and there you go.

So the soy went the way of the caffeine (difficult at first but only in the a.m. and once I learned to blowdry and roll my hair while still completely asleep, it wasn't so bad) all sodium (hereditary high blood pressure), processed flour, and the use of all things aerosol.

And life was good and July arrived and I enjoyed as always my weekends at the pool until Diane reminded me, producing yet another issue of Prevention, that I was setting myself up for skin cancer.

Completely disheartened, I asked my doctor, at that year's physical, where she stood on soy.

"There are such benefits!" she said, and listed just about every one I'd already heard about, adding a half dozen more. "And there are risks," she said, and shrugged. "It's like with anything, you weigh the risks and the benefits and you make choices."

She should write for Prevention.

Still, I stayed the course as best I could but honestly, if I couldn't have caffeine and if it were truly toxic to your liver to take more than one B-complex daily in addition to a multiple vitamin, something had to give. Sooner or later, I thought, I'm going in for that Diet Coke.

But then I thought about Holly. I'd never get away with it. She's so intuitive, and she'd get it out of me somehow. I think, having told her no more Diet Coke for me, she'd know it if I even thought about having one. She'd ask me, at some point, "So, you haven't had a Diet Coke?" and if I had and tried to lie, she'd reveal the lie before I'd even finished saying, "Me? No! Absolutely no..."

Getting through life without keeling over from eating the wrong things should not be this hard.

I think tomorrow I'm going to petition management to extend our restaurant license to the cafeteria in the best interests of all employees, and expand on the beverage services. Let's rip out the Diet Coke tap and put in a wine cooler, stocked with red only, of course.

It's very good for you. The cancer article even said so.