Giving up soda for 30 days sounds like a small experiment, but the numbers can add up surprisingly fast if you’re accustomed to drinking it every day. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a typical 12-ounce regular soda contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar and 155 calories. Skip one every day for 30 days and you’ve removed roughly 300 teaspoons of sugar and 4,650 calories from your usual intake—assuming you don’t replace them somewhere else. That doesn’t guarantee dramatic weight loss, clearer skin or any of the other transformations frequently promised by online “soda detox” challenges. What happens when you stop drinking soda depends on what you normally drink, how much you consume and what you pour into the glass instead.
