Genuine question: what do you drink instead? Do you stick to water or do you order any kind of soda/lemonade (or something I’m not thinking about)
I went from always ordering a soft drink at restaurants to only drinking water. The swich occurred almost overnight, and I ended up losing about 25 lbs.
The reason I did this was entirely social, and it happened by accident. My parents didn't have soft drinks at home, except occasional leftovers after a party, so ordering a soft drink at a restaurant was sort of a "special treat," even if it was an infinitely refillable fountain drink. It turns out 3 glasses of soda have a metric fuckton of sugar.
Anyway, when I went to college, literally none of my friends would order soft drinks when we'd go out to eat. I'm not sure if it was because people were being thrifty, or for ease of splitting the bill, or maybe they just knew more about sugar than I did, but being the one person to order a soda felt so awkward that I just stopped and eventually never went back.
I've been using erythritol and stevia as sweeteners for years, and even with those, I find myself craving sweet things after consuming them more than when I go relatively long periods of time without eating sugary things or using sweetener.
The end result, at least for me, is that I crave sweet food more even when I use artificial sweeteners, making it harder to say no to eating shitty food later on.
Actually it does kind of annoy me when I just drink water that people will ask all the time. My go to has been seltzer + lime + wedge because I do like to have some taste, and it does look cocktail-ish.
That said I also like plain seltzer and bitter flavors generally (dark chocolate, black coffee, IPAs), so YMMV.
Fee Brothers sells a 12 piece variety pack which is a great way to experiment. After that you have quite a rabbit hole of bitters brands and flavors to explore!
Commercial kombucha is generally < .5%, homebrew can be up to 10x that. It's a two step process - yeast ferments the sugar into alcohol, then bacteria digest the alcohol into acid. If the bacteria fall behind, the ABV goes up.
The yeast can work anaerobic, the bacteria need O2 to get the job done. Anything not pasteurized is likely going to increase in ABV some in the bottle, since the yeast are active and the bacteria aren't. This is also why I force carbonate my home-brew - when you build CO2 with a secondary ferment you're also building alcohol.
If that isn’t available, some sort of soda or tea or coffee. Or, just water. No one really cares, though to be polite to the bar you’re at it’s good to try to buy something.
(I spent a couple months trying every variety of non-alcoholic "craft" beer that I could get my hands on earlier in the pandemic)
Kombucha has a tiny bit of alcohol (<0.5%) and tastes a bit like a soda but has a tiny amount of sugar (usually only 8g / serving).
Between that in particular, and all the intermittent fasting faddishness in the air, calories in drinks, especially outside mealtime, just began to feel weird. Water it is.