Case Study 1: Putting Soft Drinks Down and Drinking Less Sugar

This blog is the first in BehaviorFit’s: “Case Study” Series.

Today, I review progress and success with a BeFit client. Later articles will review successes of other BeFit clients, Sports Performance clients, and Organizational clients.

Basically, BeFit clients want to make simple health and fitness changes. See a description of each client type here.

Our story today highlights the success of a mid-30’s, mother of two, road warrior, that put an end to drinking too many soft drinks.

A quick aside: I am from Indiana so I call the fizzy-sugary dark drink “pop”, but in this article, I will use the term “soft drink”.

Where are YOU from? And what do you call it? Pop? Soda? Soda-Pop? Or are you the odd-ball that calls ALL sugary-fizzy drinks a “Coke”!?!?!

It’s culture, so I will let it slide.

Does this U.S. map line up with your neck of the woods?

….moving on to client success.

Getting Started…

Before I even knew that reducing soft drinks was a target, I needed to ask my client what was important to her.

But first, let me introduce you to Ashley…

She came to me asking if I could help her out. Ashley filled out one of my contact forms and that’s how we got connected. I quickly learned that Ashley is a hard-working, married, mother of two that commutes over 1-hour to work each way, 4-5 days per week.

Most importantly, she wanted to model healthy behaviors to her children and keep up with them as they grow up.

What We Did

As I do with any client, I started with an assessment. Asking Ashely about her goals, reviewing what interventions previously worked and which did not, as well as potential barriers to her goals.

We hit on weight loss and started from there. She wanted to lose a significant amount of weight (~80 – 100 lbs).

I had never worked with this kind of client profile before, but armed with basic concepts of behavior analysis (and relevant experience of course), I accepted the challenge!

Given that I am not a nutritionist, I wanted to review the types of food Ashley consumed on a regular basis. This would allow me to provide any type of general recommendation if it was glaringly obvious.

We moved forward with data collection…

Counting Soft Drinks and Sugar Grams:

Before targeting sugar consumption via soft drinks, we initially targeted increasing Ashley’s general physical activity. She wore a Fitbit and we monitored those data weekly. Because she had the habit of wearing her Fitbit and syncing the app in place, logging soft drinks into the Fitbit app very easy for Ashley to do.

(This was convenient for me because I could follow along with Ashley’s soda entries by logging in online.)

Next, Ashley was required to log an entry into FitBit every time she drank a soft drink.

For example, if she drank a Cherry Coke, then the entry looked like this:

Then, I verified that the “Carbs” column matched the sugar content by cross-checking the nutrition label.

Each week, I added the number of soft drinks consumed and sugar grams…which gave us a nice baseline to start with.

What we quickly learned

In just one month of logging, we discovered that she was drinking on average 2-3 soft drinks per day…and a total of 32 soft drinks for the entire month of November.

This set off a red flag for me as the daily recommendation of added sugar for adult females = 24 gram per day.

One Coke has 42g by itself!!!

I have written extensively about added sugar in various drinks in these articles: Beware: The Unicorn Frappuccino and Its Sugary Descendants, What “Diabetes Here I Come” Can Teach Us, and Daily Sugar Budgets: How Will You Spend Yours?.

While sharing this information with Ashley, I strongly recommended that she consider cutting back on at least the added sugar in the form of soft drinks.

During this process, we also worked on consuming more water because she was not drinking any water…her only water intake came from processed drinks (soft drinks AND diet soft drinks).

I am not going to show the water consumption data…but she started drinking more water! Ya gotta believe me!

What Happened Next: The Intervention & Results

Our intervention was simple:

• Follow the sugar guideline as best we can as it relates to soft drink consumption
• Track soft drinks
• Give weekly feedback and hold Ashley accountable
• Sent Ashley visual charts every couple weeks documenting her progress

Over the course of several months, I observed quite the transformation with Ashley, she slowly cut back more and more each month. We set initial goals to having just one a day, to one every other day, to whatever she felt comfortable with. The goal was never to completely eliminate all soft drinks from her diet, but just to cut back…significantly.

But what happened next was beyond amazing!

Here is Ashley’s progress up to late April 2018:

We see that she slowly cut back from having 32 soft drinks in November 2017 to having not even 2 in the past 2 months!!!

All the months to the right of the vertical line show that she drank few soft drinks after we started working on goals, I held her accountable and gave her feedback each and every week.

Let me say that again —

She used to drink 2 EVERY DAY! But hasn’t had 2 in the past 2 Months!!!

An incredible accomplishment for Ashley! I could not be more proud of her.

To put this into perspective, I visualized the change based on a 4lb pound bag of sugar:

She consumed 65% of a 4lb bag of sugar (or over 2.5lbs) from soft drinks alone in November. You can see the dramatic decrease each month following November 2017.

Ashley has given her pancreas, the organ that produces insulin to get rid of sugar in her blood, quite a break to say the least!

But what’s more important I think are Ashley’s words:

She told me that she used to drink soft drinks back-to-back, but soon found herself taking 3-4 hours just to finish one!

(during the months she still drank soft drinks)

The success is worth noting once more: She USED TO DRINK 2-3 SOFT DRINKS PER DAY! Every day! And now, she drank LESS THAN 2 IN THE PAST TWO MONTHS!!!

Ashley even had a “celebratory” soft drink on her birthday, but even then, didn’t really “need” it like she used to.

It’s Not Personal

By no means is this blog a personal jab at Ashley…It’s a story of her success. She comes from a culture where drinking soda is just what you do. It’s a part of holidays, family gatherings, and everyday life. Ashley took a bold step saying “no” to a very long history of soda consumption.

All the credit goes her for making this change!

The alarming thing is that Ashley’s story reflects the national average: About half of U.S. adults consume close 3 soft drinks per day.

(The Huffington Post published this article with that factoid.)

Ashley’s story is one that I am happy to share as she fit the mold of a BeFit client. She needed help, turned to BehaviorFit for guidance, and I was fortunate enough to implement of few key behavioral principles to send her on way. Since working with her, she is down 30 lbs and is on the path to greater health.

As I wrap up this blog, I consider myself lucky to have this opportunity to work with her. Thank you, Ashley!

If you, a friend, or family member need help with changing something about your health just let us know.

Visit the “Become a Client” page to learn more or get started now by clicking the button below.

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Full Disclaimer: These are results are based on many hours of hard work with Ashley. Your success, intervention, and results may look different. BehaviorFit specializes in INDIVIDUAL behavior change. This article is not a suggestion for what YOU should, but a story of the power of behavior analysis.

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