Kicking a bad habit with mom's help

A friend of mine dubbed me the "Coke-Cola Queen" because I drank so much soda.

I can't recall how it all started. It must have begun too far back in the past and my memory just hazed over it. I do, however,  remember clearly how it stopped.
What I also know is that my mother played a very large role in all of it.
It wasn't an addiction but more of a very rotten, bad habit. I loved soda, whether it was Pepsi, Coca-Cola, sometimes Sprite, but never, ever Dr. Pepper. For a while, when I was a kid, this adoration for sugary, fizzy beverages was kept in check. This is all a credit to my parents who never stocked the fridge with the stuff. When I went off to college, things changed. When I  got my first job and my own apartment, things got worse. I  couldn't get enough of soda.
My first apartment had a pantry but rather than line the shelves with food, I lined them with empty, flimsy plastic soda bottles that would eventually be taken to the recycling center.
Alarmingly, I never got tired of the beverage. The sweetness never became too much for me; the utter lack of nutrition was completely mute.
This fact came in extremely loud and clear to my mother and she worked her hardest to communicate this message to me. Empty calories, she would say. It is all empty calories. When it failed to register, my mother tried a new tactic - news articles. I will never forget  the  time when I opened my e-mail at work to see my mother had forwarded an article about studies that proved soda could  leach calcium from your bones.
She is not the only one in the family who had a crusade against the beverage. One of the few stories I remember my grandmother sharing to me about her own mother was that my great-grandmother harbored a disdain for soda. "Poison," is what my grandmother's mother would describe it.
Of course I knew both mothers were correct. The fact would buzz around my conscience like a glad fly but I would simply swat it away.
Oh, I would try and mend my ways every once in awhile. Drink only diet drinks or simply stop altogether. Then I was back to buying it at the grocery store. But similar to any addictions or foul eating habits, I eventually sloped into rock bottom.
Buttons on my pants wouldn't stay closed. Nothing I wore was loose. I denied things for a while but then I got another e-mail from my mother that once again gave me the cold, hard facts. She was organizing her closet after I had come for dinner, she wrote, when my father marched in and declared that I needed to loose weight. Then, in what I considered to be a very polite and generous gesture, she suggested maybe I   needed to see a doctor since I did exercise and didn't seem to eat a lot.
Now this is the part that I remember extremely clearly. I think the memory is vivid because for once I did not get annoyed and swat away at the truth. I actually grasped and accepted it.
Even more, I vowed to never consume another Pepsi, Sprite or Coke again. That was more than two years ago.
I tell this story over and over again; it stirs up feelings of pride in me that I actually kicked a bad habit to the curb. But more than that I feel, finally, a sense of awe and admiration to my mother's anti-soda cause. This bad habit of mine lasted more than a decade and she never gave up on me and she never wavered.
And I will never, ever forget it.