In my last post, Tired of Being Tired, I shared several reasons why people tell me they always feel tired.  I have found, after talking to many people, that addiction to things in life usually stem back to some type of stress in their lives.  Stress not only causes people to form addictions but can magnify a current habit to full blow addiction without a person even knowing it.  I will give you an example.  I have a really good friend who recently lost his job through downsizing.  Great individual, has a family, house, all the normal things that most of us have.  A loss of a job, next to a death of a family member, is probably the second leading cause of stress in a person’s life.  How are they going to survive, can they find another job at the same level, so many things go through the mind of someone experiencing this crisis, it’s a wonder people survive.  He called me one day to seek some advice and I decided to pay him a visit.  My friend was a smoker, but a light one.  He probably smoked a pack or so every week if that.  He didn’t drink, was pretty active, just your normal average human.

  When I got to his house that day, he was the only one there, and he let me in and we sat at the kitchen table and he began to tell me what was going on.  The first thing I noticed after we got to talking was that he lit up a smoke.  I remember telling myself, that was odd.  Not long into the story, he got up from the table and pulled a bottle out of his cupboard and proceeded to pour a glass of whisky for himself.  He sat down at the table and lit up another smoke as he sipped on his whisky.  I am sure you are getting the picture.  My friend had never drank in front of me, let along whisky, and I had never seen him light up to cigarettes within about 10 minutes of each other.  During my hour or so visit, he had his one glass of whisky and 7 cigarettes.  I knew right then that the stress and worry of loosing his job and not knowing what he was going to do, was causing him to increase his normal comfort habit to a full blown addiction.  I won’t bore you with the rest of my friends story, but he did seek counseling and today has a great job, and actually doesn’t smoke anymore.

  The point to my story and this post is that I realized my Diet Coke addiction was due in large part by stress.  I mentioned early in my story that I did not intend to drink 7-8 cans a day for all those years, it just happened.  When looking back today, the stress I had at work was the main culprit is feeding my need for Diet Coke.  Of course, I don’t have the job today, but back then, Diet Coke seemed to get me through the day.  Gradually my addiction became stronger, I drank more and more each day, trying to maintain it’s effect, until it finally became the addiction I share in my story.  Stress can cause people to do many things that later in life they might regret. 

  Maybe your addiction is not Diet Coke, maybe regular pop, coffee, tea, unhealthy energy drinks, and so forth.  Think back to when you started consuming your addicting beverage, can you place an event that might have caused you to start drinking it, or maybe you can remember the time when the amount you drink started to increase, was there something in your life that might have caused that.  I think you will find that something caused you stress in your life and the side effect of that was the addiction you face today.

  If you have read my other posts, you know that I am going to offer you the 3-Day ACT challenge.  For three days, stop drinking whatever unhealthy drink you are consuming and give Drink ACT a try on me!!  Email me, wittmc@msn.com, with your name, address and phone number and I will send you three days worth of Drink ACT and I guarantee you that after three days, you will feel better, have more energy, more clarity, more focus and you won’t have the cravings to continue drinking anything else.  What do you have to loose? 

Thanks for all the great comments and support,
Mike Witt
Davenport, Iowa

  There are many things that can cause a person to be tired, some are medical, some are personal.  I am not a doctor and if you struggle with constant fatigue, the first step is to seek medical advice, you may have something that can be treated and managed.  What I want to focus on are the personal choices that can cause our bodies to be constantly tired each and every day.  Lets look at just a few:

Diet (specifically food choices)
Lack of exercise
Jobs (stress)
Lack of sleep or sleep pattern
Personal worries (finances, family, friends)
Bad Habit (like mine, addicted to Diet Coke)

  This is only a short list of the many reasons a person can experience fatigue and tiredness througout the day.  Today’s fast paced lifestyle has changed the scope of how things are done in the world.  We are constantly asked to do more with less, take on more without giving up other things and all of this can take a toll on our bodies and mind if left unchecked.  How many times have you heard from your parents or grandparents, “Life was not this complicated when I was your age”.  Typically, that is the crux, life can be complicated for most of us.  That fast paced complication can lead to poor eating habits, stress on the job, lack of sleep or lack of good sleep, addictions to unhealthy products, worries and ultimately fatigue.

  I share in my story that one of the side effects I stuggled with was extreme fatigue.  I have a stressful job, I have a wife and three teenagers (that alone can cause stress), I don’t always eat the way I should and many times I skipped exercising becasue I was always tired and run down.  We can’t always change the world or even our own situation at times, but what we can do, is take control over the things that make the most difference.  When I broke my Diet Coke addiction, although it was by accident, my body responded in a positive way.  Couple that with the addition of a Healthy replacement like Drink ACT, my daily struggle with always being tired started to fade.  As my energy increased, so did my desire to choose healthier foods, to exercise more regularly, and to take time out each day to focus on myself instead of the stresses of life.  I don’t feel tired anymore.  I don’t fight fatigue like I used to, I know now what it takes to manage my lifestyle around the faced paced world we live in, and do it on my timetable.

  Take the three day Drink ACT challenge.  Email me your name, address and phone number, wittmc@msn.com, and try Drink ACT for three days on me!!  If it’s not for you, great, all you gave up was a little time.  But if it does for you what it did for me, and if it gets rid of your statement, “I am tired of being tired”, then you will begin to take back your health and vitality just like me.

Thanks for all the comments and support,
Mike Witt
Davenport, Iowa

  If you read my entire story then you know that I am going to start with the punch line first in this post.  When I finally quit drinking Diet Coke almost 4 weeks ago, I experienced NO WITHDRAWAL SYMPTOMS at all!!  The catch is, this time was different from all the other times that I tried to quit and experienced a ton of withdrawal symptoms that always brought me back to drinking it. 

  The first time I tried to quit drinking Diet Coke, was about two years ago.  At that time, my side effects were just starting to arise.  For the first time ever, I experienced a migraine.  For those folks who have had migraines, you know what I am talking about, migraines are different from a regular headache.  In fact, I went to a nuerosugeon, who did all the scans and didn’t find anything and then prescribed Imitrex.  The medication was great, it usually took care of the migraine with one dose, but a year later, one pill just wouldn’t do it.  This past year, the migraines became more frequent and typically when one set in, one Imitrex was not enough to knock it out.  I remember times when a migraine would set it and it got so bad I had to go home early from work, would usually down a can of diet coke, take a couple Imitrex, put a hot towel over my face and crawl into my bed to try and sleep it off.  This is not how a young, active 40 year old wanted to live his life.

  Shortly after the migraines and headaches began, I started to notice problems in both my knees.  I would wake up in the morning and feel pain in my knees that made it hard to just stand up at times.  The joint pain would come and go, but most of this last year, it increasingly became worse.  One of my hobbies is go-karting.  I race at two local tracks, travel to other tracks around Iowa and race at the countries largest street race, the Rock Island Grand Prix.  When you are at the track your go-kart sits on a stand and when you are ready to go out to race you and your pit person have to lift it off the stand onto the ground.  My knees pain was so bad at times, I could no longer put the weight on my knees to lift my own kart off its stand.  Realize, I am a pretty healthy individual, very active and to have this kind of problem effect my life this way, was not how I wanted to live.

  Near the beginning of 2008 I went to my doctor one day and asked him about all the problems I was having.  After talking, my addiction to Diet Coke came up.  As I shared in my story, my doctor was not too happy to find out how much I was drinking daily and for how long I had been doing this.  He didn’t come out and say, Mike, the Diet Coke is causing your problems, but I could tell in voice that he knew my addiction could be the cause.  Of course, me being naive, I couldn’t see how a soda could cause that many side effects, but at that time, I had no clue what Aspartame was or the effects it could have on the body.  I continued to drink my normal 7-8 cans plus a day and kind of just wrote off what my doctor seemed to urge me to do, it just didn’t seem to make sense to me at that time.

  Well, here is the final punch line and how my Diet Coke addiction ended, or new chapter in my life began, however you want to look at it.  As I share in my story, a very good friend of mine came to my office one day and wanted to share a product with me that he had been trying, he thought I might like it, knew I had a pretty stressful job and thought I might like some extra energy.  He gave me a couple samples and said drink one in the morning and one later in the afternoon and see what you think.  I won’t share the ending here, you can read it on my Diet Coke Addiction Busted!! page, but what I want to get across to all of the people who struggle with the same type of side effects and symptoms associated with Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners, is that with the help of a healthy replacement, I was able to break my addiction in 5 DAYS, and not experience one withdrawal symptom at all.  NONE.  I know that there are people who can ween themselves off, or stop cold turkey but can everyone, I couldn’t.  The truth is there are many people who can’t because the addiction is too strong and the side effects are too much to handle. 

  I know that the side effects of artificial sweeteners is real, I experienced them.  To this date, nearly 5 weeks after my last Diet Coke, every side effect that I shared above or on my other posts has gone.  I have not had one headache, not one migraine, no more joint pain, and finally I feel like a healthy 40 year old should.  If you haven’t checked out Drink ACT, then do it.  Maybe you don’t have a diet drink addiction, maybe it’s coffee, tea, un-healthy energy drinks or your third run to Starbuck’s for a double late expresso.  Whatever the addiction, I recommend you the ACT three day challenge.  Shoot me an email, wittmc@msn.com, and I will send you enough samples to try it for three days.  Stop drinking whatever your addiction is for three days, and replace with Drink ACT.  By day three I guarantee that you will feel better than you ever have in your life, and you won’t have the cravings for all the other unhealthy drinks out there.  If you don’t believe me, put me to the test, heck it won’t cost you anything, in fact it will at least save you money for three days on the other drinks you buy.

Thanks again to all those that have visited my site, read my story and give Drink ACT a shot.  Watch for a new page coming soon with all the testimonials of people who have had great results with ACT.

Mike Witt
Davenport, Iowa