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They tell me I should be drinking more water.

Who? Everyone. My doctor, health experts, every diet guru from the "go vegetarian" folks to the "screw vegetables" Atkins crowd. They're all agreed -- if you want to lose weight and improve your health, drink eight glasses of water a day.

Eight 8 oz. glasses of water a day is 64 ounces total -- about 1.9 liters.

It sounds like a lot, but actually it's just a little more than three 20 ounce bottles of water over the course of twelve hours. I can (and have) put away that many Cokes, no problem. Of course that would net me nearly 60 milligrams of caffeine (yeah!) and 776 calories (boo!). That's like two meals worth of sugar.

Water, by contrast, gives me no caffeine and no calories -- but it also makes me run to the bathroom every twenty minutes.

Five days into my goal to eat five to nine servings of fruits and veggies a day (per the rules of the Get Health Guilford challenge), I have discovered just how hard it is eat all those good-for-you things. It's especially tough because I am kind of picky. Berries always seem too tart to me. Citrus stuff is worse. Melon is OK, but my life does not provide free time for slicing honey dew. And frankly, I couldn't look at one more apple today.

In an effort to make sure I got the day off right, I tried my first V8. Can I just ask, how did this junk stay on the market for so long???

If you haven't tried it, it is kind of like cold tomato soup with notes of dirty feet and cut grass. I drank it all, mind you. I am committed to the challenge. But I am going to need to find better ways to get there.

Any suggestions of sneaky ways I can get in the fruits and veggies?

I've had a serious soda problem for years. It's mostly the caffeine -- a common American addiction and an even more common one in newsrooms.

But soda's out if I want to lose ten pounds in ten weeks. I'm not big on diet sodas and have been getting my caffeine fix from sugar-free Red Bull. But there's gotta be some better stuff out there to drink when you just can't drink any more water.

What are you guys drinking?

I was caught red-handed .... with a McDonald's cup.

A very quick GTCC staffer called me out on the golden arches, iced-coffee concoction sitting mistily in my hot palm. She inquired about my drink of choice, considering my alleged attempts to give up fast food.

I never promised to give up coffee, I told her. I didn't buy a Big Mac or anything. Plus, I am only human, and I am taking this diet thing one day at a time.

Well, as long as you try again tomorrow, she told me.

I was knee deep in excuses by the time I returned to the office to check out the damage on McDonald's website: 130 calories, 5 grams of fat and 21 grams of sugar!

Hopefully next time someone will catch me before I get to the McDonald's register.

Last weekend I had a dream about soda. Coca-cola to be specific. I dreamt that I was someplace where no one knew me and no one knew I was on a diet. I looked over both shoulders and held out a clear plastic cup and happily watched it overflow with sugary, caramel colored soda.

And I drank it quickly, before the dream evaporated.

Strangely, when I woke up, I thought it had really happened. Then yesterday it did.

I kicked butt at the gym, then stopped at the grocery store to pick up some milk and orange juice. As a treat for working so hard, I also picked up a bottle of Cherry Coke Zero.

Later, at home, I popped it open and took a couple of big, satisfying swigs. Joe picked up the bottle and examined it.

"Is this regular coke?"

"No." Indignant.

"Um, I think it is."

Crap. It was. I felt all dirty. And used by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, which made the Cherry Coke look almost exactly like the Cherry Coke Zero.

To share the burden, Joe drank the rest of it.

Check out this quiz on modern portion sizes vs. portion sizes of the past.

It points out that twenty years ago the average bagel was about half the size and half the number of calories as today's bagel. The news gets worse from there.

I've noticed this a lot since we started struggling to lose this weight. You're almost never given one portion size of anything -- and if you are, it seems very small in this giant-food culture we've built.

I want to give a shout out to Chick-fil-A and OutBack for offering Coke Zero, the much tastier alternative to Diet Coke.

May that 1980s vintage era soda become a footnote in the annals of dieting history, between the Thighmaster and Richard Simmons shortie shorts.

Reader Diana writes to us about being bored with all the water in her weight loss regimen:

I have been following your and Amanda's weight loss success. In your comments on 4/14 I am quoting from your article..."too much fast food, soda instead of juice or water"... What kind of juice(s) do you drink? I often drink water with my meals but get tired of it sometimes and would like something different.

Here's my reply:

Thanks for writing to us, Diana.

I’ve been told that there’s danger in replacing soda with juices because there’s a lot of sugar in 100% juice – but there are also a lot of vitamins, and the sugar isn’t refined. I don’t drink as much juice as I used to drink soda, but I do like to have a glass of orange juice (not from concentrate – Amanda picks on me for caring about the difference) with breakfast. One eight ounce glass of orange juice (it’s easy to overdo it) is 2 servings of fruit – so you’re well on your way to your recommended daily servings in the morning.

I also enjoy cranberry juice – though what you’ll usually find in the grocery store is a mix of cranberry and apple juice. Amanda used to live and work on Cape Cod, where cranberry bogs are huge and she’s explained to me that pure cranberry juice is just too strong for most people. But if you’re going to go the cranberry route, make sure that you get something that’s 100% juice and not one of the cranberry juice cocktail drinks they’re peddling that have something like 10% juice.

The people who make V8 also make V8 Fusion(http://www.v8juice.com/fusion.aspx), a blend of fruit and vegetable juices that is actually good – as opposed to the straight V8, which Amanda learned she didn’t like the hard way. But they also make V8 Splash, a drink that is delicious but not 100% juice.

There are also a number of great diet juice and tea mixes that you can make at home. I like the Target brand ones myself – they make a peach iced tea I could drink all day that I think is something like 5 calories per serving.

What are you guys drinking?

Since we began the Cheesefry Nation blog I've gotten more e-mails about drinks - water, soda, diet soda, juice -- than anything else.

Water's clearly the best choice -- but sometimes it's not a lot of fun for your taste buds. Amanda and I have found a few diet sodas we like -- but not many. And while they're certainly the lesser of two evils, many doctors and nutritionists will tell you diet sodas aren't that much better for you and have even been linked to weight gain and chronic disease.

But here's the thing: water, soda and diet soda aren't your only choices.

Try some Green Tea -- which I've been drinking the last few days in the form of this fine product from the Arizona tea company:

Arizona Diet Green Tea with Ginseng. First ingredient: Premium Brewed Green Tea using filtered water. That, some natural flavors, Vitamin C, citric acid and honey, Splenda (which I much prefer to aspartame) and Ginseng extract. No calories, no carbs, one gram of sugar and 10 grams of sodium per serving.

All of which would mean nothing if it didn't taste good. And it does. It's not water, but it's a step above diet sodas.

Here's what Dr. Mehmet Oz (author of the excellent You: The Owner's Manual) has to say on the subject:

"It may have only one-third the caffeine of coffee, but because it has extra natural chemicals in it, it gives you the same punch. Green tea is unfermented tea that hasn't been oxidized yet, so whatever biologically active, natural goodness was in the plant is still in there."

I'm going to begin making the tea at home (to further avoid any of the extra stuff) and see how it goes.

I also have to recommend the Arizona Diet Peach Tea, sweetened with real fruit juice with no preservatives, artificial colors or flavors. Good stuff.

What are you guys drinking?