Let me tell you the story of one girl’s love affair with barely flavored bubble water.
How I learned to stop worrying and love La Croix
If you’ve been following my New Year’s resolution check-ins, you’ll know that I’ve been slowly shedding weight over the past six (!!!) months. A lot of that has been because I resolved to go the gym regularly, but an easier change has been cutting down on the calories I eat in a day.
Or specifically, the calories I drink in a day. My eating habits weren’t too bad and were easily curbed by cutting portion sizes to something a little more reasonable. But calorie-heavy drinks, whether it was ridiculous coffee concoctions, craft beer, or the biggest culprit, soda, were bringing me down.
I cut almost all the sugar out of my coffee (switching to cold brew was great for this) and limited myself to drinking better beer less of the time, but I haaaaaaate diet soda. Hate it. Diet Coke, Coke Zero, etc etc etc.
So when last January rolled around and we were grocery shopping with my new eating habits in mind, Jim and I grabbed a box of lime, coconut, and passion fruit La Croix to see what all the hype/anti-hype was all about.
Twenty-ish pounds, two pants sizes and six months later, I’ve come to embrace my obsession.
Flavortown’s Distant Suburb: A Ranking
This list is by no means exhaustive. Instead, I’m just ranking the flavors I’ve tried. Am I missing out on any? Let me know!
1. Key Lime
Not to be confused with it’s plainer cousin, this is the shit. I don’t know how they got something with no sugar in it to taste sweet, but who am I to question? Key Lime pie is one of my favorite desserts, so I grabbed this as soon as I saw it at Target back in March.
During last week’s Target run, Key Lime was out of stock at our usual Target. But I’m not defeated that easily! I hopped onto the Target website to find somewhere it was in stock and picked it up the next day. Not necessarily for the purposes of this article. I just needed it in my life again.
2. Pamplemousse
Grapefruit is well served by being this mild in flavor because it can be too aggressively sour in its natural form. Also, it has the prettiest can.
This is probably the one I drink the most because while Key Lime is my favorite, it doesn’t come in value packs at Costco like the Lime/Lemon/Grapefruit combo. Bubbly water that fits my financial and caloric budgets is my kinda bubbly water.
3. Lime
Once upon a time, I stumbled across La Croix because it was in the fridge of a tech company where I was interviewing someone for an article and it seemed a better alternative to grabbing a Coke.
Fast forward to May 2018, and Jim just started making gin + not tonics with these. I don’t usually like G&Ts, but this concoction of his is growing on me.
4. Tangerine
Who loves orange soda? Kel loves orange soda… and so do I. But a can of Sunkist, my favorite orange soda, is 190 calories. Hard ask for someone trying to stick to 1200-1500 calories a day.
We haven’t tried orange yet, but tangerines tend to be sweeter so we went with this. Like the Key Lime, it manages to convince me it has sugar when I know it doesn’t.
5. Lemon
No strong feelings. Literally none. It’s nice. It’s inoffensive. Jim usually drinks all of them and I’m okay with that.
6. Cran-Raspberry
You remember when you were a kid and accidentally drank Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry, only to be taken aback because to you, bright red meant aggressively sweet fruit punch? This is the La Croix equivalent.
That being said, I am a lame adult who likes cran-raspberry juice. I just like other things more, and the same goes for La Croix flavors.
5. Coconut
Everyone says La Croix tastes like hairspray. False. But Coconut does taste like sunscreen. Or rather, how sunscreen smells. You know what I’m talking about. That sweet artificial coconut smell.
That being said… I don’t hate it? Sunscreen smells great. It tastes awful, but it smells great. I feel like this flavor would be good mixed with rum.
6. Passionfruit
And on the subject of La Croix tasting like toiletries, passionfruit tastes like perfume. Passionfruit tastes like every La Croix meme I’ve ever read. It is so bad that I didn’t bother rebuying it for review purposes because I didn’t want to waste valuable fridge space.
It’s such a shame, because Portuguese maracuja soda is one of my favorite things on this earth.
Enough trying to burst my bubble, damn it
I guess I should come to some sort of conclusion here.
I get tagged in lots of “La Croix sux” memes, and while they’re (usually) funny, it ties into a bigger issue I have with the internet sometimes: how dare you like things that I don’t like. Especially things that are basic, whatever that means.
Fine. I’m a basic bitch. Fight me. I like popular things sometimes. More on being a basic bitch in some other day, but for now, just let people like things. Even if they barely taste like the things they’re supposed to taste like.
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