Round two of the 2017 Shake It Off Challenge has begun, and I have to say I think we have a contender on our hands. Nutrisystem is a long running company and they have had that time to perfect the “diet' shake powder. This is downright delicious. This is the kind of thing that would make dieting easy. I'm not even on a diet and I want to drink these all of the time because it tastes great and there is no guilt in consuming it. What other chocolate beverage can say that?

It is ridiculously creamy and it tastes like decent chocolate, not like garbage chocolate that you would swear is actually more plastic than food. There is some stevia and monk fruit extract in here as well as fructose to sweeten it, but none of them interfere with the chocolate taste. That is a feat onto itself. The numbers for this are less than the Wonderslim. It has 13g of sugar with 150 calories, but with this you will recognize the names of more of the ingredients, and you can't argue with that flavor. I personally feel much better drinking this than the competitor.

We have one more contestant in this game. Will Nutrisystem remain on top, or will they be ousted? Only time will tell.

I'm complained on here, a stupid amount of times, that companies should just lower the amount of sugar they use instead of using zero calorie sweeteners. Sure, they save you calories, but it's at the cost of the taste of the beverage. Dry does exactly what I have suggested. To be fair they have been doing it since before I vocalized my thoughts. This can of soda has less than half the sugar that a “normal” soda would. For a lot of their flavors this practice really works wonderfully. Unfortunately this one just does not taste right to me. There is a natural sweetness in cherries, and it's lost in tis translation. It's one of the few soda flavors that I like being really sweet. Actually a middle ground would be perfect. This tastes more like actual cherries than most sodas, but I could use more of the sweetness from a typical cherry pop. Taking all of that into consideration if I had a six pack of these I'm pretty sure by the end I would become acclimated with it and would have no issues once my brain/taste buds adjusted.

If I were to substitute all of the cans of seltzer water that I drink with La Croix brand, I would have to be a rich man. Perhaps that is just because the amount I drink is so obscene, but these cans are at least double the price of the 12-packs of Polar I normally purchase. Do you know what though? It's totally worth it. I love Polar, but La Croix put out the most flavorful seltzers I have ever tried. They have figured out a way for high quality fruit flavors to shine though without any sweeteners, which makes it zero calories. You could drink case after case of this stuff and not feel terrible about yourself. I bet you would have the most righteous burps too.

There is no mistaking this, it is most certainly a sparkling berry beverage. As long as you are not some sort of savage that needs your drinks to be more sugar than liquid, it is incredibly enjoyable.

I'm going to change an old adage and instead of “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link” I'm going to start saying “An Arnold Palmer is only as strong as its weak lemonade.” This could have been the world's best iced tea (it's not it pretty average), but since the lemonade aspect of it is fairly unremarkable the whole thing just kind of falls apart. I don't understand what the problem is. Everything in here is organic and they use real lemon juice, but that part of this concoction tastes weak and fake. Actually, it tastes more like someone brewed a bag of black tea, mixed in a squirt of lemon and then put it in the fridge. It tastes like the tea my grandma used to drink, but cold. It's more of a lemon tea than a 50/50.
It's not horrible, but I just had higher hopes for this and it ended up being average. Sure, it's better than Lipton garbage, but I feel it could have been out of this world good.

We were contacted to participate in the 2017 “Shake it Off” challenge, where the company sent us three different shake mix products and we are to write about them and compare them. While they are a couple years too late for the name of the challenge to be timely, I'm always up for a challenge, especially when chocolate is involved. Do you think Taylor Swift's legal team is going to get involved? They are quite litigious, right? Did I make that up?

For my first tasting I'm going with the WonderSlim Chocolate Cream. This is a meal replacement powder that can be made into a shake, or pudding. The outcome just depends on how much water you add to the powder. Whichever way you choose to consume this it has 15g of protein, 24 vitamins and minerals and comes in at only 100 calories. There are A LOT of ingredients in here. Most of which I have never heard of before. I'm sure they all serve some sort of dietary purpose, but I still get wary when there are so many hard to pronounce things in my food.

Flavorwise this has a nice chocolate taste to it, but unfortunately there is an undertone of diet-ness due to the sucralose used as one of the sweeteners. While you're drinking it, you don't really notice it too much, but a little while after you swallow that unmistakable flavor starts taking over your mouth. If the sucralose were not present this would be downright delicious. It is slightly chalky, but nothing too terrible and it's easy to look past that.

Overall this is better than I would have expected from a company named WonderSlim.

This soda falls under the category of so obvious that we missed it all of this time. How has the whole of humanity existed for so long without someone saying, “Hey let's mix grapefruit with cream soda?” Even as I type that out it seems strange, but how many of us love the combination of orange and vanilla? The creamsicle taste is a standard. If one citrus fruit can provide such great results, why have we never tried another? Well, that is until now.

This is a knock your socks off flavor. It's so familiar, with just enough of a twist that makes you truly appreciate each sip. The base is a fantastic cream soda that would get rave reviews on its own. Adding the grapefruit is just icing on the cake. It's not overly sour, but it is certainly different than an orange cream. Actually, after tasting this I don't know if I see a need for orange cream to exist anymore, at least not in the spotlight. This should be the go to flavor.

I'm not sure what the “Hopped” is all about, as I don't taste anything other than the cream and grapefruit in here. That's fine. I didn't want anything else anyways. This is perfection.

Sometimes when you're a non-drinker, you still want to pretend like your fancy. You dress up, get yourself a fancy bottle of sparkling juice, get out the nice glass wear and play at being adults who are better than your current station in life. Then there are other times when you get that same bottle, dress like you always do and just take swig after swig directly from the bottle at a party. Can you guess which category I fell under? I'm not one for delusion, I'm happy with my place in life, and I most certainly love fancy drinks. This is most certainly fancy.

If Ikea is any indication, lingonberries run rampant in Sweden and they are used to flavor everything. I really wish this were true, but when I visited that country I don't think I saw anything of that flavor. It's a shame because it's a fantastic tasting fruit. Oh, you say you've never tasted lingonberry before? Well let me let you in on a secret; you know the classic red Swedish Fish candy that you love? Yep, that's lingonberry flavored. That's actually the perfect way to describe this. It tastes like someone somehow juiced a huge bag of Swedish Fish and mixed it with apple juice. The whole thing comes off not tasting like candy at all, but coming off as very natural, because you know it is an actual fruit, and not really made from chewy confections.

This is very likely the greatest sparkling juice I have ever tasted. Sure, I'd like to think I could do without the added beet sugar, but who knows maybe that would have offset the flavor balance. I do not want to upset the balance. They have it perfect.

This drink is an example of the type of coffee I do not like. Even though it is cold brewed and has coconut cream in it, it still tastes bitter and kind of harsh. Sure the cream is smooth, but the coffee taste itself reminds me of garbage, burnt gas station coffee. How can something cold brewed taste burnt? Freezer burn? In addition to that the use of erythritol/stevia as a sweetener leaves another off putting taste in the mix. I really wanted to like this because I've been at least moderately on board with their other products, but this just falls short for me.

I made it through New Year's Eve.2016 was behind me. I finished up the party I was DJing (not in the turd way. I play dumb old music people actually want to hear not electronic noise). I started driving home. I sneezed. That was the end of everything. That one little sneeze shut down my body. I made it home, climbed into bed and violently shook to the point that I wondered if I was having a seizure for hours. The next day I was conscious for maybe two a half hours. This morning I woke up and my body was ready for nourishment again. I drank tons of water and this carton of juice. While the water made it so I wasn't like a dried out husk, this juice gave me a reason to keep on living and not just wither away.

This is nothing but juice, the whole juice and nothing but the juice (again). There are seven different fruits that make it up and I love each and every one of them for the hope they have inspired in me. Well, maybe not banana. They are still gross. Apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and pineapple; I salute you and your delicious ways. It's really all of the berries doing the work though. You can taste a faint hint of the apple juice base, but the pineapple is eluding my taste buds.

I'm on my way to recovery and I'm sure several more cartons of this will help me on my way. Maybe I'll even be on solid foods again someday.

This is an old favorite from my pre-Thirsty Dudes days. Man those were different times. I drank so much sugar back then and never thought twice about it. How was I not gigantic? I would easily drink at least three Arizona tall boys a day, not counting the other garbage I consumed. This wasn't a constant back then, but that was only because it didn't come in a 99 cent can and I only splurged on the extra half dollar when I was feeling special. It was a treat that I gave myself.

Most of my favorite drinks from that time period don't really hold up for me anymore, because my body has changed and so much sugar makes me feel like garbage. Taking one sip of this brought me right back though. It was the early 2000s. All I did was play music and hang out with my friends. I was in my 20's it was allowed. Hell, it's still kind of what I do now. I had terribly dyed black hair and for some reason I tucked my t-shirts in. I was a catch I tell ya. I also existed on seemingly nothing but pizza and tacos, yet I never gained a pound. I wouldn't say it was a better time, but it was a different time and I had my fun. I drank my teas and didn't think twice about it. It's no longer the cost that makes this a treat, but the amount of sugar (45g/bottle). It tastes sweet, but not to an extent that it hurts my teeth. It has that classic Arizona green tea flavor, that isn't quite what other green tea tastes like, but it's wonderful. On top of that the Asia plum adds just the right amount of flavor. I've had other Asian beverages that said they were plum and they tasted like moldy meat. This is the opposite of that. Wait, would that be fresh veggies? It's not that, but it is delicious. I hope this flavor makes a comeback because you don't see it much these days.

Does anyone else get weirded out when a company has zero presence on the internet? If it weren't for one distributor carrying this I would have had no choice but to believe that I was drinking ghost coffee. The supernatural is the only logical explanation when things don't exist on the internet, correct?

We let me tell you, if this is what ghosts have to drink to get them moving for a long night of haunting, dying might not be that bad. I mean serious coffee drinkers may not agree, but those of us who share coffee tastes with children will be all about this. Even though it is most definitely not mocha I would liken this to the chocolate milk of coffee. The flavor of the coffee isn't too overpowering, and it's gota nice sweetness to it. It takes more like coffee flavored milk than an actual cup of coffee, but I guess that is what a latte is supposed to be. For me the best part of this is that the caramel isn't too strong. That is one flavor that companies need to learn to be more reserved with. Everyone goes overboard with their caramel use and it's just too much. In here it is just right.

If for some unknown reason you are trying to get your kids into drinking coffee, this would be a good gateway drug. I don't know why you would want to do such a thing. Maybe you're really into the idea of them sitting at dinners all night talking about nothing and drinking an obscene amount of caffeine in-between smoke breaks. Do kids still do that?

Cold brew coffee is everywhere these days, so why not cold brew some tea? Oh, you don't have an extra 12 hours to steep your tea, so you take the quicker hot brew method? Don't be such a chump, Titan will do all the work for you and all you have to do is walk into a store grab one from the cooler, and hand over your money to the cashier and you are out the door in 5 minutes or less. That is a comparable amount of time as it would take you to hot steep some tea. I don't even really know the difference. I guess cold brewed coffee is supposed to be smoother or something, maybe the same goes for tea.

Something about this doesn't taste like I expected. It tastes like a good raspberry black tea, but there's something else floating around mucking up the flavor. It might be the lemon, or it may be the electrolytes. Whatever it is, it distracts from both the taste of the tea as well as the raspberry. It's still an enjoyable beverage, but with a little tweaking I would enjoy it a whole bunch more. Maybe spend less time steeping and more time tinkering with the taste.

Want to hear the most adorable thing you'll come across all day? This company is owned by an 11 year old lady named Mikaila. It started when she was trying to come up with an idea for a children's business competition. She got stung by a bee, twice and received her grandmother's cookbook with the lemonade recipe in it. Through that she became obsessed with saving bees and donates a percentage of her profits to organizations working to help bees. It kind of makes you feel like you've wasted your life, right? I wish I cared about anything as much as this girl cares for bees. In doing so she also produces a delicious beverage.

The ingredients in this are water, lemon juice, cane sugar, honey, ginger and flaxseed. It's simple. It's delicious. It has digestive benefits. You can also feel good spending your money on it because you're helping a child help bees. The ginger and the lemons overpower the honey a bit, but you can still taste it. I like when beverages taste heavily of honey, but I'm not one to argue with ginger (which has a kick that's on the mellower side in here).

I'm not going to spend the rest of the day staring at the wall trying to figure out how I can be a better person.

This is going to be a long winter. We're maybe 2-3 weeks into there actually being snow and I'm already done with it. I want it gone and I want everything to be green again. I don't even care if it's all that warm. If 50 degrees is what I was given, I wouldn't complain, as long as plants were green around me. Instead I get white, grey and brown. No one wants that. If they think they do, they are delusional.

Honest knows what I'm going through and they are trying to help me through it. I didn't even know I was looking for anything like this drink until I was nose to nose with it in the store. It's no secret that lemonade is the official drink of summertime. As a result I like to trick myself into thinking it's summer by cranking the heat and drinking it mid-winter. It only helps slightly, but I'll take what I can get to help me cope.

This is water, lemon juice, cane sugar and the secret ingredient; ginger juice. As far as the lemon goes it's a tad bit on the watery side, but I kind of like that about it. It fits my mood and I didn't really want something that was overly sour. Any issue I had with that is more than made up for by the ginger though. It's present in flavor, with a bit of a burn in the aftertaste. Best of all it's only lightly sweetened.

It's an understatement to say that I'm into it. It's really great and if I close my eyes and sit in front of the heating vents while I sip on this I can pretend it's a nice (constant) warm breeze blowing over me. Why do I have to love the city I live in so much, even though I hate winter? Buffalo has a hold of me and it's not letting go.

Private Selection is Kroger Grocery Stores line of craft sodas. I personally am fine with them keeping this particular flavor private. It has all the makings for a great olde timey soda that doesn't taste like a Coke or Pepsi, but then there is that bourbon flavor in there. I assume that's what the flavor is, since I've never tasted bourbon before. It's the thing in there that makes this taste quasi alcoholic. I don't think it's psychosomatic because I was not expecting that at all. I was expecting a dark bold cola that is made with kola nut. Sure, that is there, but there's also the extra flavor that just turns me off from it. Without it I would have savored this soda and enjoyed the hell out of it. As it stands I can't get past half of it. I'm sure for someone who enjoys alcohol they wouldn't notice it as much as I do (the same way they say kombucha doesn't taste like all of the left over half drunk beers at a party mixed together a week later). This is for someone. Someone is going to love this. I am not that someone.

Is this the long lost Arnold Palmer pop? Kind of. In its most core sense it is until you realize that some time and love went into crafting this syrup. Taken directly from their website:

Bold, black tea from India the Nilgiri Blue Mountains of India blended with lemongrass and lemon myrtle

That's not messing around, man. That's not some garbage, every day black tea and some lemon squeezed over a cinder block into a cup. This is real. You can taste that it's different, too. This is not me being a snob, you actually can taste that it's different. It's not "just" anything.

You want to impress someone who likes to drink Half and Half, you buy them a bottle of this. Sure, they've got to have seltzer on hand but it's a small price to pay for such a quality drink.

I seemingly only drink Gatorade when I'm sick. Everyone except me is getting over a gnarly case of the 2016 GI bug. If it hasn't gotten you, it's gotten someone you know and it's a real sonofabitch. I'm just suffering from massive fatigue which is miles better than what everyone else has dealt with.

What does this taste like, though? I don't know. Mystery fruit? Does any Gatorade taste like anything? There might be some arbitrary melon in there but as far as anything I can pinpoint? Nope. "Fruit flavored" and that's as far and as much as I can do. Is it bad? Nope. It's not the best Gatorade I've ever had but it's far from the worst. This went down smooth and I'd like to think it gave me what plants crave, electrolytes. My body is fighting whatever atrocious virus the Western New York region is currently plagued with and I need whatever help I can get. Soup and Gatorade. Help!

It was a nonstop week for me doing band stuff. There was a lot of driving, late nights and early mornings. I drank more energy style drinks in the past 5 days than I have in the past 2 months. The thing is that most of them weren't very good, and unfortunately this falls into that category. As with a lot of bad energy drinks the problem stems from the sweetener. In here they use Isomaltulose (beet sugar), stevia, and monk fruit. It so happens that the only one of those sweeteners that most people would be familiar with is the one that did the most damage. I understand wanting less sugar (aka less calories) in your beverage. There is so much sugar in things now a days that it's no surprise the obesity levels are so high in this country. To fight that companies are compromising the taste of their beverages and using zero calorie sweeteners. At least it's stevia instead of sucralose or one of its garbage counterparts.

This could have been a great drink. At its core it is a carbonated citrus flavored green tea. I can make it out in there and I think it would be wonderful. The sweeteners make that flavor take a back seat. When will companies realize that it's probably not a good idea when the taste of the sweetener is stronger than the actual intended flavor? This just tastes wrong. I feel like I'm a little kid who figured out the child proof lock on the cabinet under the sink and I'm just chugging away on whatever liquid I find down there.

Do you ever find yourself wondering why cleaners always seem to be lemon scented? Do you find yourself wishing that you lived in a world where you could clean your counters, floors and woodwork with something that smelled like blueberries? Does your mind then drift and you find yourself contemplating what that delicious smelling cleaning product would taste like? Well lucky for you Amp has the answer for you and it's fairly gross.

First off, blueberries are great. Who hasn't sat down and accidently ate an entire basket in one sitting? Secondly, I also love grapes, especially white grapes. When they are nice and plump at a perfectly ripe phase they are fantastic. This beverage somehow messed up mixing two wonderful tastes together and I blame the sweetener. This doesn't have the typical sucralose flavor to it, but it does something to the other flavors that just ruins them. It starts off with a decent blueberry taste but then it turn to the white grape. The two don't mingle. They simply do no mix together. The thing is at the exact moment of the switch the sucralose does something and it tastes like a cleaner and everything is ruined. This is so close to being good. It makes the jump from roof top to roof top, but just misses and plummets to its death.

As soon as I looked at the ingredient list I instantly had questions about this product. I'm familiar with Sugar in the Raw, and it is raw Turbinado sugar. I was excited to try a cola made with it, but a quick look also told me that stevia leaf was also used as a sweetener in this bottle. You may find yourself asking the same question as I was, Why in the world is a company whose only product is raw sugar using an additional sweetener in their soda? The answer is actually simple, they have expanded their company and the name is now just In the Raw. They now sell a whole line of alternative sweeteners that are also all “raw.”

I appreciate that they have extended their line and are trying to keep people healthier by using a combination of the two sweeteners to keep the calories down, but I really, really wanted this to just be sweetened with their flagship product. This would be great in a pure form, but stevia does what stevia wants to do and this has that specific taste to it. It's not horrible, but it's just not what I want in a cola. I'm not a fan of diet and I would always prefer less real sugar to anything artificial or stevia based. The cola taste in here is great. It's dark and slightly earthy, just the way I like it. Unfortunately it gets lost a bit in the stevia. The high cost of diet.