Any soda junkies out there?

I have always been a soda drinker. At one point I was drinking more than a gallon of Coke or Pepsi a day. It never really affected my weight because I was always pretty active, and my height hides a little extra weight (I'm 6'4"). In the last few years I've quit smoking, but on the flip-side I substituted the hand-mouth motion with drinking more soda. As a result, I've ballooned out to nearly 300 pounds and I suffer from chronic heartburn because of all the acid in the soda. :wack: My wife and I both agree that I need to quit drinking soda because it is not doing me any good.
Here's what I'm doing: I've started drinking a bottle of water before I allow myself to have a soda. Eventually, I'll move to two bottles of water per bottle of soda, and so forth. Surprisingly, I'm starting to enjoy the cold water more than I figured I would. We bought a Brita filter that we can keep in the fridge so we have cold filtered water whenever we want it. I'm hoping that by eventually drinking more water than soda I can bring my weight back down to a more comfortable level, and I also hope I can get off these damn antacids I have to take.
Anybody else out there ever had issues with soda? If you overcame it, what did you do?