Diet Drinks

And also, aspartame can actually make you crave sugar. That's no good for weight loss.

I never understood this. I guess everyone reacts differently, but for me sugar makes me crave sugar. I can drink a 20oz coke zero, and sip on it for over an hour and not have any sugar cravings. But if I think a regular soda, it's gone in 2 minutes and I want more and more and more. And I can't stop thinking about having another.

Listen to your body and decide what works for you.

Doing my own research on the subject recently, along with tips and advice from members of this community, it seems that most artificial sweetners do have documented harmful effects that are scary, but only in amounts far in excess of what one would practically consume. Generally, its recommended by the FDA to limit your intake of diet drinks to about 6 cans per day. This is 1% of the concentration of artificial sweetner that would be considered unsafe or harmful.

To some that means its harmful and should be avoided to the extreme. To me, as long as the amount I am consuming is considered safe, that's enough for me.

There are some people who will argue against Diet Coke in favor of natural products. I can understand this, and on the whole its usually good advice. As I get healthier and healthier, I'm sure I may even become one of those people someday. But I'm not one, and I don't balk at things because their processed, engineered, or artificially created. On the contrary, I *want* scientists working on improving our food. But it any case, that's a decision everyone will have to make for themselves, I suppose.

For some people, Diet Coke seems to have other physiological effects such as bloating, sugar fixes, sleepiness, etc. It has no such effect on me. I don't know if this is due to the variation of physiology among different people or if there's a psychological effect at work. I know, for example, that a lot of my foods taste differently since I started dieting. (Hamburgers, yuck!) I know someone who gets full just looking at food.

There seem to be two solid dietary reasons to avoid diet cokes:

1) Some kind of harmful effects on your bones. I considered this a negligible consideration because you can compensate with proper nutrition, which I'm pretty much doing anyway.

2) A rotting effect on your teeth due to the drink's acidic nature.


Even though I consider Diet Coke to be fairly healthy, based on my research and my evaluation of everyone's opinions and reasoning, I want to take care of my teeth and I just can't brush after every Diet Coke. For this reason alone I decided to cut my intake down a LOT, down to about 1 can a day, and will soon eliminate it all together in favor of green tea and sparkling water.

I think they aren't the greatest for you, but I do believe that they affect everyone differently. If you just go by weight loss result and bloating issues it would seem as though it didn't affect some people at all. However, even though diet drinks have never caused me to gain weight or bloat, I have noticed that the more chemicals I drink or eat, the more tired I am. I have thyroid issues, and I am finding the less preservatives and the less sodas I drink, the better I am feeling. So like I said earlier I think they affect everyone very differently but I don't think they are that great for you.

Normally I just peruse the topics that interest me to get opinions on different things. But this one I just had to comment on! Not so much a comment about the actual topic, but a thank you for everyone being willing to give their opinions. I joined 5 weeks ago and have learned SO much from the forums. Even if no one comes to any sort of conclusion, just having the conversation to get everyone to think is so beneficial.

Now instead of mindlessly grabbing a diet pop just because it's calorie-less, I'll think about it and more than likely, I won't have it. Never would have even thought about it before reading all this. So thanks everyone!