Diet Soda/Aspartame - The Fat Maker or Diet Helper?

i drink a diet soda every couple days, it doesnt make me crave anything sweet any more than i already do.

A natural sweetener alternative is Stevia. It's a natural source... no calories and man is it super sweet the biggest thing you have to worry about is putting too much it'll become bitter if you add too much. My new favorite drink homemade lemonade with stevia, or even ice tea with it added to it.

On my last diet I had two diet energy drinks a day (the splenda-sweetened berry rockstar in the blue can was my favorite). I lost 80 lbs in 5 months. Didn't seem to slow down the diet any (helped, if anything). Of course, neither did my then-heavy liquor habit, so I dunno.

I think there are damn fine reasons to drop diet soda other than whether or not it impacts your diet. That **** is straight poison, frankly. But first, just cut back to one a day. Drink WATER. Your body needs it, and is designed to enjoy it, even if you've trained yourself not to. You don't need to put flavor in it, it tastes good by itself. If you really want it to taste like something, just squirt some lemon juice into it or squeeze a chunk of lime (a lime is <$.50, and you can make an entire gallon taste strongly of lime with that). Stop buying these products all the time, it's such a waste of money and doesn't actually do anything for you that isn't entirely in your head. You are meant to enjoy drinking water. I used to drink two to four liters a day of soda, and now all I drink is water, and sometimes a little milk or dark beer (though I really shouldn't, beer exacerbates the gout). That **** really does mess with your system.

If you cut your sweetener intake way back across the board, you will quickly find even an occasional diet soda tastes incredibly sweet, and real soda tastes just sickly sweet, syrupy and a little disgusting, even the ones made from real sugar. But when you get to that point, a piece of fruit will do things for you that you can hardly imagine, just an explosion of sweet flavor. Your unsweetened cereal will taste sweet, because of the milk. A piece of the darkest chocolate in the store will be as sweet-tasting as that over-sugared hershey's bar is now. Candy will have no hold over you. Pastries will be too sweet, to the point that you'll prefer your donuts old-fashioned, because the glazing is disgusting. At this point I scrape most of the frosting off a piece of cake just because I don't like it anymore, when I used to eat frosting with a spoon. You can change your relationship to sugar, but you've got to cut back the sweeteners if you want to get there.

I lost 160 lbs drinkiing diet pepsi. Have kept it off for 3 1/2 years drinking diet pepsi. Put 20lbs back on from a combination of breaking my hand and not working out. Have lost 8 lbs in the last 2 weeks drinking diet pepsi. and I drink at least 5 a day.

Oops. I meant to respond specifically to this post. Thank you for posting this! I'm sure there are better things we can drink than diet soda--but honestly if it means cutting out cookies and potato chips...I'll take the diet soda. I'm happy to hear that you've had so much success while still drinking it