About 5 years ago, I started counting calories as an answer to all of the diets I hated trying. I love eating and I love food, so it's hard for me to try a diet that excludes something. A nutritionist I used to work with said, "It's just calories in, calories out." I created this fancy little Excel spreadsheet and became anal about weighing out all of my portions. But I lost about 20 pounds that year and kept it off so I must have been doing something right.
It was during this period that I took up drinking diet soda on a pretty frequent basis. It was oh-so easy to track the calories in those things (zero!) and I could still have sodas with lunch or dinner instead of boring old water. My doctor and my dad hated that I drank the stuff. "Even drinking coffee is better than drinking diet soda," my doctor would say. "Coffee at least has some health benefits." My dad's comments were a little more colorful than that, but along the same lines: Diet soda = BAD for your body. It was (and is) probably true, but I really didn't care. How can something be so bad for me that helps me look so good?
My best friend in the whole wide world never made me feel bad for drinking diet soda... but I couldn't help but notice she never had the stuff. We trained for a half marathon and marathon together. She even gave up regular soda to train. My brain just couldn't process all of this. I knew she didn't drink the diet stuff for the same general reasons my doctor and dad hated it - it's just kind of an untrustrworthy beverage. Turns out she just gave up the regular soda because she didn't feel like she had the calories available for that nonsense. At least that I can identify with.
Part of the work in creating a new version of myself was to try and eat cleaner and healthier. I already eat fairly healthy, consuming lots of fruits and vegetables and doing my best to make sure my calorie intake stays at or below a net 1540 calories per day. I also knew going into it that I'd probably never eat clean in the sense that "eating clean" is all the rage with its own set of recipes and blogs... Paleo? Forget it. A life without cheese and I would probably jump off a bridge. But just cleaner - trying to eat more organic fruits, vegetables, etc.; avoid GMO products where I could; get artificial sweeteners out of my life; things along those lines. It lead me to research more about the artificial sweeteners available on the market and my ultimate personal ban on diet soda.
Is diet soda making you sad? New study says yes - Fox19 Cincinnati News
If you believe everything you read online, aspartame can make you depressed, and you're more likely to further your depression if you're already prone to it. The article above suggests this is a "new" study but upon further investigation, the scholarly article prompting all of this was published in 1993 - so the link has been known for at least 20 years already. (See also Aspartame Causing Severe Depression - LIVESTRONG from 2011.) The last thing I need in my life is something I enjoy drinking that makes me more depressed. It's been 3 months and I haven't gone back to diet soda since.
Will it change your life and bring you love, fame, and fortune where you didn't have it before? No, probably not, but I do feel better just going throughout the day without the crazy neurotoxins coursing through my brain. There are plenty more reasons not to like aspartame, but that's why I didn't want it in my body. How can you tell if your favorite drink has aspartame? Look for the phrase "Phenylketonurics: Contains Phenylalanine" on the product label. I'm finding out that aspartame is also widely popular in sugar free gum, which sucks because I chew a lot of gum now that I'm not smoking cigarettes... The hunt for aspartame-free gum continues, but if you're feeling down, try having a glass of iced tea or juice instead. Try it for a week, and you should start to feel better!
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