Diet Coke: The Root of all Evil?

Okay, maybe not all evil. That's going a bit far, all for the sake of a title I suppose. Maybe the root of all plateaus?

My greatest success dieting started with simply giving up soda. I had started off just deciding to give up pop - at the time I was a big drinker of regular soda - I'd call it the sugary kind but I'm not sure I want to call the corn syrup laden stuff sugar. Now THAT stuff is deadly, I will say this much. It was a bit later that I decided to go a step further with the Atkins diet.

And I rocked it! For awhile. Then things kind of leveled out, and that was about the time I had started drinking diet sodas. After giving up pop for so long suddenly the diet stuff didn't taste so awful. There were several months that I was still pretty good about the diet and didn't start lapsing into the foods that I shouldn't lapse into, but at the same time I still stalled out.

I remember before the diet formulating my own theories that diet soda was evil (though at the time it was still more a justification for my drinking the regular sodas, be it still by the gallon or so it seemed) - I grabbed bits and pieces of information I heard from doctors and formed this notion that diet soda ends up being so sweet that it creates this expectation in the body of the sugar that goes with it, and when that sugar doesn't get there it starts craving other things.

Now of course I have other opinions about the evilness of Diet Coke in particular. It has to do with the fact that Diet Coke was formulated to taste like Pepsi, not Coke, and that it was the basis of "New" Coke (of which the scars from its introduction and subsequent removal of "Real" Coke have never really healed). Not that I ever thought Pepsi was all that bad, I drink plenty of it as well. But still, I felt Coke finally got it right when they came out with Coke Zero, being as it tastes more like the real thing.

But when it's all said and done, I find myself realizing that there's still a sense of addiction to the stuff. Whether it be diet coke, diet mountain dew, diet dr. pepper.. just soda in general there are times I find myself really needing to get a soda. And while I don't drink it nearly as much now as I used to, it's still a pretty real thing - meaning craving can be pretty powerful.

And my schedule tells me it's time to go and do things... I guess what I'm coming to is with the surgery coming up that's one thing I'll have to give up anyway.... maybe now's the time?