Are Diet Sodas a Beneficial Part Of a Weight Loss Program

Cutting calories is an expected part of your weight loss journey, and when you look at the possible ways to reduce caloric intake, choosing diet soda seems like the correct choice, right?

Or is it?

I have been drinking diet soda since I was a kid. My mom always used Sweet ‘n Low or saccharine, and Tab was a go-to for her soft drink. Tab was my addiction until they discontinued it and brought in Diet Coke. I thought my world was ending! LOL

I know how bad artificial sweeteners are for your body but it is better than sugar, right?? Check this out.

Are Diet Sodas a Beneficial Part Of a Weight Loss Program

For years, numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the health hazards of regular sugary sodas: tooth decay, diabetes, and of course, weight gain. But believe it or not, new scientific studies on the effects of diet soda are bringing to light the exact same health hazards – including weight gain!

While scientists are not sure as to exactly why the body reacts to diet sodas as if they were sugar-filled, they do have a few theories.

First, there’s nothing nutritionally redeeming or natural in diet soda. It’s a combination of laboratory chemicals combined with water and carbonation. And if the body doesn’t recognize what’s being ingested or doesn’t have the ability to totally break it down to excrete it, it will store it away in fat cells.

The more you ingest a substance that it can’t break down, the more you will gain weight as your body tries to find storage for the chemicals it doesn’t know what to do with.

Other scientific findings point to the disruptions between the taste buds and the brain when it comes to diet soda. When diet sodas are ingested, they seem to signal overeating.

It works this way: your tongue receives intense messages of sweetness when you drink diet soda. It tells your brain that it has a pretty big incoming load of calories. So your brain prepares the rest of your body to process the anticipated caloric intake, including releasing insulin, which makes your cells ready to take in energy from the digested food.

Only with diet soda, you don’t deliver on those calories, leaving your body with an elevated insulin level (bad for your body) and your brain thinks there is something missing somewhere. So it will urge you to overeat later in the day to make up for that jacked-up level of insulin you ordered earlier.

In addition, those same scientific studies point to diet sodas as contributing to overeating in an additional way: a dulling of the taste buds that detect sweetness, leading you to hunt down sweeter and sweeter things to eat and drink as you try to satisfy your sweet tooth.

It all makes so much sense! Unfortunately for us, no matter how you look at it, diet sodas don’t have a place in our weight loss journey.

I have been reducing them more and more over the years, sticking to water mainly, but now I am researching carbonated waters too. Taking away all of our pleasures! LOL