ThinkingSkull.com

I love soda, particularly Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Pepsi. Diet? Yep, cause I drink too much of it. I’m getting better, drinking mostly tea at home sweetened with Splenda… more on that in a second.

Also, I’ve joined a health club (with fees deferred by my day job) and have been busting my arse to get into better shape. Having shared this with my co-workers, now I’m getting grief because “drinking diet sodas is undoing any good” that I may have been doing because they are “full of fat and calories.” My question is, do skinny people really believe this? Here’s a little something from WebMD:

Artificial sweeteners, also called sugar substitutes, are compounds that offer the sweetness of sugar without the same calories. They are anywhere from 30 to 8,000 times sweeter than sugar and as a result, they have much fewer calories than foods made with table sugar (sucrose). Each gram of refined table sugar contains 4 calories. Many sugar substitutes have zero calories per gram.

Now I really got on board with Nutrasweet (aka Aspartame) but I soon found out that expiration dates on diet soda are very important; time, heat, and cold all kill the flavor of Aspartame and make it taste like Formaldehyde smells. Splenda, which is derived from sugar and the key ingredient in the not-Diet-Coke tasting soda called Coke Zero, is even tastier and is heat/cold/time resistant. I also like Propel fitness water (32 oz. for $1.00 at Walmart) with a tiny 10 calories per bottle.

Seriously, am I really doing that badly with no-calorie diet drinks, or are skinny folk afraid of large people like myself muscling in on their popularity?