Along with my LSD and Speed posts, I can only imagine how Google is indexing this site…

I already avoid regular soda and have for quite a while. I actually got to the point where I liked diet Coke / diet Pepsi better than the regular sugary stuff. But in the back of my mind, I knew it couldn’t be good for me. Around the end of December, I read a few articles about diet soda and Nutrisweet. Without doing a lot of research, it’s hard to get at hard facts that you can be sure aren’t biased. Some reports get pretty conspiracy-theory-ish and seem to imply that Nutrisweet is being pushed by some hidden government plot to undermine… something. As soon as I get the tone of those articles, I can’t help but tune out. Other reports are so squeaky clean as to be suspect themselves, implying that Nutrisweet has never caused any bad reaction in any life form whatsoever. I figure that somewhere in between those two extremes must lie the truth.

Anyway, I was drinking a lot of diet Coke/Pepsi (never had a huge preference one way or the other), sometimes 2-3 20oz bottles a day. I figure there’s just gotta be some health risk there somewhere. So, as a somewhat unspoken New Year’s resolution, I decided to quit.

It’s now been well over a month since I last had a soda of any kind (stopped in late December actually). At first, without noticing it, I started drinking extra tea. I quit coffee a couple of years ago, because I somehow, after being an addict since age 14, I just stopped liking the taste. Anyway, it dawned on me that I was compensating for the lack of caffeine in the cola by drinking about 3x the tea I had been. So I cut back on the tea and had a nice few days of caffeine-withdrawal headaches. Trying to drink mostly water, with some sports drinks on the days I run.

It’s hard to put a finger on any benefit or different feelings because of this change, given that I’m also in the middle of plenty of other ongoing systemic changes as I increase and improve my running and lose more weight. But I’m going to assume that I’m somehow more healthy for this change.