I'm about to blow your mind.

Wow I've been blogging slacker, but that's a post for different day. Today I have something extremely important to tell you.

Aspartame is more addictive then caffeine.

You know how caffeine is this highly-addictive drug? Well, it's got nothin on the stuff they put in diet pop.

As you may remember, I started on this journey toward freedom from the drug more than a year and a half ago. It was not pretty. There were withdrawal headaches, which were not ameliorated by replacing the caffeine in pop with that in coffee and taking lots of Excedrin. Then I got bronchitis, which was very suspiciously-timed, and it may be a crackpot theory that the two are related, but withdrawal can do weird things to your body. (The bronchitis morphed into walking pneumonia, but I think that was because the doctor didn't give me strong enough antibiotics.) Even though I was getting as much or more caffeine then when I was just drinking diet pop, I was cranky on days when I didn't have any pop. My weight was up and down like a yo-yo.

At first I was on an every-other-day plan and gradually scaled back till I could go a week without pop. Today I have it 2-3 times a week, almost always when we're eating out. When I've gone two or three days without pop, I don't think about it, but if it's the day after I've had some, I crave it. As for caffeine, right now I just have one, maybe two cups of caffeinated tea a day, plus the occasional pop. And I never miss coffee.

OK, so this is not a scientific sample size. But it's pretty obvious that, at least in my case, the aspartame is way more addictive than caffeine.