Who needs tastebuds?

Faithful readers of this blog will recall that I have long struggled with a diet soda addiction. Fortunately I've been able to replace most of my soda consumption with coffee. At least at home. When I'm out, I default to pop, mostly because of the temperature. Every time I have coffee (non-iced) from a shop or restaurant I experience severe tongue damage. Yet I see people get a steaming cup from Starbucks and immediately sip all the time. Have these people so damaged their tongues that they are desensitized? Or do have a particularly sensitive tongue? I really would love it if someone could explain this to me.

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.

Mommy hungry!

So it's Week One of the zero-allergen diet. So far so... ok. This weekend I went off the wagon a bit with a cheeseburger (protein style), some red wine on V-Day and blue cheese on a salad. (And maybe a serving or two of you-know-what.) Replacing coffee with tea has caused some more headaches. I have the sniffles, too, but that's probably related to weather changes and blooming. Excedrin has been my friend.

Now I need to start a spread sheet where I record every single processed food and possible allergen I consume and then record my mood/physical symptoms and see if there's a connection. Unfortunately, my nutritionist says reactions from reactive foods can take three days to appear.

As I've mentioned before, my main goals are to increase energy and improve digestion. Eight-10 years ago I needed only 7-7.5 hours of sleep a night to feel right. Now it's more like 8.5-9. That just doesn't seem right.

The Pop Report

Almost a year ago I decided to try to get off the diet pop. Finally, it seems I'm close. The last few weeks I've only been drinking it about twice a week, and it seems that about half the time I drink it I immediately get a headache. So that's a good thing. And I figure pop won't be as pervasive in Australia as it is here, so that will help. I here they really know how to do coffee there, so I expect I'll be drinking a lot of that.

In other diet news, I'm trying out a dairy-free diet to see if it makes me feel any better, tummy-area-wise. Hopefully they have soy milk at the coffee joints in Sydney, or else I better get used to my coffee black.

The Pop.

I seem to have successfully gotten myself down to having one diet pop every other day since I returned from Illannoy (a trip like that is far too stressful to go without at least one a day). The question is, am I ready to go cold turkey? Or maybe a couple times a week? Last time I cut way back on the diet pop I got bronchitis, which totally sucked. Like, a lot. So you can see where I'd be a bit nervous...

:-p

I am so cranky today. It's a non-pop day. Coincidence?

On-and-off

For almost a week now I've successfully had pop only every other day! This is a big step, to go without diet pop for a whole day on a regular basis. I'm not sure what my next step should be; one day on, two days off...?

Mmmm...coffee?

So it's been, what, six months since I started trying to get off the pop?! At this point I'm drinking one or two a day. Most of my caffeine is coming from FRS and, yes, coffee. We do have a coffee maker, which in the past had only been used by guests. I actually had to read the manual to figure out how to make coffee.

I have an actual plan: one a day for a couple weeks, then one every other day. And at the end of the month, I'm done.

This year I will...

Everyone knows resolutions don't work. So this year I thought I'd try something a little different: a new monthly resolution, x12. Here's a draft:

January: eat fewer processed foods (see "now reading" at left)
February: completely stop drinking diet pop
March: cut way back on sugar
and so on...

We'll see how it goes.

The Pop Report

It's been nearly four months since I decided to quit drinking diet soda. It's going ok. I'm down to just one on most days. But there was a domestic incident today related to pop.

You see, sometimes I stop at a gas station or convenience store or such to get a 20 ouncer. And one in eight of these has a buy-one-get-one-free coupon under the cap. So I ended up collecting four of these. So I had me a stash in the fridge. Now, my dear husband has been supportive of the pop-quiting. We haven't bought any cases of cans or bottles since I started my experiment, not even Splenda Coke.

Hubby: If you can have a stash that I can't drink from, then I want a stash that you can't drink from.
Me: But I'll drink from it!
Hubby: But you can't!
Me: But I will anyway!

He does not understand the power of addiction.

We decided that we would try not to have any more pop in the house. He can have a stash at work....

blech

I have been generally feeling blah and annoyed today, and I'm convinced that it's because I so miss diet pepsi. Donald Rumsfeld really needs to die a slow, painful death.

In my search for a replacement, however, I may have found a winner: Owater Infused with Caffeine and Electrolyites; basically Gatorade with caffeine (which they don't make why???). It tastes pretty decent, is pretty low in calories and has a reasonable amount of caffeine.

The pop

In case you're wondering how I've been doing on my quitting pop experiment, I'm doing OK. Yesterday was my first day without any pop OR caffeine! I took some aspirin for a headache in the morning and crashed hard while the boys napped. Today I had some Diet Pepsi with lunch and had considerably more energy in the afternoon.

Eventually I want to get to the point where I don't drink pop at all any more, mostly to keep my kids away from it. I don't really have a problem with using caffeine occasionally, but addiction is never good.

So bitter

This was not a good day. I woke up this morning and got on the scale and I was 3.5 heavier than I was a week ago. Gaining three pounds a week is not acceptable. Nathan thinks it's water weight because I'm not consuming so much of a diuretic. But this says caffeine really isn't a diuretic. So who knows. Then I got some kind of coffee drink at Starbucks. This was the first time I had ever ordered a drink at Starbucks (they do have good pastries). I told the chick at the register my story (need something with caffeine, but no calories, and that doesn't really taste that much like coffee). It took a while but she recommended the skinny-something-or-other. Of course, since it was a coffee drink, it taste like ass. But less like ass than plain coffee. Coffee simply is not tasty. You people can keep telling yourself that it is. But you don't drink it because it tastes good, you drink it because it has caffeine and no calories. Eventually you get so used to it that it seems to taste good. But maybe that's true of NutraSweet, too.

Anyway, I continued to have headaches this afternoon despite Excedrin in the morning and my ass drink with lunch. Nathan thinks it's because of NutraSweet withdrawal, since there's some evidence that's an addictive drug, too. I did have a can and a half of Fresca, though. Anyway, I'm starting to wonder if all this annoying crap is worth it.

Oh yes, there are headaches

They tend to be at the base of my skull, and into my neck. Seems kind of random. The only caffeine I had today was Excedrin first thing in the morning. I had aspirin a little after lunch and some more around 7.

It'll be a week tomorrow, with just one slip off the wagon: some Diet Coke with my soup-in-a-bread-bowl at Boulanger yesterday. It actually didn't taste that good...

day 4

This morning I had a does of Excedrin (two pills = a cup of coffee = two cans of Diet Pepsi) and then a caffeinated Gu while I was riding my bike around 2. And three cans of Fresca. I'm hoping that aspartame will start tasting bad to me.

3 days

It has been more than 72 hours since I had any cola. No Diet Pepsi, no Diet Coke. Just a few cans of diet rootbeer and some Excedrin to ease the transition. I've only needed 2 or 2.5 doses of the Excedrin each day. I hope to back off that starting tomorrow. It's not so much the caffeine that I'll miss, I think, it's just the sweet taste. I simply love love love the taste of Diet Pepsi. Flavorful and no calories. Oh yeah.

Pop

I've finally decided it's time to stop drinking diet soda. There's the drug addiction, the probable cancer-causing agent (though what doesn't cause cancer?) and now the osteoporosis. One of these taken on its own wouldn't be enough, but all taken together, plus the fact that I don't want my kids wanting to drink pop, and I'm actually ready to quit. And I'm excited about the reduction in my carbon footprint, fewer cans and bottles circulating, etc. But I'll miss you, diet pop!

I finished the Diet Pepsi that was in the fridge this morning, and now I'm done. My last one was consumed in the car on the way to Santa Cruz around 10 a.m. I'm using Excedrin to ease the caffeine withdrawl.