Like many overeaters, I used to drink diet cola, as a strategy for calorie reduction. I stopped doing that in light of my new decision. Normal eaters sip sweetened beverages not only for taste satisfaction, but also for sugar energy between meals. When an overeater drinks an artificially sweetened drink, they are getting less taste satisfaction from the beverage and no energy lift. That fact alone can make one vulnerable to snacking. Why confuse your body by drinking something that pretends to be sweet but has no energy value?
Following this line of thought, I began to drink the sugared version of the diet cola I used to drink. I felt somewhat guilty about it though. After all, soft drinks are one of the junk foods that health-conscious people shouldn’t indulge. Nevertheless, I did happily drink it for quite a while with no weight gain or apparent health problems. But there was something wrong about it.
I compulsively chose soda over other, more natural and nutritious beverages. If given a chance, drinks like apple juice are more effective in satisfying that taste urge, which comes around with such persistence. I started to suspect that soda interfered with thirst quenching and even taste satisfaction. It actually seemed to numb the taste buds. Even though soda was less effective, I kept returning to it throughout the day. I’d look past the attractive juices and consistently grab the bottle of cola.
For me, cola is the real culprit. It wasn’t soda so much as it was cola I was compulsive about. I have no statistics to cite, but I observed that overeaters are more likely to depend upon diet cola than just any diet soda. If I eliminate cola as a choice, my compulsion about soda goes way down. When I look at a fruit-flavored or white soda alongside a glass of juice, the juice has a fighting chance to be chosen.
As I was mulling over the soda dilemma, a friend of mine said that when she drinks a favorite cola soft drink, it makes her crave things like French fries rather than more healthful food. That struck a chord with me. I’ve come to believe that soft drinks support our attraction to junk foods. Soda and salty snack foods are strongly linked. One seems to foster the attraction of the other. After you numb your taste buds and introduce the unnatural flavor of cola, your taste urge vigorously emerges, especially for salty snack food. If we could remove soft drinks and salty snack food from the American diet, it’s possible many children would lose their excess weight and be able to enjoy a natural childhood, free of encumbering pounds.
Another problem with soft drinks pertains to the amount we are physically able to drink. We can drink much more soda at one time than juice. The carbonation in the soda makes it easy to quaff a 12-ounce can. We use carbonation to settle the stomach, but that also allows us to drink more than would be natural. Compare the can of soda to the traditional 5-ounce juice glass. That small size probably came about because large amounts of juice can cause stomach discomfort. Many people can’t drink a lot of juice without suffering ill effects. That discomfort will remind you not to drink so much at one time.
Because of these problems with soft drinks, I had to qualify my decision to drink freely of them. It was hard to give up cola because it had been beneficial to my original efforts to rely on beverages between meals. At first, I still drank my favorite cola but in significantly lower amounts and only at certain times. I also began drinking sparkling water. It has some of the same problems as other carbonated beverages, such as numbing the taste buds, but it was an acceptable alternative. Sparkling water is a nice treat and is also useful for relieving stomach discomfort. I’ll return to the issue of soft drinks later because I know other overeaters will struggle with this as I did.
