Sweet Revenge

For a long, long time, I'd avoid artificial sweeteners. The pink stuff (saccharine), the blue stuff (aspartame), the yellow stuff (sucralose). No sir, give me real sugar (or, sigh, high fructose corn syrup).

But then I started gaining weight, because as a software engineer, I didn't move a whole lot, and I ate out a whole lot. This lead to weight gain.

So I reluctantly started to have diet sodas, and to get my coffee with Splenda (the yellow stuff). All the fake stuff do something that's practically insidious. Since the three sweeteners are extremely sweet, often you only need a packet, possibly two, to get it as sweet as you want.

If you try to get it that sweet with sugar, you need at least twice as much sugar. You need 4 relatively large packets, rather than two rather slim packets.

And that's where they get you. Because one day, they'll run out of the artificial stuff, and you'll reach out to get the sugar to sweeten that tea or that coffee, and you'll put two packets in, and drink it, and then realize it's not sweet enough, then add two more packets, and say, OK, that's pretty sweet, but then think "OMG! I'm going to get so fat eating this much sugar!"

By making the stuff much sweeter, you need less of it, and only when you compare it to how much sugar you need to dump in to get the same effect do you feel the tremendous guilt of sugar.

Of course, you could be strong. You could stop eating sweet things altogether. But you're not strong. Once it's sugar-free, you might drink two, three, four, five, heck, six cans of soda a day. The sheer guilt you would have drinking regular soda disappears. You convince yourself that the soda you're not drinking allows you to eat other foods more freely.

And so you gain weight. And then you think, "Well, I really can't stop drinking soda now, can I? It's the one thing that's got no calories". How many people have really lost weight by drinking diet soda? Not too many, I'd imagine.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta get some of that yellow stuff more my coffee.