More recently I cut out diet soda entirely in favor of just water, but I've actually ended up gaining weight, mostly because in retrospect it seems like I've actually replaced a lot of the diet soda with beer (or at least there was a strong inverse correlation between my beer and diet soda consumption). So now I'm working on reducing my beer intake and filling in with the occasional diet soda when I really need some tasty carbonated beverage.
Personally I've never liked flavored sparkling water. When I'm thirsty I prefer plain old water (as long as it's properly filtered), and occasionally I'll drink some unflavored sparkling water. But there's something refreshing about a cold beer or a diet dr pepper that flavored sparkling water just doesn't provide, and it seems that between those two the beer is a lot worse weight wise.
Specifically what happens is that your brain is supposed to taste sugar, and learn to shut off your appetite when it has received enough. But artificial sweeteners teach your brain to ignore that signal because you get what tastes like sugar without getting sugar. So whatever sugary things you eat, you will eat more than you otherwise would without feeling satiated.
There is no scientific merit to this frequent claim. [1]
In fact, a comparative study on dieters using diet soda versus water shown that the water group lost less mass, hypothetically because they were feeling hungrier and less satisfied with their diet, thus more likely to succumb to sugary foods.
[1] Rogers, Peter J. "The role of low-calorie sweeteners in the prevention and management of overweight and obesity: evidence v. conjecture," Proceedings of the Nutrition Society
Thanks for the correction. I'll try not to repeat this one blindly in the future.
It sounds a little like gym-science.
I drink soda, mostly diet, love Ice Cream and sweets and usually have a cheat day on the weekend and probably overeat once or twice during the week.
I also enjoy exercising and workout about 5-7 hours a week. There is a balance. It's no different than earning more and spending more.
This observation is what led to me cutting soda out of my diet entirely almost a year ago (barring the rare treat).
And don't be fooled by the promise of diet soda. Lots of studies recently have shown that drinking diet soda doesn't help with weight loss either. Apparently the artificial sweeteners do something to your body by tricking it into thinking it's getting sugar; I'm not really familiar with the details, but studies showed that people who swapped soda for diet soda didn't lose weight, but people who swapped soda for e.g. water did. This advice is what led to me cutting diet soda out of my diet 6 months ago (which I had switched to after cutting out regular soda), so now I drink almost exclusively water.
If you're interested in cutting out soda as well, and don't think you can just switch to water, I have a couple of suggestions:
1. Start with those crystal geyser flavored sparkling waters you can get at Costco. I drank those for a while, because the hint of flavor tricked my mouth into thinking I wasn't just drinking water. I eventually stopped though, in favor of
2. Get a SodaStream and just make your own sparkling water. You can add flavor packets to this if you want, but I never have. Once you get used to it, unflavored sparkling water is pretty great. The downside here is the refill tanks for the SodaStream aren't cheap, but if you're concerned about that, there are homebrew carbonation setups as well (they just take up a lot more space; SodaStream is pretty compact).