Given choice between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi I will choose Pepsi. I used to drink soda daily but have weaned myself off it almost entirely. I don’t drink coffee, but sometimes need a caffeine infusion. Diet cola is my caffeine delivery mechanism of choice.
My propensity for dental cavities played a significant role in my original choice to switch to diet sodas.
I’ve heard the “I hate water” thing before as well. It’s odd to think, but apparently, there’s a lot of people out there who almost never drink water. It’s all soda or milk or whatever. It boggles the mind to never drink water.
I grew up with diet soda being the norm. Sugar soda doesn’t taste right to me. So, when I want a soda, it’s diet. And. . .since I’m overweight, I’m obviously having what I want, when I want.
If you consider the SDMB “meeting” people, you have and you just don’t know it! We had a thread where quite a few people said they hate water.
It’s never tasteless.
My father hates it too, so it’s genetic. 
What can I tell you; if I drink plain water I feel nauseous.
Maybe I’ll put out a poll.
Is it healthy to only drink soda/milk instead of water? Like, are you hydrated enough?
Diet soft drinks taste horrible to me. I will drink Izze (sparking fruit juice, still a bit sweet but perhaps not as offensive as regular soda–that’s what I tell myself), but I have all but quit regular soda too.
When I was obese, I drank regular coke constantly. Sometimes up to 4 or 5 a day. Now that I am much thinner, I drink only diet coke. It really is just a taste, once you get used to diet soda, the regular stuff tastes funny. I switched as part of an overall attempt to consume less calories. (Less calories in + more calories burned = Smaller me).
Now, even as a smaller me, I do feel there is a weird stigma to drinking diet coke. On those once in a blue moon days when I do decide to get pizza or a burger or whatever, I feel like I get a look for ordering a diet drink. I usually order Iced Tea. Still comes with caffeine, still comes with ZERO calories, doesn’t come with the weird looks and smug assumptions that it’s a silly thing to order a diet drink with a burger.
Oh, and I hate ALL Pepsi products. Regular / Diet does not matter. Coke all the way
The stuff they sweeten diet sodas with doesn’t have any calories because it’s not food. No way that shit’s good for you. I’ll take sensible eating and exercise and an occasional soda made out of food.
Hydration is part of the reason I switched to Crystal Light - like the commercial says, it really does get me to drink more water-type beverages. I drink a gallon of it at work and probably close to a gallon at home each day.
I know I am taking in things I don’t need, particularly dyes, but the benefits of more liquids outweigh it in my mind.
Citric Acid (Provides Tartness), Instant Tea, Corn Syrup Solids(Adds a Trivial Amount of Sugar), Aspartame (Phenylketonurics: Contains Phenylalanine) (Sweetner), Maltodextrin (from Corn), Contains Less than 2% of Natural and Artificial Flavor, Magnesium Oxide (Prevents Caking), Acesulfame Potassium (Sweetener), Red 40 Lake, Red 40, Yellow 6 Lake, Yellow 5, Blue 1 Lake, Blue 1, Sodium Benzoate (Preserves Freshness).
If it’s sucralose, it’s made from sugar. Isn’t that food?
Re: hating water
I don’t like to drink water with meals (hate is a strong word - it’s a preference) because it doesn’t clear the taste of whatever I was eating the way flavoured drinks do. Flavoured drinks “reset” my palette, while water just rinses stuff away but leaves me still tasting whatever I just had. I also don’t like water when I first wake up, because it still leaves my mouth tasting like sleepy morning mouth, and that’s gross. Does that make sense? I drink a lot of water when I exercise, though.
I guess if you think shoes are cows, then yeah.
Water-type beverages? What do you think sodas are made of, HCl? Water is water is water. The other stuff in any drink have their own affects (milk has fats, sodas have sugars, diet sodas have artificial sweeteners), but at the end of the day, you’re still mostly drinking water.
I believe that the way that artificial sweeteners work is that your body can’t process them and they enter at the top of the digestive system and exit just as complete from the other. So, not really food from that perspective. But I somehow think I’ll survive drinking diet soda.
Really? None of my big fat friends do this.
If you think the food you are getting in most restaurants doesn’t also include chemicals and food additives similar to what’s in sodas, regular or diet, you’re wrong. Especially fast food and lower level serving restaurants like Applebee’s. There is a reason why SYSCO is a huge company.
I just realised my second post (#33) might be considered as snarky - I don’t mean it to be. Just some sarcastic humour. Sorry!
I’ll chime in on both the OP and the slight hijack. I switched to Diet Coke while dieting and now often prefer it to regular. That’s not to say I don’t sometimes drink regular, but if I can get a Diet Cherry Coke or Diet with lemon, I get that.
As to hating water, it’s never tasteless. And it has to be drunk ice cold to decrease the bad taste. And in my house growing up, the ice cubes made by the ice maker smelled like garlic (really) and so adding them to tap water made it worse. So I just didn’t drink water ever as a kid, and don’t much as an adult. I do drink it sometimes, usually on a hot day if I’m out walking around, or exercising, or whatever. But some water just tastes really really bad to me. Aquafina tastes like Alka-Seltzer, ick!
I drink a lot of tea (black, green, and herbal) and often Crystal Light, which is just basically flavored water.
Oh come on. Who really thinks Applebees or McDonalds serves food?
This is just a tired old jab at the fatties. “Look, that fattie ordered a Big Mac and a diet coke, what a stupid cow”. Um, a 20oz full-sugar soda has almost as many calories as the burger, why are you making fun of them for deliberately choosing not to add empty calories to their meal? :rolleyes:
That said, it’s the opposite phenonoma that boggles me. Almost every time I see an obese person with a bottle of soda in their hand, it’s the full-sugar kind. We have about a dozen obese women in our office. Of those I’d guess that 8 to 10 of them drink full-sugar soda (and a LOT of it too). Several of them say they just don’t like the taste of diet soda (um, you get used to it), but the rest claim they “are allergic to artificial sweeteners”. :rolleyes: Neither group is willing to just drink water though.
As for me, I’m normal weight and I enjoy soda. I probably drink about 12 cans of diet coke per week. If they were full-sugar, at 150 calories per can that would be 93,600 (empty) calories per year I’d be consuming, which would result in me gaining 26 pounds in a single year. The reason I have’t gained 26 pounds a year and therefore are not fat, is because I choose diet soda over the full-sugar stuff. What is so hard about understanding that?