Is it Good for Losing Weight or does it actually make you FAT?

It is common knowledge that soda is one of the least nutritious things that humans consume. It provides no essential nutrients and is full of bad chemicals and high fructose corn syrup. Each can of regular soda you consume adds 150 calories to your diet! To counter the bad perception, the beverage industry invented “diet” sodas and now many people believe that these are healthy alternatives to full calorie soda. This belief that diet soda is healthy has led many people to think that by consuming diet soda, it will benefit their weight loss.

There is nothing healthy about “diet” soda. Just like regular soda, it contains no nutrients and unlike diet soda, it is full of even more bad chemicals from the synthetic sugar that is used to sweeten it. Several recent scientific studies have shown that diet soda drinkers gain even more weight than their regular-soda-drinking peers. An eight-year study at the University of Texas revealed that there was a forty-one percent increase in being obese for each can of diet soda that a person drinks in a day.

One of the most likely reasons that diet soda consumption increases body fat is that people believe that they are cutting calories here so they overcompensate with other food. In the end, they probably would have consumed fewer calories in their average day had they drank full calorie soda because they would not feel free to consume these calories elsewhere. These calorie free sodas can give a false sense of safety.

Another reason why diet soda can lead to increased body fat is that the body does not know how to process the artificial sweeteners. These man-made chemicals alter your body’s hormones, causing the hormones to tell your body that it needs to store more fat. This hormone alteration can also cause an increased desire for more carbohydrates in order to satisfy this hormonal demand for more fat storage.

The conclusion you should draw from all of this is that soda consumption, either regular or diet, is one of the worst things you can do for you body. Regular soda has too many calories and causes spikes in your blood sugar while diet soda messes around with your body’s chemistry and makes people falsely believe they are doing something good for their bodies. One of the first things you should do when pursuing a healthier lifestyle is to cut-out sodas and replace these drinks with water, tea, and fruit juices.