Diet Addictions are No Joke

The one thing I hear at every competition I have been to, is the athletes swearing by Crystal Lite and Diet Pop to get through the days leading up to their show. These shredded athletes that gave up every form of sugar, dairy and starchy bread. Claimed to have only survived by the sizzling snap of a fresh can of Diet Peps, and the tingly feel of bubbles on their starved tongues as they savored every last drop.

I’m not a huge fan of saying Diet pops make you fat. Although I believe there is truth in that statement, I think the majority of studies they pull are of people who drink diet pops, beside their McDonalds Big Mac and extra large fries. How often do you go to a restaurant and see an overweight person devouring a high fat, high calorie meal, with a side of DIET pop. How many over weight people do you see sipping on the bubbly juice while walking down the street? I also fee that as a society we are generally carrying more fat on our bodies due to many factors. I think the co-relation is that people in general are more apt to be over weight because of their nutrition, and then they think they are saving a ton of calories by drinking diet pop. Sure they got a little bit of the equation right, to use diet pop in place of regular pop, and reducer their sugar intake. But if that was the only problem, we wouldn’t have an obesity issue. The biggest, and most important part of the problem, most people are getting very WRONG. Nutrition is the key to a lean or fatty body. These people take out a diet pop, feel good about it, and add in an extra scoop of ice cream. If diet pop on its own did make you fat, I don’t think that the hundreds of pro and amateur athletes that drink it almost daily; would even touch it. They are lean and mean, thus they do not see the actual adverse effects of this dangerous and unhealthy beverage. I think this is why they feel free to drink diet beverages so freely while in season.

So if it doesn’t make you fat what’s the big deal?

I had to get the ‘studies show diet pop makes you fat’ portion out of the way. If I just said, “Don’t drink diet pop. Diet drinks make you fat, and there are studies that prove this!”

I would receive a ton of letters from skinny bitches and shredded meat heads telling me that they look hot, and send me a picture of their lean-ass- body in a bathing suite, taped to a crushed can of diet pop.

The reason I want you understand that its not just about your weight, is because I think as a high performance athlete if you are serious about your training you should be just as serious about what you put in your mouth. This article is to open your eyes to the hidden disasters diet beverages can have on your training regime and competition prep.

Weight Lost:

Gotcha! I just finished telling you that I don’t think Crystal Lite or Diet pops are going to make you fat, and then I hit you up with this first point. But the reason is different than you may think. The fact of the matter is that diet pop contains chemicals and no calories. Your body understands calories in, calories out. Calories are a form of energy. If you ingest calories, you fill your tummy with energy; your tummy does some magic stuff and then turns the energy into fuel for your body to function. When you don’t have that energy and fuel, you are hungry. SO, if diet pop has no calories and you chug it back like a baby sucking on a bottle; this unknown-chemical-filled substance will go into your tummy and do what? Not much, because it isn’t energy, your body doesn’t know what to do with it. And your body definitely will not use it to make muscles, help you run further or assist in your power lifts. So, now you drank this diet pop, and you’re even hungrier. It’s played a trick on your mind. Most the time this can lead to over eating. The over eating, as been connected to the aspartame in diet pop, and the disconnect which aspartame causes between the brain and the metabolism of food.

Performance: As a former Crystal Lite drinker, I started to notice I was getting headaches after chugging down a liter or two of the sweet stuff. Then I stopped for a while. When I returned to the evil-sweet talker, I actually could sense that something wasn’t right when I drank it, my body didn’t like it. Want a list of all the negative sides effects that the FDA has admitted to with aspartame??… Well here are 92!!!

http://www.sweetpoison.com/articles/0706/aspartame_symptoms_submit.html It’s deadly:

I don’t need to go into why those listed side effects above are a warning sign that something is wrong with the diet drinks we consume, but I will. It’s important to understand how these dangers arise. When you drink and metabolize aspartame, methanol is produced, which is absorbed and converted into formaldehyde . Yah that’s great… “Can I have a side of diet coke with some formaldehyde sprinkled on top?”… You need bone strength:

The reason we need vitamin D and calcium is so that as athletes we have strong and dense bones. For athletes that lift heavy weights, pound on their joints with plyometrics or jump for their sport, your bones are your keys to GOLD! So why would you drink cola, which has been proven to decrease your bone density. If someone said bluntly, drinking diet pop would reduce your vertical by a number of inches I can put money on it, every basketball player would stop drinking it. Cola has something called phosphoric acid in it. This is a flavoring agent that increases blood acidity, thus leaching calcium from your bones That’s all I got to say, its shit… so don’t drink it.