give up aspartame

I have not had aspartame in a few days. I don’t really miss it – it is easy to just have unsweetened coffee or tea or just use sugar – it’s better for me, and a weight-conscious person like myself wouldn’t use excessive amounts of sugar anyways. I think I might miss having diet soda when I go out to eat, but maybe I can order something else instead.

Is it bad for me to say that I don’t feel particularly better? I don’t know what I was expecting, but it doesn’t really seem to make a difference. Or maybe I need to wait a bit longer to notice the positive effects?

I watched a documentary last night on the Aspartame cover up. I’m shocked and horrified!!! Although I never drink diet drinks and though I was avoiding it all together, I checked the gum I chew, Cobalt 5, (daily!!) and found out that it contains phenyletonurics. See http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Phenylketonurics
for the definition. Yuck!!! These chemicals prevent seratonin from keeping us feeling good and sleeping well, increase mental retardation in babies, increase brain tumors, and promote many other problems. This is a disgrace for the American Government to allow this product on the shelves. If our government was paying for the healthcare it would be outlawed and pulled off the shelves immediately. It’s a sick country when the profit of a company is more important than the health of its customers.

Since getting off it, my headaches are few & far between…

This stuff has always freaked me out a bit but not enough to give up the sweet goodness of pop with no calories! I love the fizz. So I am trying to switch to carbonated water. Almost just as good and its WATER! I easily ignored the warnings about aspartame until I realized that I often felt dizzy, upset or unable to sleep at night after having consumed some that day. here’s to good health.

Ok so I’ve slipped up a few times on this goal – aspartame is in everything! Plus I’m trying to lose weight, and all the low calorie options for drinks and gum have aspartame in it – so i’m just left with water, tea and coffee which gets a bit dull. I just have to think of my long-term health rather than the immediate weight impact.

I gave it up for a while and then for no reason started drinking loads of diet coke and pepsi and sugar free gum. Bad. I’m going cold turkey as of right now.

Evidently the stuff is like both caffeine and sugar: addictive, an inhibitor of serotonin, insinuating itself into your system, making you feel only ‘high’ when you’ve got it in your body, and comparatively ‘low’ otherwise…

If I cut this stuff out, which will be easy, AND sugar, as well as caffeine, I will have cut out all of the things that I consumed regularly for years. It will be interesting to see what sort of withdrawal there will be. I think I have turned to these things subconsciously for the high all these years. And I might sort of sit there twiddling my thumbs, bored, thinking, where’s the high...

But I’m just getting to a place where I’m sort of sickened by the idea of being addicted to anything, being incomplete without the presence of something foreign in my veins.

Au naturel, baby!

Avoiding this isn’t that difficult for me. Probably because it is something added to a food product and not a major component of one. For example, I can add regular sugar to my tea. I don’t drink soft drinks. I consume water not flavored ones that have hfcs and/or artificial sugars. At least I don’t have to worry about this particular poison. The other ones are much more of a challenge for me though.

www.aspartame.com

so i don’t drink diet sodas very often, but i occasionally indulge. my problem is sugarless gum. my dentist recommends chewing gum after lunch, since i can’t always brush my teeth. any suggestions?