Quote:
Originally Posted by babyfattimes3
I still don't believe diet sodas are a good choice, due to aspartame.
I think it's different for everyone. Years ago I started getting severe migraines, had sores in my mouth, and had some strange bladder issues. The migraines eventually got so bad that I'd spend a week at a time in bed with the lights off and the blinds closed, still attempting to block out everything with a pillow over my head. I could barely eat, I couldn't read or watch tv, I couldn't even listen to music, about all I could do was cry and pray for the pain to subside. I attributed it to stress over moving across the country, an old glasses prescription, and the extreme change in climate. When new glasses didn't improve anything, I hoped that time would.
I was feeling surprisingly well one day and was sitting up at the PC when my husband came home. He was happy to see I was doing better and had brought me a treat . . . a bottle of iced tea. I started on the bottle, and about halfway through it I doubled over in pain. The migraine came back with a vengeance! I looked at the ingredients and felt incredibly stupid upon my realization; it was sweetened with aspartame. When I'd moved across the country, I decided to cut out sugar and had switched to diet drinks and other products in hopes of getting healthier. When the migraines got severe and I could barely eat, I was drinking diet iced tea, diet soda, and was eating diet popsicles. And I'd also forgotten that years before, my father had bad reactions to aspartame, giving him sores in his mouth and bad headaches (I didn't think it was an issue for me since I'd never noticed a bad reaction in myself back then).
I do have friends that clearly have no issues with aspartame, so I don't run around preaching the evils of it.
However, I do openly discuss how it affected me in case it may help someone else that may unknowingly have a bad reaction to it. Once again, I believe everyone can be affected differently by such products. For example, I also can't drink apple juice because it will trigger a super painful golf ball-sized Bartholin's Cyst; oddly enough, I can eat fresh apples just fine. The interesting part is that apple juice has always tasted "rotten" to me anyway (as if it's gone bad when it's still fresh), so it's like my body was already trying to warn me.
If you choose to avoid aspartame, avoid all diet drinks from a fountain unless you can read the ingredients; 99% of them have aspartame. Also be careful of non-diet products, like chewing gum and cereals, which often add aspartame to make them "healthier."
And if you do find you want an occasional soda for a treat, keep in mind there are aspartame-free options that you may find more agreeable, like:
Diet Shasta (sucralose-based)
Diet Hansen's (sucralose-based)
Diet Coke with Splenda (yellow label, sucralose-based)
Zevia (stevia-based)
And Arizona makes diet iced tea that's sucralose-based as well.
Take care and hang in there!
I definitely went through withdrawals. Since your issues don't seem to be as severe as mine, I'm sure they won't last nearly as long (my migraines came and went for about three months and the sores and bladder issues eventually went away; it had apparently built up in my system over time). If I accidentally ingest some it these days doesn't seem to affect me, but it definitely did when my system was still apparently purging what had built up. Drink plenty of water and see how you're feeling in a week or so.