A few years ago I was having a horrible time with brain fog. I couldn't think clearly, couldn't remember things, and just felt all out of sorts. The light often hurt my eyes, and I had a constant headache. For a while I thought I needed new glasses, but getting a new prescription didn't help. So then I thought it was allergies or the change in climate (I'd moved to a completely different part of the country), but allergy medicine and extra rest didn't help. So maybe it was caffiene? I completely cut that out, remembering the Mountain Dew headaches I'd suffered many years ago. Still no help though. At one point my head hurt so bad that I'd be laid up in bed completely unable to function. I couldn't read, listen to music, watch tv . . . it was all I could do to hold a pillow over my head in a weak attempt to keep the painful light out and pray that I wasn't about to have a blood vessel burst in my brain. I actually began to wonder if I was having some weird sort of blood pressure problem or something.
One day I felt amazlingly like my old self and was actually sitting up when my husband came home from work. He brought me a bottle of diet Lipton green tea with citrus as a treat. Wow, I'll never forget that. Within seconds of taking a few drinks . .
seconds, I doubled over in pain; it felt like my head was going to burst. It was then that I made the connection and realized it was the aspartame. And I felt really stupid for not realizing it before . . . years ago my dad was having issues with the very same chemical. He used to eat suger-free mints and eventually made the connection that they were the reason behind his headaches and the sores in his mouth. He switched over to something with actual sugar in it and it went away. I never had those sores, but I had another problem altogether . . . overactive bladder. Without getting into TMI, let's just say that I reached a point where I no longer felt "safe" leaving the house.
At the time I'd been consuming not only a lot of diet drinks, but other diet products that were sweetened with aspartame. While laying in bed with those horrible migraines I had no appetite, but silly me, I was eating diet popsicles in addition to diet sodas in an effort to get something down. No wonder I'd have to stay in bed so long, I was continuing to poison myself. But to make a long story short, once I realized the issue I had no problem quitting cold turkey! It took a several weeks for the brain fog to go away, and as an added bonus my bladder eventually went back to normal (although that took much longer). I haven't had one single migraine since and can actually hold my pee like a normal person these days.
I try to go for things that are naturally sweet, including using stevia as a sweetener or just not using sweetener at all. I've found I love plain iced tea and even plain yogurt. I occasionally allow myself sucralose (like in Diet Rite) but after that whole aspartame deal I'm pretty wary of chemicals that are supposedly safe for consumption.
To this day I wonder what else the aspartame might have been doing to my body . . .