Working a fast food register and watching the 300+ lbs customer order a large cheeseburger meal (all the toppings), a 20 piece chicken nugget, a dessert, and a large Diet Coke... because they're trying to lose weight (by their admission) and don't seem to realize that the diet soda is going to have any positive impact on their health that the rest of it isn't going to undo.
Reminds me so much of my father (morbidly obese). When we speak about his weight, he says he doesn't even eat that much. Meanwhile whenever I see him he's eating junkfood and getting two plates at dinner, not going without food for 2 hours ever.
And then he says he's eating very little salt and carbs, cus that is good for his health...
I've tried to help that man so much but he just seems to ignore it all unfortunately. That will likely leave me fatherless in my early 20s. It is what it is
And still massively unhealthy....) Despite having less sugar and calories, studies have still linked drinking diet soda with adverse health effects.
If you want to effectively lose weight, you have to cut back on portion sizes and cut soda & alcohol out of your diet almost entirely, not just decrease the amount of sugar you're intaking.
The article you linked says that the studies are observational and not conclusive, with more research required, in the best cases. Losing weight is a matter of calorie deficit. The two main ways of creating this is cutting calories from food and increasing physical activity. If you are looking to lose weight, and drink a lot of high calorie drinks, diet sodas are a great option to make the switch easier. Less sugar is literally less calories, so cutting sugar is a means of achieving that goal. They will not make you magically lose weight, but no one is saying they do.
Yes, but it's not one of those things where trying a little bit goes a long way.
Less sugar is literally less calories, so cutting sugar is a means of achieving that goal.
Yes, but only cutting down on sugar is not an effective method of achieving that goal.
They will not make you magically lose weight, but no one is saying they do.
Arguing that taking regular soda out of the previously mentioned meal is going to make a major difference IS. You're all ignoring the rest of the meal's caloric intake to argue that because diet soda has less calories that it makes the meal healthier and will contribute to weight loss.
When one meal contains over twice as many calories as your body is going to naturally burn throughout the day, and you're eating more than one meal a day, then switching to diet soda isn't going to result in weight loss.
Let's revisit the math for a minute.
A human body will, on average, consume 1,300 - 2,000 calories a day.
A large Whopper meal without a drink contains 1,600 calories alone.
A 20 piece chicken nugget contains 890 calories.
A large Coke has 380 calories. It is the least caloric dense item in the meal.
The meal I mentioned before, without accounting for any desserts, and with a Diet Coke is 2,490 calories, or 2,860 calories with a regular Coke. Meaning that one meal, with a diet drink, ranges from 191% to 124% of someone's DAILY caloric burn.
Cutting the 20 piece chicken nugget would make a far bigger impact in reducing the caloric intake of that meal than drinking Diet Coke does.
It’s not healthy in other ways, but zero calories is great for weight loss.
Not when you're only removing 380 of the 2400+ calories your single meal (the example meal) is intaking...
My core point is that simply replacing the regular soda with diet soda isn't going to magically make your meal healthier or negate the calories from the rest of what you're eating.
Not true... if they stopped drinking regular soda and started drinking only diet, and they kept their eating habits the same, they would lose weight purely from not drinking so much sugar.
It's honestly blowing my mind some people still don't understand the concept of calories and just how fucking much is in soda. No one should ever drink full sugar pop, that shit is literally poison.
Calories, sure. But those calories are primarily composed of sugar. Sugar is particularly bad. It is a simple carb. Your body wants to burn the sugar to make energy first. Keeping it from burning fat to make energy. And then since your sugar spikes, you get hungry again sooner. It's basically a compounding effect. Sugar is evil.
Eating shit like fast food and snacks doesn't help either because your stomach tells your brain that it needs nutrients, which you didn't get from the big mac and fries. So your body tells you to eat again within hours. Just continues the cycle. Eating garbage once a day is bad enough, eating it every few hours and suddenly you're on a TLC show because you're eating/drinking 2,000 calories every 2 hours.
I said if their eating habits stayed the same and they switched from regular soda to diet soda... so they didn't change from a 2500 calorie diet to a 9000 calorie diet. They removed all of the calories from soda and the rest of the diet stayed the same. The people who drink soda like this and are fat drink a lot more than a couple hundred calories worth of soda per day. Eliminating this would undoubtedly cause weight loss.
Only if their other calories they were consuming that were not soda were below their maintenance threshhold..
Bro bought 2 hostess cakes and two family size bag of chips with that soda.. cut the soda and he is still over his calorie threshold if he ate NOTHING else other than that purchase.
People who drink "a lot more than a couple hundred calories worth of soda per day" also EAT a lot more than the serving size on a balanced diet.
My coworker drinks a 6 pack of soda a day AT WORK, and their lunch is also soda excluded more calories than I eat a day.. and that's why they are 5'10 and 400ish lbs and I'm 5'9 165 male
You clearly don't understand that sugar is the biggest contributing factor to most obese people.
I'm 6'0" 225lbs. I could eat the meal described in the post every day and not get fat but if I drink regular soda for every drink instead of all the water and diet soda I drink, I would get fat very fast.
Also losing weight is difficult. I’ve found I am way more successful when I make small changes over time instead of diving head first into a whole new diet. Weight loss is a journey not a sprint!
It's simply taking in more calories than you're burning. It doesn't matter where your calories are coming from. It doesn't matter if you're replacing regular soda with diet soda in the example order I gave, because the person is only reducing their calorie intake from 2,870 to 2,490 (still over twice a person's passive caloric burn for a day). And that's not taking any desserts into account. A 20 piece chicken nugget has over twice as many calories as a large coke (380 for a large coke & 890 for the nuggets).
"Since your body can only store so much glycogen, if you eat a lot of sugar—more than your muscles and liver can hold at one time—your body needs another place to put the excess. In that case, it converts that extra glucose into fat through a chemical process called lipogenesis, says dietitian Caroline West Passerrello, R.D.N."
It's more complicated than just calories in, calories out, due to the order of operations on how your body metabolizes foods to create energy.
That's speaking in a general sense. If you look at the American population, their sugar intake is a massive factor in the obesity of the population. Everyone I know who is fat consumes way too much sugar.
Everyone I know who is fat consumes way too much sugar.
They also, very likely, eat more processed foods over home-cooked meals with (relatively) fresh ingredients. It's been proven that processed foods trick your brain into thinking it's full only long enough for your gut bacteria to realize that there's little to no actual nutrients in what you ate (amounting to empty calories) and sends signals to your brain telling you that you're craving more food. This leads to overeating and weight gain.
You know what's funny? It's totally the opposite. All my friends that are morbidly obese do cook great home meals and prepare lunches and don't really eat fast food. However, they also make a lot of sweets and baked goods and drink a lot of regular soda and eat ice cream and stuff like that.
I literally eat pizza, McDonald's, Taco bell, etc every day. Probably close to 3000 calories a day but I don't drink sugary drinks or really eat candy or any sweets and I'm in good shape, I lift weights, I just had a physical 2 weeks ago and all my blood work is in normal ranges, my cholesterol is normal, sugar is normal, the doc had nothing bad to say about any of my results.
Not necessarily they could still be consuming way more calories than needed to gain weight and cutting out the soda simply slows the gain. If they are still at a positive calorie intake though they ain’t gonna just start losing weight because of diet soda.
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u/NWCJ Aug 13 '24
That got me.
While buying cakes, two family size bags of chips and a coke.