The Journal Of The InnKeeper

"So why do you drink diet soda, you don't need to be on a diet!"

"Why bother drinking a diet soda when you're eating all that other crap?"

With Eating Season upon us here in Florida, I thought I'd address this common misconception.  There are lots of reasons why someone might want to drink a diet soda and still not be on a "diet".  Even naturally thin people like me are still subjected to the laws of chemistry and biology - if you consume more calories than you use, you will gain weight.  Some people have the kind of super-active metabolisms that make it really hard to prove this is true, but that's just because their metabolisms are using the energy from their food at higher rates, for whatever reason, and they are not motivated to actually try to eat enough food to out-pace their metabolisms (and who could blame them?)

But the simple fact is that the body "stores" the calories that people don't use, even skinny people, and eventually there is a point at which every person will "store" more than they can use regularly and people gain weight.  So even thin people will have an upper cap to the amount of calories it is desirable for them to consume in a day / week / month / on average.  So some people save those caloric opportunities for their food and seek to find lower calorie options for the drinks.  Not everyone wants to drink water all the time either, so please don't condescend in the comments about how they should be drinking water for every meal.

With all the amazing opportunities to eat during Eating Season, some people want to be able to sample the delectable edibles, and drinking a diet soda means that they save all those hundreds of calories per day that other people spend on drinks, to spend instead on food.  If you're watching your weight, that means that you can still splurge a little bit, and research suggests that being able to splurge occasionally often takes the pressure off of the dieter just enough to avoid the binging that leads to the weight yo-yo.

Then there's the issue of calories and poverty.  People who are poor actually don't get enough to eat.  I know many people don't believe that, since they see fat poor people and think there's a direct correlation between food and weight.  But the truth is that weight is pretty complex, as is poverty.  In all too many situations, healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy food, so poor people end up trying to stretch their dollars to get as many calories as possible in order to avoid starvation, at the expense of more nutrients but less calorically-dense food.  If you're trying to maximize the amount of calories you get, one might choose to drink diet soda (or water, or whatever) in order to better spend their money on high calorie foods and enable themselves to get their calories *from* their food instead of wasting them on calories from drinks.  Plus, being poor sucks, so fuck you for trying to take away any small pleasures that poor people might be able to grasp, like drinking something with flavor in it.

To re-visit the admonishment to drink water within the concept of poverty:  not everyone has access to suitable drinking water all the time, so sometimes a diet soda *is* actually the more healthy option.  Bottled water can often cost more money than soda, depending on what water options are available, and anyone who has ever worked in some of the arenas and convention centers that I have knows that you're gambling with your life if you have to rely on tap water exclusively.  And that's assuming the person in question is somewhere that offers tap water.

There's more to say about food and poverty and the assumptions privileged people make about food and poverty, but this is already getting long and I don't really have the patience to delve that deep into the subject here.  Suffice to say that if you're making comments about how poor people eat when you're not that level of poor, not in that particular person's circumstances, or not an economist who specializes in poverty, you're probably wrong and you should just shut up now.  When you've had to sell your own blood just for enough money to buy a loaf of bread at the day-old-bread store like I have, maybe then I'll listen to you.

It's a long-standing myth that people need to be drinking 8 glasses of water every day.  1) Not everyone needs that much; and 2) the real advice was "the EQUIVALENT of 8 glasses of water per day".  Humans get water from food and other drinks.  It is not necessary to drink all that water on top of everything else that one consumes (and it can even make some people sick to overdose on water - yes, that's a real thing).  So a person who is not dehydrated or experiencing symptoms of dehydration is not necessarily harming themselves by drinking something else in place of water.

I'm a Super Taster - meaning that I have an overactive sense of taste and texture.  It's a real problem, bordering on eating disorder (for some, it really is an eating disorder, but I'm not as bad as some).  It's a delicate balancing act between finding food that's healthy and food that I can actually bring myself to eat.  I carefully choose my drinks to compliment my food, to make it easier to eat, and I'm very limited as it is because I can't drink caffeine and water tastes bad to me.

So, no, I'm not on a diet (although it borders on body-shaming to make assumptions or comments about how thin one must be in order to justify "dieting") in the weight-loss sense.  But I do have an upper cap to the amount of calories I can consume in a day before I start feeling sick (in addition to when I start putting on weight), as well as how much water I can drink before I throw it back up.  I choose to spend those calories on enjoyable food instead of my drinks, when I can.  I also am very poor and I have often not had enough money to eat more than once a day, so I will also choose to spend my money on high calorie food just to get enough calories in my body to keep moving one more day and I don't want to waste those calories on my drinks.