Day 10

I had something strange happen yesterday. About midday, I was really craving a diet pop and decided to walk down to the store to get one. I think a big part of it is that it was one of the rare nice days here and wanted an excuse to get out of the office for awhile.

Anyway, I walked down and bought a Diet Mountain Dew from the fountain. I was sipping it on the way back and kept thinking it tasted different. For one thing, it was way sweeter than normal. I kept wondering if perhaps they had gotten the syrups mixed up and it was regular pop instead of diet. It did seem to still have the aspartame aftertaste.

I got back to the office and went back to work while debating with myself whether I should drink it of not. I started to feel really strange, kind of spacey and lethargic. I had been getting hungry before I left, so I ate, thinking it was low blood sugar. I also tossed out the rest of the Dew. I drank maybe six ounces of it in total.

For the next four hours, I was really sleepy and didn't feel well. I started to feel better by the time I got home but had a really bad headache by then. The headache stayed with me the rest of the evening.

I am thinking one of two things happened. It's possible that it was sugar pop and I reacted badly to the blast of HFCS that I am not used to anymore (about 22 grams). However, I would have thought that I would have had a burst of energy before crashing. On the other hand, I felt puffy the rest of the day and didn't drop any weight overnight, as if I had a large infusion off carbs.

The other possibility is they got the syrup mix wrong on the diet pop and it was way sweeter than normal. This elicited a cephalic insulin response which flooded my system with insulin and dropped my blood sugar quite a bit. Since I am not eating any carbs, it then took my body a while to bring it back up. The strange thing is that I still drink several diet sodas a day and I don't normally respond like that. I have even tested my blood sugar after drinking a Diet Pepsi while fasting and didn't see any change.

I am not sure which it was but am leaning to the second option. Maybe I reacted to it because it was much sweeter than what I normally drink. Either way, it convinced me that I finally need to stop drinking diet soda. It has been in my plan for a while but I kept finding reasons to put it off. I have a business trip this weekend and don't want to be dealing with withdrawals while on it (I get vicious headaches for several days when I go cold turkey). I am going to stop the pop when I get back.

The meal I mentioned above was my first hunger of the day, about 10:30 AM. I had several bites of pemmican (it has greatly improved in flavor as it has aged) and two cheeseburger patties. I was hungry again when I got home and had a piece of cheese to tide me over to dinner, which was at 7 PM. Dinner was three small pieces of pork loin (with a nice rind of fat, so it wasn't too lean) and four piglets (pork riblets). The piglets were nice and fatty and tasted great.

As mentioned above, there was no change in my weight and I am still at 192.4.