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Wellness Wednesday for April 23, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I gave up real sugar and high-fructose corn syrup years ago in favor of artificial sweeteners like Splenda, aspartame, and stevia. Last week, I decided to also give up zero calorie artificially sweetened drinks on Jim's advice. It's done wonders for controlling my hunger. On the minus side, non-sweet tea and juice taste awful; I would rather just drink cold water at that point. So that's another source of enjoyment gone from my life.

Try some unsweetened fruit flavored seltzers. It’s gotten to the point where those taste as good as Sprite to me.

I was thinking about a post extolling the wonders of artificial sweeteners, courtesy of popping into the local Taco Bell and making good use of their unlimited drink refills.

All the Pepsi Max and Diet Coke a man could dream of, without the normal consequences on the waistline? Whoever made the nectar of the gods zero calorie deserves a Nobel, maybe two. And they're safe, last time I reviewed the claims about potential downsides I was thoroughly unconvinced.

Yeah my experience whether on or off keto was that sucralose & sugar alcohols didn't disrupt my hunger/satiation. And I thought as of maybe 10+ years ago, the story was that while each of the artificial sweeteners have slightly different results with different people, they all had extremely low metabolic response compared to dietary carbs in general. The idea of your body being 'tricked' into producing a flood of insulin by the apparent encountered sweetness seems like some kind of psychological intuition that some people may find useful, but that wasn't backed by evidence.

And it's crazy to hear dentists saying 'luckily you're not a soda drinker' when looking at perfect teeth, whenever I'm drinking an impressively expensive amount of energy drinks instead of coffee.

Splenda has calories, about the same as a sugar per gram. 3.5 calories per gram . but they are allowed to round it down to zero.

i was wondering what happened to jim. He owned jim . com which is worth a fortune. and then he stopped updating

My understanding is that all the artificial sweeteners have calories, it's just that they taste so intensely sweet to us that you have to use a tiny amount compared to sugar. And that makes the calories negligible.

I do read Jim from time to time, but I never got his health advice, given that extreme amounts of butter will eventually cause issues. Actual doctors who do work out like the barbell medicine fellas recommend the use of zero-calorie sweeteners and seed oils.

The comments below are even worse commentary on this by Aidan, a guy whom I cite regularly. For the record, I am not the fittest guy, I just don't think that eating mostly meat and dairy can be good long-term.

Whats wrong with tea and what is non sweet juice? Do you mean juice that has had its fructose somehow removed or just juice without added sugar? If it's the latter then I don't see the problem, unsweetened juice is still incredibly sweet.

Maybe juice is not the right word... I'm talking about stuff like chicha morada and agua de jamaica, not fruit in a blender.

Aguas frescas without sweeteners? Now I've heard of everything.

Pro-tip- put unsweet tea in the fridge, do yardwork and then drink it as soon as you come inside. That's how you develop a taste for it.