Is Diet Coke Good For Weight Loss?

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Drinks like diet coke or diet pepsi are marketed as good alternatives to regular soda if you’re trying to lose weight. But are diet sodas a good idea if you’re on a weight loss diet?

Let’s take a look at whether drinking diet coke is good for weight loss.

What is in diet coke?

Diet coke and other diet sodas replace the sugar typically found in these fizzy drinks with an artificial sweetener, like aspartame.

These artificial sweeteners stimulate sweetness on our tongues, but are chemicals that cannot be used by the body to create energy.

In this way, the drink can be listed as having 0 calories, meaning that it doesn’t provide the body with any amount of meaningful energy.

This is the main benefit of diet sodas. It gives people a close alternative to soda, without increasing their calorie intake.

Problems with diet coke

But can drinking diet soda potentially cause problems for people trying to lose weight?

Let’s take a look at a few issues, so you can decide if they might be a problem for you.

1.) Sweetness triggers cravings

The taste and perception of any sweet foods and drinks trigger pleasurable sensations in the body. These pleasurable sensations can be quite addicting, and make some individuals crave sweets.

If you have cravings for sweet things, drinking diet soda can continue to trigger your cravings for more sweets.

Even though the drink itself may be 0 calories, the intense sweetness from diet coke can easily stimulate more cravings, resulting in you snacking on other more calorie-dense sweets.

Intense cravings can also feel like hunger in some people. So continually drinking sweet drinks could also increase your hunger, and result in more food being eaten overall.

So if you have craving or hunger issues, and find it difficult to stop snacking, drinking diet soda may be worsening this issue for you, and you might want to wean yourself off these drinks.

2.) May increase insulin resistance

When you drink normal coke, the sugar enters the bloodstream, and causes your body to produce lots of this hormone called insulin. Insulin helps our bodies use the sugar, partially as energy, and partially to be stored away as fat.

Because the amount of sugar from these drinks are so high, the amount of insulin produced is quite high as well.

When our body senses too much insulin, we start to become desensitized to the insulin.

This results in a vicious cycle in which we produce lots of insulin, but our body doesn’t respond too well, so our bodies need to produce even more insulin to get a response.

We call this problem insulin resistance, and this problem can result in increased weight and fat stores.

Increased fat stores also contribute to insulin resistance, leading to another vicious cycle that can continue to perpetuate itself.

Although diet soda doesn’t contain any sugar, studies have shown that these diet sodas and their intense sweetness are still able to stimulate insulin release.

We aren’t %100 sure why, since artificial sweeteners are not sugar, but it might have to do with our brain’s response to overly sweet foods, or our gut bacteria breaking down these artificial sweeteners into metabolically active chemicals.

It appears our bodies will still produce insulin to the perception of sweetness, not just to the presence of actual sugar.

This means if something tastes sweet, regardless of whether it was caused by sugar, natural honey, or artificial sweeteners, our body might still want to produce insulin in response.

Constant insulin production from frequently drinking diet soda can potentially cause insulin resistance, leading to fat gain.

3.) May not help weight loss

Despite the fact that diet sodas have no calories, research suggests that drinking more diet soda may not actually help with weight loss, compared to drinking more water, which does help with weight loss.

Additionally, research shows that switching from diet soda to water helps increase weight loss.

But if diet soda technically has the same amount of calories as water, why wouldn’t they have the same effects on weight?

The answer is complex and we’re not sure, but it likely lies in the fact that consuming artificial sweeteners may indirectly result in metabolic changes that cause more weight gain.

It might help with some temporary weight loss if you switch from regular coke to diet coke, but you could do so much better by just doing away with diet coke altogether, and switching to water.

4.) It keeps a bad habit

Ultimately, if your goal is to change your lifestyle to one that promotes not only a healthy weight, but a healthy body, dropping these sodas for healthier alternatives will be an important long-term goal.

Switching from coke to diet coke may help reduce the overall calories consumed, but won’t help you come off an addiction to coke or soda in general.

Should you avoid diet coke?

Although things like diet coke offer increased variety for people on weight loss diets, these zero calorie diet sodas are by no means an alternative to good old water.

It’s often argued that diet soda doesn’t increase your calorie intake, so what’s the harm?

Unfortunately, effective long-term weight loss is not just about counting calories.

Artificial sweeteners may have indirect effects on your brain by triggering cravings, or on your metabolism, by increasing abdominal fat storage.

These effects can cause issues with weight loss, particularly those with sugar cravings or metabolic problems, like diabetes type 2.

You could temporarily switch to diet coke as you transition away from regular coke, but your ultimate goal should be to discontinue these overly sweet fizzy drinks altogether.

If plain water is too boring, you could go with lemon water, or unsweetened carbonated water. Tea or coffee are also good alternatives.

Learn more about

• Is Sparkling Water Good or Bad?
• Other foods for weight loss

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