's motd Tuesday Jan 18, 2011

[Guest guest]

HOW MANY?

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I got a

letter from a man named . He was

writing to tell me how worried he was about his wife,

a. He told me that she weighed over 300

pounds and had simply given up on taking care of

herself. He also told me that she's watched me on TV

for years, owns several of my workout DVDs but has not

used them in a very long time. He included their

phone number with the hope that I would take time to

call and talk to his wife. And of course, I did.

Yesterday, I had that conversation

with her and, for the first three minutes, she was in

tears. a had no idea that had written me

so she was caught totally surprised. She and I talked

about a lot of things, including the fact that she'd

been involved in a serious car accident about ten

years ago. And ever since the accident, she admitted

to really packing on the weight.

Now when I'm talking to someone about their weight, I

end up asking them a lot of questions. One of those

questions for a was, "Do you drink a lot of

sodas or diet sodas?" She told me that she

tries to stick with diet sodas because...they

helped keep her weight from getting even more out of

control. And when I asked how many of those

diet sodas she drinks a day, without missing a

beat, a told me that she drank something like

seven cans of diet soda-a-day. Whoa! Was I hearing

right? Seven?

After hearing her diet

soda news, the little calculator went off in my head.

Let's see, seven-cans-a-day times 30 days equals 210

cans of diet soda a month! WOW! I

asked a, why on earth was she drinking that many

diet sodas. She told me, simply...", I

like the taste."

Me? I don't buy diet soda. But I would assume it

must cost a lot of money to have the diet

soda-drinking habit. In a's case, seven-a-day is

more than a six-pack a day and say, at $3.00 a pop,

let's see, that adds up to nearly 100 bucks

a month. Or, put another way, 1000

dollars-a-year. WOW! (Again.) That

works out to be a pretty expensive habit,

don't you think? But let's not talk about the price

right now. Let's talk about the ingredients in those

cans of diet soda.

Well, truth is, if you read the label, some of the

ingredients you can't even pronounce. Then there's the

extra sodium they put in them to make up for the fact

that there's no sugar. And we haven't even begun to

discuss the caffeine, along with the artificial

flavors and colors.

But get this. Some researchers

now say that people who drink a lot of diet sodas

actually end up gaining weight. How

and why? Well, it's because the people who

drink them think that by drinking zero-calorie diet

sodas, it gives them licence to eat more food because

of the calories they saved drinking the diet soda.

(Now there's some bad news.)

I don't keep these sodas in the house because, hey, I

like the taste of some of them, too. Oh, I have

dreams of filling a glass with ice, slowly pouring

that diet soda into the glass, turning it up to my

lips and feeling those diet soda bubbles tickling my

nose. But seriously, who needs them?

So do you drink a lot of diet sodas, like a? And

are you overweight? Well, if you're a big diet soda

drinker, do you now understand why you're

still overweight? I hope you do.

Love,