diet vs regular soda

Gee, maybe I should get some test strips?

Although it would probably be best to just stop getting it when I eat out ~ I've gotten regular instead of diet 2 of the last 4 times I've ordered it, and that's just based on my tasting ability / headache sensitivity.

(And yes, part of me is thinking "anecdotal" and "urban legend". The other part is thinking "it's human nature to make mistakes" and "soda is expensive anyway".)

Can a very fat person become a normal thin person?

I've read a variety of sources on this. Sometimes the conclusion is "no"; sometimes it's "we don't know". But rarely have I seen it stated as bluntly as in this excerpt from Gina Kolata’s new book, Rethinking Thin, printed in the NY Times.

It starts with recounting a 1959 study by Dr Jules Hirsch where people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence moved into Rockefeller University Hospital to go on a rigorous diet.

( Average loss: 100 lbs. [E]everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner. That did not happen. )

But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

( metabolic and psychological changes were observed )

The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”

Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.

So does this mean once you get fat, your body permanently adjusts? Not so fast. Another researcher at the University of Vermont looked into what happened if people without weight problems deliberately gained weight.

With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. [...] Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent.[...] When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

Their conclusion?

[E]ach person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. [...] Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

In other words, I think there's a reason why my (rather gradual) weight gains tended to stick with me, and my (rather dramatic) weight losses didn't.

(BTW, emphasis added by me.)