 Next question is from coach dad CT. I don't drink alcohol, but my thing is Dr. Pepper. If I have three to five cans on the weekend, am I better off with the natural sugar and calories in the regular one or the diet one with artificial sweeteners? I like this question because I think it was Sal who got me to kind of really reevaluate this. I think I've openly admitted on this podcast that I've had this like diet coke thing, and I still occasionally have these. Now it's like, you know, once a month or once every other month, one finds its way in there. If I'm enjoying the other day we had in and out burger and I like a diet coke with my in and out burger and I'm there, right? I don't have my Hanson natural sugar option while I'm there. So what I've done though is to eliminate pretty much drinking diet codes completely is, you know, just say, Hey, I'm going to have an Hanson is a product that I really like. It's a brand that I were not sponsored by them or anything, but they're they have natural sugar and the calories are still pretty minimum. I think it's 130 calories or so for the for the drink. And what I've noticed is that instead of drinking diet codes and saying, Oh, it's zero calories. So allowing myself the freedom to have it every day or twice a day, saying, you know what, I'm going to make the choice of having something with sugar and knowing that it has 130 calories, I tend to make a better choice. Plus, I notice the way I retain water in my gut. So when I'm when I'm doing diet cokes, I definitely get this kind of like inflammation. And I definitely feel like I'm holding water, especially in my gut. And when I do natural real sugars, I don't get that. Now it could also be because when I drink a natural sugar drink, I tend to have one and I have one maybe every other day. If I have diet cokes, I could watch myself go from one every other day to one a day to even allowing myself to have two in a day really quickly. And maybe it's the overconsumption of it that is causing that. Yeah, the problem with this discussion is always that we don't consider the total context. Okay, so is it better to eat to have the sugar drink or the artificial sweet and drink? I don't know. I need to look at the rest of your life. I need to look at your behaviors. Here's the main challenges that I see with artificially flavored drinks. Now forget the whole debate about whether or not the artificial sweeteners are healthier or bad for you. I'm going to let's just assume that there's no risk with them. Although I think that's baloney, let's just assume no risk. It just makes your drink taste sweet. And so there's no calories in it. Studies show consistently that when people include artificially flavored drinks into their diet or replace sugar drinks with it, and they're left to their own devices, they don't lose any weight. Now why is that? Is it because the artificially flavored drinks cause them to gain weight? No, it's because they make up for it by eating other food. Behaviorally speaking, it doesn't cause weight loss. Now if you track everything perfectly and then you cut out sugar and replace it with artificial sweeteners, you'll lose weight because you're going from calories to no calories. But here's the behavior issues I see with artificially flavored drinks. This is what Adam is talking about. Drinks that have calories and sugar, those have a natural barrier. What I mean by that is there's something that people tend to consider when they drink those sodas. There's a consequence. It's on the can, 130 calories, 30 grams of sugar. That's my consequence. People's behaviors when they do that, especially health conscious people, they tend to limit the drinks or have a few. And that's it. When you have a can of soda that has zero calories, you have eliminated the perception of the consequence. So then you just start to drink the shit out of it. Now, what's bad with that? Well, we know that it doesn't reduce your food intake. You end up making up for it. It definitely throws off how you perceive food. So now things that are sweet, naturally, don't taste nearly as sweet. Compare a diet Coke to a regular Coke. And a diet Coke is sweeter. Much sweeter. That's the biggest thing that I've noticed. And if I get in a pattern of drinking, even something like that has like a stavia or something I consider to be like a better option in terms of, you know, a sweetener, just like they make up for the fact that the calories aren't in there by, you know, really turning up that that sweetness. So your body kind of responds like, ooh, that's nice. But then that affects the decisions I make later on in terms of like what I'm craving or what, you know, might find its way into my into my food and like having desserts and things like that. Like it's just my my palate starts to then kind of crave that sweetness in other directions. This is exactly what I found what I've and this is this is the read like someone's probably listening going like, oh, well, how can't you why can't you discipline yourself to have the the one diet Coke every other day or few days the same way you do with the handsome. And that is why it's because what ends up happening is I have this, you know, artificial sweetened drink that is like superpower tasting sugar and changes my palate. Now when I have a handful of grapes or I bought into an apple, I don't get that same satisfaction as rewarding. It's not. And so I don't get that same pleasure signal in my brain as I was getting from that Diet Coke. So then it makes me want more of them. And so I keep chasing that. And so I have and I really didn't test that this this behavior like this until we had brought this up on the podcast. The way I kind of looked at it was like, ah, you know, I'm very aware of my behaviors. If I start to see myself go from the Diet Coke occasionally to the Diet Coke every other day to the Diet Coke every day, then all of a sudden I allow myself and it's always like if I caught myself doing two Diet Cokes in a day, I know I've worked my way up. And that's always was my like, okay, time to pull off and I'm really good about doing that. But I never really thought, Oh, what if I just allow myself to have a sugar drink when I want it? And will it be easier for me? And you brought that up when this discussion came up before. And I actually applied that and it's been unbelievable. Like I I don't feel I need the Diet Coke. So I don't get caught up in that. When I have a Hanson drink that and I tell you what, another reason I wanted to bring this this question up is because I had been on I've been in search of a brand like Hanson that I really like. And I found one that's even healthier and even better and has even more flavors that I like that I cannot wait to introduce to our audience because we've been going back and forth for a few months. Oh, those are the ones that we tried? Yes. And so that's getting sealed up right now. So we have a new partner in that space that I'm super pumped about. Because this definitely this is a brand that really speaks to me because that has been a long time battle for me is always wanting to go revert back to Diet Coke. And I feel like this is something that's going to completely eliminate that. Yeah, one of the problem is big problem that we do in the fitness space is we look at all everything from a mechanistic point of view. Oh, look, no calories. Therefore, it's okay. But we don't look at our game. We don't look at the big picture. Look, artificial sweeteners have existed now for decades. And we still have obesity. It hasn't solved anything. So what's what happens? Well, it actually encourages tends to encourage, I should say, a bad relationship with food. Here's a good relationship with food. I want something sweet. Okay, there's some calories in it. That's okay. Because right now I think I'll enjoy this. A bad relationship with food is consequence free pleasure seeking. Okay, apply that to anything else in your life consequence free pleasure seeking. There's always a consequence. You think there's no consequence, but there's always a consequence and your body does become desensitized. When you do this often, this is with everything this could happen with anything that gives you pleasure. Sex does the same thing you can desensitize yourself to the point where what might get you in the mood no longer gets you in the mood because you've been desensitized, because you've exposed yourself to too much, you know, whatever. Same thing with food. So look, I've been training people, we've all been training people for a long time. I've never seen somebody fix their nutrition issues by replacing sugar with artificial sweeteners. In my experience, it's never not only is it not fixed, it usually causes more problems.