The Trouble with the Sweet Stuff

Sigh...tea.  My favorite.  Well, it used to be.  I grew up on sweet tea and I mean sweet tea, I'm talking my aunt made a medium sized Tupperware pitcher full with almost two cups of sugar!  I loved that stuff but it sure explains a lot.  LOL  It was basically the equivalent of drinking simple syrup.  I have to order a sweet tea or two when we're in the South but the taste wears on me quickly.  I just can't handle that much sugar in tea and get the sugar sweats from a beverage.  (A piece of cake, yes but I digress.)

I've grown up with artificial sweeteners because my mom was perpetually on a diet so the "pink stuff" was constantly in our house.  When I picked up on the fact that I was fat too and should think of doing something about it when I was 8 years old, I started putting it in my tea, on my cereal or whatever to reduce my calories from sugar.  (Rice Krispies were never the same because what was better than a big ass bowl of puffed rice cereal with sugar sludge in the bottom as you OD'd on Saturday morning cartoons?)  I didn't notice too much difference though because for all of the sugar I was downing for probably 50-100 calories depending on what I had between cereal, tea or whatever else I put it on, I could put one or two packets of sweetener in/on it and have zero calories!  Fat kid dream come true!  However, baked goods using any kind of artificial sweetener just were not my jam.  But one of my favorite simple pleasures as an adult is a good cup of hot tea.  I love a strong English Breakfast or Earl Grey with two pinks please.  When I was trying to be "better" the past year, I did one pink and one packet of Stevia.

I went along this way my entire life until recently when I kept reading more and more things about how basically no artificial sweetener is safe including stevia because it hasn't been in use by the masses long enough to do sufficient studies on potential side effects.  The last thing I read that kicked me in the butt was that it can change your gut bacteria.  The Mr and I were talking about this and he said "well, look at the difference in waistlines from our grandparents at our age to the waistlines of our generation.  The major thing that changed in that time was convenience foods and the introduction of artificial sweeteners."  Literally the only thing I drink is water, tea and milk.  I don't drink diet soda ever because I think it tastes like crap.  If I'm going to have a soda, it's going to be the real thing once or twice a month, if that.  My artificial sweetener habit is between 2-6 packets per day which is nothing but that's not taking into account where it's being hidden in other food like my bread or something like that.  I figured I'd let the pink stuff run out and then go to Stevia and 1 tsp of sugar.  Yes, I know.  Sugar is evil but it's natural.  As soon as I made the switch, it was awful and eye opening.  It tasted like there was nothing in my hot tea at all.  I've never been a fan of Stevia anyway but thought it would temper things as I weaned off.  It adds very little sweetness and even sugar adds WAY less sweetness than I've been accustomed to my whole life.  Each packet of my preferred sweetener was 300-500x sweeter than sugar.  So if I've been consuming two packets of it since I was 8 years old, that means I've been accustomed to a cup of tea that is 600 to 1000x sweeter than sugar!  No wonder I'm effing miserable drinking my tea now!  My stevia just ran out last night so now I'm down to pure honey or sugar.  The first week I started this, I lost 4 lbs but I think it was a fluke because it crept back up.

As a person who is not a fan of flavored tea, you can imagine my English Breakfast tastes like dirt now and that makes me super sad.  Stuff like Earl Grey and green tea is a little easier to tolerate but it's something I just don't look forward to anymore.  I'm so used to asking "you want a cup of tea" to quell any later evening hunger and looking forward to a perfectly sweetened cuppa and now it's just a big mug of disappointment.  I wish I'd never been introduced to it so I would've never developed that reward trigger for something so sweet.  I suppose I'll have to learn to like flavored tea or I guess cut it out completely and try to avoid crying in the tea aisle in the store.

How do you sweeten your tea/coffee?

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