A science and physiology note, just because.

I'm sure a lot of you know this, but according to an article I just glanced at on the Internet so you know it's true, slightly more than half of people are actually not quite correct about where their heart is.

So, just for the record: your heart is in the middle of your chest, basically, not over on the upper left quadrant. It's not symmetrical, so a bit more of it IS to the left than to the right of the centerline, and the parts to the left are a little closer to the front than the parts on the right, which is why you might THINK it's on the left, but it's mostly in the middle. People tend to imagine it a lot farther over to the left than it really is.

I am drinking ridiculous amounts of diet soda.

There is no artificial sweetener which I like the taste of. Therefore, I never used to drink diet sodas at all. I didn't drink a whole LOT of regular soda, because I am aware of how bad it is for me, but it DOES taste good.

However, I'm now attempting to reduce my caloric intake, and that means that I'm hungry, a lot. And diet sodas have no calories, but DO have sweetness, and carbonation which fills up my stomach, so they trick my brain into thinking that I consumed something.

So I've been working on trying to find diet sodas which are the least nasty. So far, I've discovered a couple things.

First, some root beers have complex enough flavor profiles that the nastiness of the artificial sweeteners can be hidden among the rest of the flavors. Second, sodas, like Moxie, which are supposed to have a significant bitter component, can mask it, too. Third, sodas which ALREADY taste chemical and artificial, and are SUPPOSED to, work out okay.

So: the ones I've found that I can tolerate, so far: diet Polar root beer, diet IBC root beer, diet Moxie, diet Dr Pepper, diet Sunkist Orange Soda.

Note that none of these are as good as the real versions, except the Sunkist Orange and that's only because the real version is ALSO terrible. But I'm drinking huge amounts of all of these. Like, I've gone through two liters of Sunkist today. Which is completely unhealthy, for a whole NUMBER of reasons, such as that most of the things in it are probably mildly toxic, including the 230 mg of caffeine. (Sunkist is unique among orange sodas in that it adds caffeine.) But that's just the point: all those mildly toxic, bitter compounds mask the taste of the sweeteners. Which are probably also mildly toxic.

Some day, I will work on cutting that out of my diet and replacing horrible fake things like this with real food. But, for right now, I'm going to work with this plan.