Wednesday,
August 4, 1999

Okay, I'm not quite as sluggish today as I was yesterday. I'm actually rather proud of myself -- wrote a lot, got the bedroom cleaned up, and worked on a web page for my brother's improv comedy troupe. The rest of the house still looks like the circus tramped through it, but hey, I ain't a maid.

I've also started doing something interesting -- well, no, I started doing it last week, actually, but I'm starting to see results now. There was a discussion on rec.arts.sf.fandom about NutraSweet, and someone posted a list of side effects that NutraSweet was supposed to cause. Now, I've heard a lot of stuff about aspartame, such as you can't use it in cooking because heat converts part of it into a toxic chemical (which is scary enough in itself), but this is the first time I saw things like short-term memory problems, insomnia, and inability to concentrate associated with the sweetener.

So I decided what the hell, let's stop the intake of aspartame and see what happens. Considering that I drink a LOT of Pepsi Max, this was a bit of a big change in my life, but it was all in the name of research. And since this left a big liquid gap in my life, I switched over to orange juice and water. A lot of orange juice, and about 80 oz. of water a day.

The results. . .are interesting. Apart from the fact that I'm peeing like a racehorse every hour, I would have to say that I have noticed some improvement in the way I feel. I don't feel as logy, I'm definitely not as bloated as I was, and I generally feel more alert and aware. It's kind of hard to describe -- I used to feel like my consciousness was riding around in this water-filled sphere, gently bumping along but not making much of an impact on anything. Now the water seems to have drained away, and it's much sharper, more pointed. Which helps if you're a writer.

Can I say this is all due to cutting out aspartame from my diet? No -- I've also been flushing my system fairly regularly and consuming a hell of a lot of orange juice and Vitamin C, so that has something to do with it. But I'm starting to think avoiding aspartame is a good idea. Now if I can just wean Lyndon off of the stuff.