Study: Diet soda doesn't help you lose weight

Side note: Do any brands really advertise drinking their diet soda as a method of (actual) weight loss? I can't think of any that actually present it this way.

It goes on to say that substituting sugary soda for diet soda isn't enough for most people to stop gaining weight. This is probably because you're likely to substitue the calories and sugars for something else, since your body notices its getting less of something and will crave it.

Yet you have things like this:

"One large study found that people who drank artificially sweetened soda were more likely to experience weight gain than those who drank non-diet soda"

This again is a correlation with the typical behavior of a diet soda drinker. They're not drinking diet soda because they want to lose weight. Rather, they're drinking it because they don't want to gain weight. They could have a terrible diet overall and this alone does nothing but move the problem over into, say, consuming two scoops of ice scream after dinner everyday. All because the soda they had during lunch didn't satisfy their bodily craving of refined sugars.

So this is a case of correlation not being causation. These types of articles do nothing but encourage this error to propagate. Perhaps the term "diet soda" is misleading in itself, but perhaps telling people that drinking a calorie-free drink will make them gain weight is just as silly as telling people it will make them lose weight.

We've been told calories are calories are calories so many times.

BUT

Calories are clearly not treated the same way by different people: two people can eat the same thing, and live the same lifestyle, and one will be overweight. Should we really assume that the same notion can't apply to an individual who treats themselves differently?

What's the elephant in the room? Metabolism!! And whether your body wants to store weight.

What you eat affects both metabolism and whether your body wants to store weight. Sure, everyone's going to be require their own unique mix.

BUT the important point is that what you eat has reflexive impact on how your body uses what you eat and thus on whether you'll be overweight.

So calories are not the only thing. And thus it's entirely possible that a calorie-free substance, which has impacts on metabolism and how your body decides what to store, can impact weight gain.