Vegetables tasted so good. Vanilla added to our Starbucks coffee started to taste awful. It felt like a world of taste opening up. Food started to satisfy so much more. It was easier to identify when I was full and avoid overeating.
The sugar industry has so evil and has done so much damage to this country and to the world.
In any case, I stopped drinking soda entirely because it was too unpleasant. Then I discovered how easy it is to make my own and started doing that. That way, I can make it to my preferred sweetness level.
[1] I realize that soda is literally candy, but it's too sweet for me anyway. I've never understood why it's different than, say, a hard candy that is 98% sugar.
When I experience aspartame, the host product tastes "wrong", and if I consume more than a wee bit, my stomach gets a bit upset. So, let me ignore that sweetener…
When I use most artificial sweeteners, at first they can seem enjoyable and freeing. A 50:50 blend of Stevia-in-the-Raw and Splenda can seem more like real sugar to me. But with repeated frequent use (say, daily in a mug of tea), I gradually come to feel not an anticipation of something good and satisfying but an expectation of doing something 'empty'. Sweetness in general becomes increasingly distasteful.
Perhaps the distaste is due to lack of metabolic reward. However, after a few days of not wanting sweetness, a little bit of real sugar can reset me to enjoying sugary things. Takes longer to again enjoy an artificial sweetener.
I've done strict keto off and on for 10+ years and drank Diet Coke like it was going off the market. When I cut out carbs (we're talking < 30g per day), it becomes obvious that it's real sugar that triggers the cravings for me. Never did a diet soda make me crave a candy bar. Instead, it was generally something like a bite of a real hamburger bun, or a couple french fries.
It's really hard to isolate the effects of things like artificial sweeteners when "real" sugar is absolutely everywhere.