It's great that you gave up some unhealthy foods and also hat you lost weight, but are you really comfortable with having an addiction? Woulnd't you prefer to be addiction-free, not slave of any foods or drinks "you simply must have"? Even if you could lose weight, get to your goal, even maintain (and there are studies that show that's harder to do with a regular intake of aspartame, also because it stimulates hunger), a daily dose of aspartame for a few years is quite a slam on your nervous system.

Aspartame harms the production of new cells in the nervous system, which means that consumed regularly it will damage it.

For pregnant women it's particularly dangerous as there is a higher change of fetal malformations when consuming aspartame. If you have ever heard of folic acid supplementation during pregnancy... well, aspartame does the exact opposite of folic acid.

There is a good, informative section on aspartame on the book "Prescription for a Nutritional Healing"; there are also lots of informative articles on the net. Here are some:
- Aspartame is dangerous for everyone
- Aspartame dangers in pregnancy
- Aspartame... the BAD news
- Aspartame: what you don't know

If after reading some of these and the many more you'll find on the net you wonder why something this dangerous would still be around, the answer is one: MONEY. Pharmaceutical companies make BIG bucks out of aspartame - it's cheap to produce and sweetens more that sugar so it's the "ideal" additive because it delivers the sweet taste without using large quantities nor using more expensive, good quality ingredients.

With all the proof there is that it's bad, trusting the FDA is not, IMO, enough to be convinced that it's not dangerous for our health. They have been wrong before, and with all the money that's involved, trust is a tricky issue IMO.