It's definitely an acquired taste, at least for me. At one point, I tried to cut out sodas to avoid the sugar but couldn't so I tried to switch from regular to diet.
The first one I tried was a Diet Pepsi as I heard it was easier to get accustomed to that than Diet Coke when going from the sugary stuff. It was awful and I could barely get down half a can.
It took a while but I finally got used to it. The one drawback, though, is that once you switch, there's no going back. After you get accustomed to diet soda, the real stuff, as Labby says, is way too sickly sweet. So now I can only drink the diet stuff, which is too bad since my previous favorite was Mountain Dew. I can't drink it anymore, sadly, and the diet version isn't very good. Oh well.
I got ruined on milk that way too. At one point, my sister switched to skim milk from whole when we were kids and drinking that stuff was like drinking water, only without the taste.
Once I started drinking skim, I couldn't drink any other kind (1%, 2%, whole). Today, I only have milk with cereal and can't drink it by itself because it tastes eh.
