Sugar is addictive for me and anything that imitates sugar, like artificial sweeteners, keep me addicted to the sweet taste and wanting sugar. The hardest thing for me to give up after going low carb was diet sodas. No sugar but I still craved the sweet taste of sugar. Once I got off the diet pop after three or four months the sugar/sweet cravings finally went away.

I will have something sweet once in a really great while now. If I'm at a birthday party I might eat a quarter piece of cake or maybe a half piece and not eat the frosting. Mostly to be sociable. And I can get by with that. But sometimes I find myself eyeing the table with the cake or pie and wanting more. So I cut it off right there. So far been able to do that without "falling off the wagon". 

My wife will use a tiny bit of honey or some dark 85% chocolate in low carb deserts (which consist mostly of fat of one kind or another). So we do get a tiny bit of sugar but it is very small amounts. Just enough to take the bitter taste out of cocoa but not enough to actually give a "sweet" taste.

Not everyone probably needs to go to the extent we do, but we find it works for us. Our taste buds have changed to like the smooth mouth feel of fats instead of the sweet taste of sugar. So her low carb deserts are made mostly of things like cream cheese, heavy cream, butter, etc. with flavorings like 85% dark chocolate, lemon or lime. She will also make home made Greek style yogurt out of heavy cream (even though yogurt bugs eat most of the sugar out of regular milk when making yogurt, heavy cream which still has some milk solids will end up being even lower in carbs. Plus just makes a very creamy yogurt).

It has been so long since we have eaten processed foods I can't say. Would have been going on 6 years since we went low carb and even before that my wife used very few boxed products. Our processed food consumption would have been things like cereal out of a box, pop tarts and things like that. Eating out we would have probably got a bunch including ice cream and such. She has always been a wonderful cook so things like cakes or pies or any food was nearly always made from scratch from separate ingredients. She never used anything like hamburger helper or such things. So at home never a big lot of processed foods outside of breakfast but eating out a bunch we did get it.