I will make no attempt to bend a metal spoon. I won’t start playing the Pennsylvania lottery.

But I may possess some strange sort of eater’s ESP, according to research I first read 10 days ago.

Last year I was facing a problem that’s probably a puzzler for any older man who works out like a madman in the summer: How to drink enough to stay hydrated yet not wake up every hour on the hour because of it? In the search for a solution, I learned carbonation increases the rate of late-night urination in some people.

While I enjoy ice-cold water first thing in the morning, I barely tolerate the tepid stuff I drink out of a water bottle on a late-morning ride. That may be why I prefer sugar-free flavored sparkling water after that.

And I need to drink a lot of water after that. On a hard and lengthy ride in a summer swelter, I can easily lose 5 or 6 pounds despite downing two 28-ounce bottles while in the saddle.

So last summer I applied common sense to my situation and started drinking flavored sparkling water flat. Surely enough, that reduced my middle-of-the-night bathroom trips to a more manageable number.

But here’s why my common sense could also pass as a sixth one.

I’m a miser at heart, can pinch pennies with the best of them. I wasn’t going to defizz my flavored water initially simply because I saw the carbonation as about half of what I was paying for.

But - in part because I couldn’t shake an odd and nagging sensation there was another important reason to defizz my flavored water - I eventually did.

And then 10 days ago, that odd and nagging sensation finally made sense. In “Zero weight loss from zero calorie drinks? Say it ain’t so,” Robert H. Shmerling, MD, and Senior Faculty Editor of the Harvard Health Publishing website, cites a study that links carbonation to an increase in appetite and weight gain.

As I went to check my food log from last year, I could have sworn I heard the theme song from “The X-Files” somewhere in the distance. And there it was, followed by three question marks, a note in all capital letters about my recent lack of appetite.

Less than a week after I started drinking sugar-free flavored sparkling water flat.

Okay, so it’s not nearly as dramatic as the suddenly panicked guy who runs off the plane only to watch it crash at takeoff, and Eater’s ESP will probably never be recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as the sixth sense, but the aforementioned study published in the 2107 Sep-Oct issue of Obesity Research & Clinical Practice is certainly worth your consideration.

For more than a year, researchers gave three groups of male rats one of three beverages: water, typical soda, or diet soda. A fourth group was given typical soda allowed to go flat.

Regardless of whether the carbonation came from typical or diet soda, the rats consuming it ate more food than the rats given water or flat soda. They also gained weight faster.

Moreover, the researchers detected a hormonal reason for both: elevated levels of the “hunger hormone” ghrelin in the rats whose drinks contained carbonation. That led the researchers to see if a similar increase in the hunger hormone occurs in humans.

On different days over the course of a month, 20 males drank one of the four drinks previously given to the rats or carbonated water. The subsequent tests for ghrelin found an increased amount of it after the 20 drank any type of carbonated beverage compared to when they drank water or flat soda.

The study authors theorize that an increased pressure in the stomach from carbonation causes an increase in ghrelin production. They end the paper by stating their results “implicate a major role for carbon dioxide gas in soft drinks in inducing weight gain and the onset of obesity via ghrelin release and stimulation of the hunger response in male mammals.”

Odder than my Eater’s ESP is that I never read about this study until 10 days ago. What I have read ad nauseam, however, are studies to determine if the artificial sweeteners used in diet sodas undermine or even produce weight gain.

But no consensus has come from them.

For every study that suggests the use of aspartame or sucralose or saccharin creates weight gain, there’s one to contradict that.

Maybe what’s really at play here is a combination of what was detected in the carbonated-beverage study and what I’ve written about in at least a dozen columns.

That our metabolic systems are all a bit different, so the only way for you to know if any theory developed through scientific study is true for you is to experiment on yourself.