I’ve resisted taking this step for a while now, but, on Sunday, I finally decided to quit coffee.
Coffee is one of the foods that I should be avoiding on a low residue diet. I wanted to see if I could “get away with” drinking my single morning cup each day, and, for a while, it seemed that I could. But I started paying more attention to how drinking coffee made me feel. And while on the weekdays it seemed to be treating me alright, on the weekends, I did not enjoy it.
If I drank coffee before working out, then I had to deal with a lot of needing to pee. Plus I would get some lightheadedness and just generally not feel that great. And my weekend workouts run late enough that drinking coffee after them can keep me up at night. My husband can drink coffee whenever he wants and still be sound asleep five minutes later. I can’t drink coffee within about 6 hours of bedtime without feeling the effects.
The other factor that made this a difficult choice was that I am one of those people who have a hard time stopping coffee. I get physical withdrawal effects, including an incredibly nasty headache that can last a week if I go cold turkey. I’m trying to ease the withdrawal by not completely cutting out caffeine, but instead greatly reducing it by switching from a morning coffee to a morning green tea.
Well, I did go all day Sunday without any caffeine, so I had a headache most of Monday even with the tea. But then on Tuesday, I woke up feeling more awake and alert, even at 4:30 in the morning. The headache did come on Tuesday, but it didn’t come on as quickly as Monday’s or as strongly, so I think this method will prove better than cold turkey for me. I’ve gotten off coffee before, and I know that I don’t need it to function. In some ways, I function better without it. I’m hoping to discover whether my tummy functions better without it.
I’d hate to say goodbye to coffee for good. I never liked the taste of it as a kid, but I’ve always loved the smell of it. It’s a nice morning ritual. But if I can prove to myself that it adversely affects my tummy, then I’ll stop. That can’t be any harder than getting up at 4:30 in the morning to go to CrossFit, right? And I do that all the time now, even though there was definitely a time in my life when if I was awake at 4:30 in the morning, it was because I never went to sleep.