I wasn’t sure where to start this thread, so figured off topic.
I’m having a hard time quitting caffeine & wanted some accountability & since no one I know IRL has any trouble with caffeine, I’d post here.
Why quit caffeine? It’s no good for my mental health - low level general anxiety, ups & downs in irritability, it makes ruminating on an obsession worse. Physically I’m sick of the big ups & downs in energy & I really dislike believing I need a drug in order to wake up & be alert. Psychologically I’m very addicted to caffeine, I crave it very strongly, and I really don’t like being beholden to a drug.
Basically none of the caffeine side effects are terrible, so I kind of bumble along still using the caffeine because it’s more painful to quit than to deal with slightly shitty side effects haha.
In September 2017 I managed 5 weeks of no caffeine & after the first 6 days I felt loads better & had much more physical energy. Mental energy was an effort to get started - I’ve used coffee as an ON button before doing most tasks.
So here goes, Day 1, been awake 5 hours & so far I feel good. Past experience says I crash in energy on day 3 & day 4 is the hardest.
I’ll update this log twice a day until/if I get to 90 days caffeine free \m/
You want accountability partners? Tell you what, you so much as sniff a coffee, I’m sending R Lee Ermy after you. In for this. I’ve had coffee every day since I was 11, so am interested.
Hmm I used to be big on preworkouts and ice coffees a while ago maybe 500mg caffeine most days. At first it really pushed me in the gym but that kind of decreased a bit after a while even though it still worked well enough. I think I got tolerant or desensitised a bit to caffeine.
I just stopped when the preworkout ran out. There was a little drop in performance in the gym initially but I accepted it. these days I train with little hype up or psychological arousal nevermind caffeine.
When I do decide to get hyped and use pre or caffeine it feels incredibly powerful like more than the first time I used preworkout. So I save it for the right time and let myself get sensitive to it.
Haha at “Do or do not” my girlfriend says that all the time. It’s a brilliant mindset though.
I just read a 2002 John Berardi article on caffeine & insulin resistance, I’d like to see how my insulin sensitivity changes so will go get more inserts for my glucose monitor.
It’s coffee 90% of the time. The rest of the time super brewed green tea.
I’ve not used energy drinks or caffeine pills for 2 years.
I’d switch to decaf coffee, but I’ve such an addictive personality, it’d just keep my addiction going via a psychosomatic effect & lead me back to mega strong espressos. Like using zero nicotine E-liquid in a Vape.
My coffee intake recently has been 6 or 7 heaped teaspoons of instant coffee in total each day. Spread over 3 or 4 strong coffees.
I had 3 weeks of zero caffeine a while back & then before a weights & conditioning workout I had 3 espressos… I trained for 3 hours like a machine & could’ve done another hour haha.
If you’re desensitised to it, it’s a powerful stimulant. Especially in the doses served in chain stores - about 350mg in one cup of coffee
Coffee is such a lucrative business, I think around $100 billion a year, I don’t think we will be told the whole truth on its health effects. Not by mainstream sources anyway.
Of course I’m also hoping for some shit-mazing fat loss from improved insulin sensitivity haha
The history of research into the health effects of coffee is interesting, and somewhat of an indictment of the way prevailing dogma influences the findings that actually make it into print.
Most older studies of coffee consumption started from a default assumption that high coffee intake was unhealthy. You can find plenty of studies from the 1990’s that showed associations between coffee intake and higher blood pressure, for example. That drove lots of thinking that coffee had detrimental effects on cardiovascular health, and lots of people (a sentiment that still exists today) believed that quitting coffee was a “healthy” thing to do, or that coffee was a vice that carried increased cardiovascular risk.
Except…further, more detailed research has never really borne that out, and more recent studies are generally showing that coffee drinkers have lower risk of, basically, everything (as you allude above: epidemiological studies have generally shown that habitual coffee drinkers seem to have lower risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc).
As for the specifics of the study posted here: if anything this highlights just how hard it is to find well-controlled diet studies of anything. A systematic review of all randomized controlled trials that compared caffeine administration versus placebo which reported insulin sensitivity as an outcome turned up a total of 7 trials with 70 participants. Unfortunately it’s really hard to know the quality across those studies, but the general gist seems to be that in each of the crossover studies (meaning that you randomly assign the patient to consume caffeine or not, get tested, then have the “other” treatment, then get tested again) the patients had lower insulin sensitivity after caffeine consumption than after non-caffeine consumption. However, I’m under the general impression that these effects are pretty transient (i.e. may not result in chronic insulin sensitivity changes, but more of a “this is what happens right after you drink a cup of coffee” study). Aragorn probably knows more of the biology behind that than I do.
Well, yeah. Going from “zero” to “3 espressos” is a little ridiculous.
I’m used to hearing this stuff about Big Pharma and the big money suppressing DA REAL TRUTH, but now I need to worry about Big Coffee, too? Where does it end? Next thing you know I’ll be hearing about BIG CITRUS and BIG APPLE and BIG CARROT suppressing the truth about their health effects.
While I have your attention, any truth to the whole ‘adrenal fatigue’ syndrome? Can stim use over time mess up your cortisol levels and put you into a constant parasympathetic ‘stressed’ state?
It is - I can’t moderate - I’ve such an addictive personality. I’ve tried moderate caffeine & I always end up hammering it again after a day or two, hence quitting feels like the right approach for me.
Day 2 & almost 3pm. Woke up with a mild headache which is very rare, but lots of water got rid of it.
Definitely feeling spaced out & quite slow. I was in a 2 hour meeting at work this morning & that was hard work. It’s not bad by any means, quite mild really.
This log is helping a lot, by being accountable. I don’t want to fail out of vanity (pride) if nothing else!
4.30pm. No headache in the morning & I woke up with lots of motivation for training at 11am.
Had a test after that - social stuff after I trained, where I’d normally feel like I needed caffeine to be sociable. It was mostly good However. Did start to flag by 4pm.
I’ve got more social stuff this evening - and I’m just going to tell the friends of friends that I might be a bit spaced out & slow from the caffeine detox.
