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| Coffee poster. Arizona. February 2020. |
My original draft for this post began December 2021. In re-reading the draft this week, at the end of March 2023, I bored even myself by reading the minutiae of my experiments, so I edited a bunch of that out.
And spoiler alert: Notwithstanding all that good work back on the cusp of 2021/2022, I drifted back to drinking two pots of fully-loaded coffee each morning. .... Now having revisited this draft, I'll resume my mixture of caffed and decaffed ingredients. That was a good practice.
So, on to the 2021/2022 experiment:
As part of troubleshooting some concerning health symptoms, I decided on December 7 this past year [2021] to run an experiment. Quit coffee for awhile. See what happens.
My coffee origin story
I never drank a drop of coffee until I was in my early 40s. Loved the smell; despised the taste.
I was a Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi girl. Drank it in the morning, all day, and at night. Loved that biting carbonation and the flavor. Maybe the caramel coloring added something ephemeral to the pleasure, as white sodas did little for me.
But one day, everything changed in a moment.
It was at a day-long, offsite, work-related meeting at a hotel.
Breakfasty break things set out by the hotel. Long, white-clothed tables. A big, shiny silverish coffee urn. Chubby ecru coffee mugs stacked on a tray.
A switch turned on: I had a desire for a cup of coffee. I poured myself one. I drank of it. I loved it immediately.
From then on, I was a coffee drinker.
Black, no sweetener.
I thought I'd experienced caffeine in my diet sodas, but that was nothing in comparison to the wallop of coffee caffeine.
For awhile I was a coffee snob, but that was just a phase. Thank goodness.
In the beginning of my coffee-drinking career, I ordered espresso on occasion when in a coffeehouse, but I found the quality so unreliable, notwithstanding the baristas' pride in their skills, that I defaulted to the brewed coffee on tap. Besides, due to my financially-prudent Swiss heritage, I valued the higher number-of-swallows bang for my buck with a cup of brew than a demitasse of espresso.
My long-time coffee drinks of choice:
- Brewed coffee
- Americano
- French press
Caffeinism caught up with me?
Fast forward (backward?) to December 7 this past year [2021]. I quit coffee.
Prior to the day I quit, my usual consumption was 50 ounces per morning: two pots of my five-cup coffee maker. My "recipe":
- #1 pot: Five coffee scoops (roughly equivalent to rounded teaspoons)
- #2 pot: Atop the once-soaked grounds of #1 pot, two new coffee scoops.
My withdrawal experience:
- December 7: A mild headache developed in the afternoon and into the evening.
- December 8: A dull headache all day and into the evening.
- December 9: No headache. But oh, so sleepy.
- Day 10 and following: Unremarkable.
I thought I would miss the ritual of a cup of coffee. I did, a little, but not much.
A possible coincidence: Several mornings before my coffee stoppage, I had been experiencing severe anxiety each morning, which for me, centers in my belly. The first three mornings following my coffee abstention, I continued to have this distressing anxiety. Then it was gone.
On December 22 [2021], I began to drink coffee again, but ...
Between December 22 and December 30, I tried various recipes that mixed caffed and decaffed coffee.
My overall objectives were to:
- Enjoy the pleasure of drinking coffee in the morning
- Derive the putative health benefits of caffeinated coffee
- Avoid the negative effects of too much coffee, such as shakiness/jitteriness and feelings of anxiety
The winning recipe:
- First pot: Three scoops of caffeinated coffee + two scoops of decaf
- Second pot: Dump the grounds from the first pot. Replace with four scoops of decaf + one scoop of caff.
NOTE: A scant two months after my coffee experiment, in following up on those concerning symptoms that had prompted the experiment to begin with, I learned that the frequent getting-up-at-night (and other things) were a function of undiagnosed sleep apnea, now being treated.
