Cutting Out Caffeine
Posted: Thu 27 March, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Health 2 Comments »Regular readers will be amazed to know that while we’ve been away, I’ve completely stopped drinking Diet Coke. Coke and Diet Coke have always been my major addiction really, and over the years my intake has gone up and down, but never really cut out completely. I know I drink/drank way too much of it, and then a while back Herself issued me the challenge of cutting it out completely while we were away.
In light of knowing that I’d be foul if I went straight from my normal levels of Diet Coke to zero, I cut my intake way down in the month or so before we left for our break – and that was probably one of my smarter moves of late, if I’m honest. It meant that once we got here on Friday, I just cut it out completely, rather than needing to reduce the intake before dropping to zero – and it means that I’ve now not had any caffeine or Diet Coke for a week.
I’m not cured of the addiction, I’m sure – it wouldn’t take much at the moment for me to just go back to the pre-holiday intake, if not the pre-reduction intake. So it’s still something I’m going to keep on working on, and drinking other things rather than Diet Coke, and just seeing how it goes.
Along the way, it also means I’m drinking more water, and using fruit squashes and the like. No bad thing at all – I can’t deny, the range of fruit squashes and so on has increased massively since I were a lad, and that’s definitely a good thing. So it means that I’ve got a lot more variety in what I’m drinking, and hopefully increase the healthiness (to some degree) of my liquid intake as well.
Time will tell, obviously- but I think that with other thoughts and plans that have been started while we’ve been away, it makes sense to reduce both my intake of caffeine and artificial sweeteners (Aspartame in particular, having seen the reports that Pete linked to a while back) and the evidence of the last week or so that I don’t actually need that caffeine and Diet Coke in my life to keep me going (which I’ve occasionally thought I do) then that’s a good starting point, and a good motivation for the future.
ive cut out sugar in most things now and when i go back to having a sugar in my tea it tastes horrible and to say i had 3 sugars in my tea at one point quite amazing realy
I’ve managed to be caffeine free for about 7 months now, which is pretty impressive for me, given my level of diet coke intake in years previous. It’s a bit of a nightmare in pubs though, as they rarely have any diet drinks other than diet coke, so I’ve wound up drinking ginger ale in preference to water because at least it has some taste to it. It’s still full of sugar though, which is a bit of a mare.