I Quit Drinking Coffee And Life Is So Much Better

Ok, hear me out. Wait until the end before you start screaming at your screen in outrage.  

Quite possibly the greatest thing I’ve ever done was stop drinking coffee.

Calm down! I said wait until the end before you let your outrage loose. 

Google “the benefits of coffee” and you’re greeted with page after page of studies citing the health wonders of everyones favourite liquid “pick me up.”

From boosting physical performance, enhancing focus, helping to burn fat all the way to reducing the risk of cancer. There isn’t much coffee cant do.

I love coffee. Black coffee for what it’s worth. Espresso. Double. None of that flavoured milk shit.

So it would come as surprise that giving it up had the most profound physical and mental effect on my body.

I didn’t stop drinking coffee because I read a study or heard there were negative health connotations.  I was basically forced to due to ill health. What came afterwards is why I didn’t go back.

Let me give you some background info.

As I mentioned, towards the end of 2017 I developed some health issues. At the time I didn’t realise the severity of the issues. I just thought I was run down.

Around the middle of 2018 I fell into something of a depression that I had never experienced before. There was a cloud of negativity hanging over me. I wanted nothing to do with anyone. I wanted to be left alone. Every day I was on the verge of walking out on everything. Fuck work. Fuck family. Fuck girlfriend. Fuck absolutely everything and everyone. I just wanted to disappear and be left alone. It was a deep rooted feeling too. It would hit me every day and it was all consuming. I treated everyone like shit. I over reacted to everything. My body felt heavy and tired all the time. Everything was a struggle from training to walking to work to getting out of a chair.

From a training perspective, the worse I feel the better I train. The heavier the weight feels the angrier I get with myself for being so useless so I push harder. I then get particularly sadistic and really try and beat myself up for feeling so bad. More anger equals more reps with more weight. So despite feeling utterly horrible I was still training well which is why i just assumed I was run down.

But there was something different. I was able to “agro” myself through workouts but I found myself unable to breathe properly. I couldnt get air into my lungs no matter how hard i tried to breathe in. My legs felt like they had run a marathon and the lactic acid build up in my muscles was debilitating. Because I was unable to breathe properly i couldn’t focus or get a clear head and because of that I got exceptionally irritable.

Every morning I would have my first double espresso at 7am and then the next at 10am. That was my coffee consumption for the day. I had done this for years. I didn’t drink coffee for a buzz or pick me up because it didn’t really do that any more. I drank coffee because I genuinely enjoy a good espresso and it was part of my morning routine.

Unfortunately my brains addiction to caffeine was such that if I didn’t have a coffee by at least 9am the tightening and cloudiness would start to take over my head. If I still hadn’t had a coffee by 10am the migraine would cripple me. I’m talking black room, silence, foetal position and intense throbbing pain directly into the centre of my brain that wouldn’t ease for at least 24 hours if left untreated. But a few sips of a coffee or anything with caffeine in it and 5 minutes later I would start to feel my head loosen and the pain subsiding.

I said previously one of the negative effects I had started to notice was the lactic acid build up in my muscles. It would start on my way to work. After 5 minutes of walking it felt like someone had poured concrete in my shoes. My legs were so heavy and I was dragging them along the footpath. I would arrive at work after a 15 minute walk completely out of breath and felt like i’d just done several sets of squats.

This is also when my mood would plummet and the depression and feeling of wanting to disappear would kick in.

One morning after I had my first espresso I was laying down reading the news when out of no where my legs got heavy and I could feel a lactic acid build up in them. I thought, “What the hell is this? I’m not even doing anything!” I thought over what I had eaten that morning as it couldn’t have been from any activity and it was so sudden. I had literally walked from my bedroom to the kitchen, to my office, back to the kitchen and then back to the bedroom. Unfortunately I don’t live in a mansion on a sprawling multi acre estate so I promise all that walking probably totalled 30m. All “no cardio” jokes aside, this wasn’t normal.

I eat the same food every day so its easy to track what has gone in. None of the foods had ever caused any issue before but something made me think about the coffee.

I can’t stand pre-workouts because they actually make me sleepy. I’m completely wired on the amount of caffeine but I have no energy and I just want to lay down and sleep. My thought process was maybe the caffeine in the coffee had caused some kind of shut down in my system. Completely guessing but I had nothing else to work with.

I decided to not have my second espresso for the day and went to work. Strangely I didn’t get the lactic acid in my legs. I got to work and I wasn’t out of breath nor did my mood drop. I remember looking up at the sky and saying out loud, “Fuck off. Coffee? You’re taking coffee off me?”

The next day I only had 1 espresso and once agin the lactic acid, no breath and depression were no where near as bad. So the day after I dropped from a double espresso to a single espresso and low and behold I felt even better. For several weeks I dropped the espresso shot down to a ristretto which for those that don’t know is about a 5 second coffee extraction that is extremely concentrated. I did this until one day I thought this is ridiculous. I’m using such a small amount of coffee beans that they’re going off before I finish the bag and as much as I love the taste of coffee, having less than a teaspoon is really just a tease.

So I stopped drinking coffee altogether.

Initially the first days came with a slightly cloudy and heavy head. But by dropping the coffee gradually I had effectively weaned myself off caffeine and I was fine in no time.

The positive affect on my body was instant. My body didn’t ache. I didn’t want to kill everyone. I actually felt happy. I had so much energy I was literally jumping out of bed in the morning.

As the weeks went on I noticed that my energy now was better than it had ever been. I woke up and got out of bed wide awake. Never groggy and tired. My energy throughout the day was steady and at the end of the day I got tired and then slept deeply. There were no ups and downs. No crashes. 

It turns out I wasn’t just run down. There were multiple infections running rampant in my body that required several hospitalisations and surgeries over the last 24 months. I don’t lay the blame entirely with caffeine although it did have a particularly negative affect on my body during that time, and in looking back over the years I always suffered headaches, ups and downs in energy and bad sleep.

These were now completely gone.

What is interesting, is several people that I’ve spoken to said they experience something similar to what I did when they consume caffeine. Not to the extreme but definitely something along the same lines. They didn’t even think about it until speaking to me. A few have since stopped drinking coffee and like me instantly felt better.

Do I get tired these days? Of course I do. Everyone gets tired. You’re supposed to get tired. But if I’m tired its usually because I’ve been working a lot or training has been harder than normal. But I sleep so much better than I used to and I don’t wake up feeling like I’ve been hit by a bus and need a stimulant to clear my head. My energy levels throughout the day are always even. Do i get mood swings? Who doesn’t? But now they are no where near as extreme.

Do I drink coffee now? I didn’t for over a year and i missed the taste. So every few weeks on a Sunday I go for a walk and get a double espresso because as I’ve said I genuinely love the taste of coffee. Do I need it? No. Do I want it every day? No.

The main reason I never cut back my consumption of coffee was the fear of having to spend a week in crippling pain going through caffeine withdrawals. Despite the fact I hated being tied to a chemical it was simply easier to just keep drinking it. Plus, I liked the taste.

But now that I’m free of the addiction I feel better for it and I have no desire to become a habitual coffee drinker again.

Had you told me 5 years ago that I wouldn’t be drinking coffee I would have scoffed at the very idea. “I need my coffee. I literally can’t function with out it.” I hear every one of you saying the exact same thing. 

But since giving it up, I feel better, sleep better, function better and have more energy than I did when drinking it.

It’s hard to describe how much better my body works without caffeine going in to it. Its so simple and yet the effect is so huge!

Too many people fall into the trap of uppers and downers. Gym goers worldwide dope themselves up on pre-workouts so they can have the energy to train after a day at work. All that pre-workout then leaves them unable to sleep at night. So they use alcohol, weed or some other sleep aid to get some rest. In the morning they need multiple coffees just to get started. But shortly after midday when the first caffeine hit wears off, they crash. So it’s more caffeine to get them through the rest of the day before more pre-workout to train with and then downers to get some sleep. And the cycle continues.

Along the way complaints of lack of energy, irritability, foggy head all come to the surface.

Am I saying caffeine is evil? Not at all. But maybe, just maybe you may find that you’re better off without it.

I know I am.