Two months ago, I posted about how my experiment in giving up caffeine wasn't producing results. Now, after about four months without daily caffeine, it's time to revise that opinion and to consider the experiment a success.
After two or three months of caffeine-recovery-induced sleeping ten hours a night, I now sleep about seven and a half hours a weeknight and about nine on weekends which is about what I was doing before I stopped the caffeine. Falling asleep is much easier, and I rarely have the same hideous insomnia that I used to. I also now eat toast and beans (black) or toast with avocado and smoked salmon for breakfast, which seems to do all the things they say a good breakfast should, despite my years of skepticism. I'm a lot more productive at work, and can focus far more on single tasks than I used to be able to. Unfortunately, like being happy and not depressed, I think being well-rested makes me a little less crazy-creative in favor of being more methodological :\
Like my pretend environmentalism through not driving because I can't be bothered getting a California drivers' license, I think what helped most with the schedule changes was laziness - I had started riding my beloved bike to work, but then told myself that if I got up early, I wouldn't have to ride (using traffic as an excuse). Because of this, I now leave home around two to three hours earlier - today I got to work at 7:15am, and it's great.
I've put on a little weight in the months since I said goodbye to caffeine, but I think that also has a lot to do with the union of eating Google food and eating dinner with Lauren (previously I had stopped eating anything substantial for dinner). I figure if I get back on Traineo I should be able to trim that off relatively quickly - a decent set of scales, traineo's graphing and knowing that someone was watching was enough to let me drop 12 pounds in a few months last year.
Like when I quit smoking, I still allow myself the occasional caffeinated drink, usually coffee with Lauren at Caffe del Doge; as mentioned previously, I'm so bad at noticing correlations between what I do and how I feel that I never really get physiologically addicted to anything, so I'm not worried about relapse (and part of the reason I gave up was so that I could get the effect when I needed it).
1 comment:
Congratulations! Caffeine's pretty hard to quit, especially at Google.
I checked out traineo -- slick interface, but I don't like the fact that you have to calculate your own calories per day.
I'm pretty obese again so perhaps my advice is suspect, but in the past I used fitday.com to good advantage. A bonus is that they have calorie ratings for many foods. It's mind-numbing to enter in every single thing you ate, but over time it gives you an excellent sense of how many calories are in anything.
Unfortunately, unless you're in full-on geek mode it can be a bit too time-consuming. If one could re-use meals or workouts it would be a lot better. I'm still looking for the perfect website for training.
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