Posted on June 11, 2016 by Kate Halsall
We often blog about caffeine – the pros and cons for drinking and eating it, the potential affects it has on your workouts and so on, but we’ve never really talked about how to give it up if you think you have too much! If you’re looking for ways to reduce the amount of coffee you drink – then this is the blog for you!
Firstly, if you drink a lot of coffee, let’s set expectations now – this is not going to be easy. If you try to just cut it out, you may experience withdrawal symptoms such as headaches and fatigue. The trick here is to reduce your intake gradually, and here’s a few suggestions on how you can do that:
- Mix the caffeinated coffee with decaf. If you are using instant coffee, mix it up! Have half a teaspoon of “normal” coffee and half a teaspoon of decaf in the first week, then look to add in more decaf and less normal coffee. If you buy your coffees, make sure some of them are decaf. If they are coffee pods or filters – you can get varieties of those. Once you are 95% decaf you can then start to reduce the amount of cups of coffee you have a day without risk of withdrawal symptoms
- Add more water to the coffee. Sounds easy right? The weaker your brew the coffee (or tea in this instance), the less amount of caffeine it contains apparently!
- Try coffee alternatives. Herbal and green teas (still contains caffeine) are an ideal replace for coffee.
- Drink more water. Often people drink tea and coffee instead of drinking water. So replace some of your daily ‘cuppas’ with water instead. Take a bottle of water with you wherever you go and always have one on your desk.
Additionally, take stock of your diet and consider if you’re potentially missing something from it which is why you crave coffee.
- Amino Acids. A couple of websites I came across suggested that if you didn’t have a good balanced diet, that the amino acids you are missing could be affecting the neurotransmitters in your brain and that’s why you crave your coffee or caffeine fix. I’ll be honest, I need to look into this a bit more, but hey – no one’s ever going to suffer bad effects from having a healthy balanced diet! For information, foods with the highest amounts of amino acids are lean meat, fish and poultry, eggs and dairy. If you are vegetarian, good sources are quinoa and soy.
This blog is not trying to tell you to give up coffee completely. Research shows that daily moderate consumption is 2-3 cups. But if you do drink significantly more than that, you need to understand why and start to reduce it. Ultimately some will argue that caffeine is a drug, it’s addictive. Hopefully rather than trying to go cold turkey, we’ve given you some ideas on how to reduce it gradually.
Further Articles:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2012/04/05/easy-ways-to-reduce-caffeine-intake
http://www.winchesterhospital.org/health-library/article?id=9652
http://www.foodrenegade.com/how-to-end-your-coffee-addiction/
http://www.m8north.co.uk/blog/pros-and-cons-of-caffeine/
picture: https://pixabay.com/en/coffee-cup-coffee-beans-coffee-cup-171653/#_=_