Starting March 1 this year I stopped drinking aspartame, sucralose, and caffeine, aspartame in the form of Coke Zero, sucralose in Diet Pepsi, and caffeine in Coke Zero and coffee. It's literally one of the hardest things I've ever done, and on caffeine, I had a sort of accidental relapse and I'm still not done yet 4.5 months later.
Caffeinated life Last year I had gotten to a point where I was drinking five or six coffees plus another five Coke Zeros or Diet Pepsis. It's odd that I even got to that point, because for years I was a person telling others not to drink Diet Coke etc., and I had gotten off coffee myself for years, although looking back I was still eating whole dark chocolate bars every day, which have about the same caffeine as a cup of coffee.
I'm surprised how central a role caffeine has played in my life, when I think about it. It went from Cokes and so much chocolate as a kid to coffees to Diet Cokes to whole chocolate bars and back to Diet Cokes and more coffees and on and on, all while knowing I was sensitive to caffeine. It just grew and spiraled to where I was getting caffeine equivalent to 10 cups of coffee a day.
Aspartame: addictive Looking back, without realizing it I'd been addicted to aspartame in Coke Zero and Diet Coke actually three periods, for years at a time, in the last fifteen years, and have gotten off of aspartame and gone through aspartame withdrawal three times. Lemme tell you, aspartame is hugely addictive. Most people I bump into who drink Diet Coke/Coke Zero drink a lot of it. Aspartame withdrawal is brutal and lasts weeks just to get out of the heavy duty symptoms, for me at least. It feels like you have the flu, you get highly sensitive to lights, and on and on. Aspartame gives a feeling of a "lift," and when you're off of it you feel the opposite, a let down.
There were periods the last couple years when I was drinking about eight or even ten Coke Zeros a day, and about 15 years ago I was going through 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke in a day, about 15 years ago. I knew aspartame wasn't good for you, made my brain just feel weird, but what I didn't know until the last couple years is that aspartame is addictive. I was just thinking about the caffeine in Diet Coke being addictive. Luckily, aspartame and sucralose are pretty easy to avoid, so having been off them 4.5 months, it's hard to get them accidentally in your diet. I feel, though, that at 4.5 months off aspartame it will still be another 4 months or so for my brain to readjust to something close to normal.
On and off caffeine
Getting off caffeine has been brutal as well. I see websites that say withdrawal symptoms last a few days or five days, or nine days. I think for a lot of people like myself, this is totally wrong. Your brain takes months to readjust after stopping caffeine. My caffeine withdrawal symptoms were super heavy, the fatigue, the brain fog, the muscle stiffness, and on and on.
There were some set backs. While I stopped drinking coffee March 1, I later discovered that some of the herbal teas I'd been drinking at cafes instead had real tea in them, so they were not caffeine free. Then, I had a big relapse while trying to actually make things easier. After four months off coffee, I thought, "maybe I can reduce the withdrawal symptoms by drinking a cup of decaf a day," sort of a belated tapering off, so drank a cup of decaf a day for seven days. Decaf has about 20% (or more) of the caffeine in regular coffee. Lemme tell you, after the week of decafs, I started to see the withdrawal symptoms come back in a huge way, major headache, fatigue to the point I could barely stay awake, brain fog, etc. So I stopped the decafs. Today is Day 6 of the return to zero caffeine, and the headaches are still there, although the fatigue has improved somewhat. Hard to believe that a week of decafs could bring back raging withdrawal symptoms, but no question they did, easier to understand when I think about the ten cups of caffeine I was drinking up to March 1. From here out, I'm going to be vigilant about zero caffeine. I found out that at Starbucks, on a list of about 10 herbal teas, only three were actually 100% caffeine free.
Overall, I think it will be another four months or so for my body to really readjust to being off caffeine, and even then, maybe never fully readjusted, but that's OK.
Another big benefit of getting off caffeine and artificial sweeteners is just saving money.
My view: if you think you can't function without caffeine, that's probably a good reason to get totally off of it
My personal view, based on what I've been through, is that if you can get off of caffeine, do it and don't look back.
*You may think you need caffeine, but that need is essentially to stave off withdrawal symptoms, that's what people mean when they say, "I can't function without caffeine," they're having heavy withdrawal symptoms in the hours between the effects of one dose and the next.*
How caffeine works: two unnatural states, blocking and overloading the body's "I'm tired" sensors Caffeine works by actually sabotaging your body's own signals that say "I'm tired." Why would anybody want to do that? Well, somehow I did it for decades. Adenosine is the body's natural chemical that signals "I'm tired" by fitting into adenosine receptors. Caffeine works by fitting into these same receptors, so adenosine can't get in there, it gets boxed out by caffeine. This leaves a lot of left over adenosine floating around the body while caffeine is present--and when the caffeine finally wears off, the receptors become available and get flooded with all the extra adenosine, saying, "IIIIII'M TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRED." So you keep going back and forth between two unnatural states, a) "I'm not tired" when you really are, and b) excessive fatigue i.e. "I'm really tired" when your body may actually not be that tired.
Meanwhile, there's a second problem. Not only does caffeine use result in excess adenosine, it also creates extra adenosine receptors. When you consume caffeine over time, blocking adenosine from reaching its receptors day in and day out, the body compensates by making additional adenosine receptors in order to try to continue regulating tiredness. Somebody like me, who was up to 10 cups a day, would have a ton of extra adenosine receptors.
That kind of unnatural adaptation, creating an unnaturally high number of adenosine and receptors is how--scarily, looking back at it--I was able to drink two Coke zeros at 10 pm and then sleep when I was drinking ten cups a day--whereas normally if I drank just a half a Coke zero I would be up all night. Years of caffeine had altered my system that much.
So, when the caffeine disappears, that means someone has many more receptors active to say "I'm tired" than they normally would, hence the huge fatigue and other withdrawal symptoms. I'm still not clear how long it takes for the body to reset the number of adenosine receptors back down to normal after stopping caffeine, but experience tells me it differs greatly from person to person and can be weeks or months for some people.
Pulling off the Band Aid: How do you want your withdrawal, every day at inopportune times, or once and done?
So the real question for caffeine consumers is, how do you want your caffeine withdrawal: every day, in unpredictable spurts, for years and years as long as you keep ingesting caffeine, or once--it may be brutal, but at least it's over, like ripping off a Band Aid? Caffeine has a half life of about six hours, meaning at six hours half of it has metabolized and half is still in your system, so even ten or more hours later it could be lingering.
That's the spot, right there, in those hours when the effects of one dose of caffeine wear off, when the withdrawal symptoms are kicking in. It could be while you're in a meeting, or sleeping, or when you're trying to get to sleep. Add all those hours of withdrawal add up, it's whole days in a week, all at unpredictable times that can catch you off guard.
So, withdrawal I can tell you from experience can be awful, maybe one of the hardest things you'll ever do, but you'll concentrate better and sleep better after you really get off caffeine. You see studies about the positive benefits of coffee, but to me the negatives far, far, outweigh the positives. I love the taste of coffee, wish they could make it truly caffeine free, but until they do coffee is both sabotaging the function of--and increasing the number of--the body's fatigue sensors, that's how caffeine works plain and simple. Anything that causes such major withdrawal symptoms on a daily basis and is so hard a habit for so many people to kick I think is not really worth any side benefits.
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