How do you Caffeine?

Caffeine

Drug

Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline xanthine alkaloid and a stimulant drug. Caffeine is found in varying quantities in the seeds, leaves, and fruit of some plants, where it acts as a natural pesticide ... Wikipedia

Drug classes: Diuretic, Central Nervous System Stimulant,Methylxanthine

Well, caffeine is not good for you or me. See here, here, and here. Even if it does come from a plant (wait, so does cocaine).

But many of us drink it anyway because it does this.

Myself included.

Why? I HAVE TOO MUCH TO DO IN TOO LITTLE TIME. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea for school to start at 7:30 in the freaking morning? Couldn't politicians do one nice thing for all of society and start school an hour later? 

Now I want to swear, all the bad words. 

I was always a good foodie snob. Michael Pollan was my homeboy. I checked labels for trans fats, shopped the outside of the grocery store, avoided packaged food. I banned high fructose corn syrup and anything with the word "hydrogenated." Also, Charles took a nutrition class from the mother-of-all-nutritionists where we learned once again -- caffeine sucks.

And I will be honest. I was really judegemental, holier than thou, elitist, etc. toward my Diet Coke drinking friends. In fact, if my friends drank soda regularly, I typically just thought they were stupid and lower on the ladder of intellectual prowess. I mean, how can you do that to your body and be a thinking individual?

Caffeine Play

Enter: Me as a school teacher. Cute bun, glasses, eating peppers for a snack.

Enter Exhaustion: Late nights, over worked, underpaid 

Enter Caffeine: Insidious at first. A little here, a little there. Then one day, after a whole lot of being tired, not doing what I want, feeling like a slug--came the caffeine big guns. ZipFizz. The name alone makes me cringe. 

I hated myself. But liked how it made me feel! 

For over a year I drank one of these babies every single day. I even had a little episode where I had to have a mammogram because of an issue I was having--mammogram turned out fine, and the cause of this unexplainable breast pain according to my doctor was...caffeine.

Crap.

Went off it for a week. Then back on again--drinking one a day, dealing with the breast pain. Because, how can you feel alive without caffeine?

I'm a slow learner.  

ZipFizz has the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee and I am a mormon. Even hell was not enough to keep me away.

Enter Anxiety: Just the mornings at first, then at nights too, then all the time.

Enter completely stupid me: Why am I so anxious, sad, depressed all the time? Where has my creative energy gone? Why do I always feel like shit?

Finally somthing clicked...and I thought maybe, just maybe, this caffeine thing is doing more harm than good.  The plan was to stop drinking it, but I still had a lot of ZippFizz in my house. I drank it everyday until it was gone.

And I was so proud of myself. And felt A LOT better. I mean, even I was surprised by the negative effects it was having on my brain, energy, sleep, and just general mood stability. For a month I was caffeine free.

But then I was going through an old purse and found 2 more! Drank those immediately (imagine me crying "My precious! My precious!" while drinking the elixir).

So I just drank the last one five minutes ago.

And now I'm going off it for good.

Here's a caffeinated toast to going off caffeine!


Smiles,

Erica